Comics studies comes of age

A year earlier, while it was still being serialized in RAW magazine, the critic Ken Tucker suggested that Maus's existence might help "expand the very notion of what a comic strip can do, to make intelligent readers reconsider -- and reject -- the widespread notion of ... 'comics-as-kid-culture.'" After decades of being dismissed, derided, or ignored, comics were attracting widespread attention. Beaty, a professor of English at the University of Calgary, and Woo, an assistant professor of communication studies at Canada's Carleton University, run through a series of contenders for the "greatest comic book" title, including Spiegelman's Maus, the short works of Robert Crumb, the superhero oeuvre of Jack Kirby, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and so on. [...]to avoid entrenching the academic bias for self-aware art, a bias that Beaty and Woo's celebration of Hicksville reinforces, we should study in greater depth other institutions -- the publishing houses and movie studios, the comic-book shops and online retailers -- that have made comics what they are today.