Bleeding Beyond the Gutters

You call them graphic novels now. They were comic books when I knew them, stumbled across with planning or serendipity before being chased out of a 7-Eleven. I can still tell you what combination of Marvel or DC I could buy for $2. I still see every cover date pointing three months into the past.

These days, the books come from Amazon, their CMYK gradations smoothed and finessed, and yet bled out. I saw the Kirby Crackle rendered in the rough technology of Ben-Day Dots. I haunted spinner racks every month to get another chapter of a story without seeing its end in sight. You get the story all at once in a budgeted diet. Long ago, everybody weighed in on the quality, but now it comes in cover blurbs and not a letter column.

Now you call them graphic novels as if you need some elevated word to describe better what critics have decided all of a sudden approaches art. As if you are new money ashamed of the backwoods accent you started with.

But there are some like me who saw the art bleeding beyond the gutters of lowly comics on common spinner racks, even when few saw it yet.