WORDS AND PICTURES -Graphic novels come of age- by PETER SCHJELDAHL

...A painfully humiliated hero is essential even—or especially—to “Superman” and its vast spawn.Disregarded Clark Kent is the figure readers identify with; his transformation into the Man of Steel nurses the hopes and fulfills the rage of all underestimated boys, but it can’t cure his loneliness. “Spider-Man” twists the knife by making Peter Parker’s superpowers an added torment to him: he’d rather be an ordinary guy. The theme of a publicly misjudged character’s private anguish has grown, in comics history, to dominate the form. Who today still relishes the pure ridicule of “Li’l Abner,” or the convivial folk wisdom (brilliant wordplay aside) of “Pogo”? Both were immensely popular before the ascendance of “Peanuts,” the most important comic strip of the past half century. Charlie Brown is Clark Kent without the colorful underwear, and with all the possibly compensatory qualities split off and given to other characters, mainly Snoopy. Jimmy Corrigan, in turn, is Charlie Brown without the eternal childhood in an Arcadian neighborhood. Ware teases out a nightmarish aspect of “Peanuts” that Charles Schulz cushioned in whimsy: Charlie Brown is incorrigibly mediocre, incapable of satisfactory relationships or achievements, doomed to obloquy. His generous and trusting heart sets him up for mishap and betrayal—which, in his little four-panelled world, where nothing changes, he meets with a sigh. Jimmy’s world is big—Chicago’s Sears Tower looms in misty silhouette outside his window—and events in it have consequences. They give him nosebleeds. They make him cry.

The influence of “Peanuts” pervades one variety of graphic novel, the influence of the early MAD magazine another. Cartooning acquired a new, prevalently drug-enhanced function configuring madness as entertainment. Its new paragon—a writer-artist whose greatness still defies conventional description—was R. Crumb, who inaugurated “Zap Comix” in 1968 in San Francisco, at the center of a countercultural circus that was going rancid around the edges. Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact.

excellent.