The long history, abundant diversity and visionary quality of comics produced in the English-speaking world are too rarely appreciated by mainstream critics

When did the comic-book universe become so banal? Read more

When pop culture icons burst from the underground, critical commentators tend to cocoon themselves in snobbery or flail around trying to understand their significance. This week, the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones joined in with a blogpost titled: “When did the comic-book universe become so banal?”

Jones cited 71-year-old Robert Crumb as the standard of true art in comics. Generations have flourished since Crumb reached his peak, but to understand the resigned disappointment with which such rants are received by comic fans and scholars of the artform, we need to look further back into history.

From the 19th century onwards, comics bloomed across Europe, with groundbreaking works from Rodolphe Töpffer, Gustave Doré, Wilhelm Busch, and Caran d’Ache. The blockbuster character of his time, Charles H Ross and Émilie de Tessier’s Ally Sloper, began life in the UK in the 1860s.

Not only does comics history go back far further than Superman’s arrival on our shores, but it extends far beyond English-speaking countries.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Victorian comic blockbuster Ally Sloper

Earlier this month, the 110th anniversary of Pinchon’s Bécassine was celebrated in France with a Google doodle. In France and Belgium, comics have long been celebrated as the “ninth art”, not only in readers’ minds but by academia. Across Europe, they are treated with similar respect, not relegated to specialist shops or hidden beneath the cape of the superhero, as they are in Britain. From the Adventures of Tintin to the arrival of the Moomins and the Smurfs, not to mention Dennis the Menace, Dan Dare, and Roy of the Rovers, comics have long been part of daily life for millions.

When superheroes made their resurgence after the second world war, in the shadow of the Comics Code, which aimed to regulate the burgeoning US market, Marvel burst into new life and introduced many of the heroes who rule cinema screens today. A few years later, the underground comix scene blew up in the US, assaulting the senses with grotesque and provocative work from Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Trina Robbins and a motley crew of artists who shared an intense hatred of censorship and conformity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Superman No 1 from 1939. Photograph: AP/Sotheby's

While the UK’s comic creators didn’t cause the same shock to the national system, the comix movement nurtured, encouraged and inspired a new generation who would go on to imagine Judge Dredd and Tank Girl, as well as fuelling the “British invasion” of US comics. Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman are the headliners, but there are many less well-known but no less talented artists, such as Peter Milligan, Brian Bolland, and Brendan McCarthy.

Since the dark 1980s of superhero-hate and the neon 1990s, when ginormous breasts featured on every cover, the new century has seen a groundswell of interest. Comic conventions frequently boast more small-press and self-published creators than those with ties to the larger comic publishers. The audience is at least 50% female, with many people bringing along their children.

The fashion for cosplay has seen an even more diverse crowd of comic fans attending events, and so-called “graphic novel” sections in bookshops – ghettoes for comics that are longer original works or collected into series – are one of the rare areas of the market to have grown year on year. Comics for children are regrouping, too – profits there are even higher – with The Phoenix going strong after more than 150 issues, and KaBOOM! Studios titles selling like gangbusters.

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In 2012 a comic, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, won the Costa biography, bestowing the seal of establishment approval on Mary Talbot and her husband Bryan, who has been one of the greats since he emerged from the underground scene in the 1960s.

But there are still breakdowns in understanding. In bookshops, graphic novels are squashed together with spandex-clad heroes and comics intended for children. Autobiography sits next to horror, next to humour, next to fantasy. This confusion as to how to shelve them is symptomatic of a wider failure of our culture to understand how comics work, which is responsible for the irritating headlines, and blinkered attempts at critically addressing the medium.

Comics are not static art. Their point is to communicate an idea or story, and they do so through the layout and design of the page, the transitions between each panel that demand that the reader fill in blanks of motion and time, and the pictures, captions, and text. Comics can be simple, but they are often deceptively complex.

Disenchanted, a webcomic by the 2000AD and X-Men: Legacy writer Si Spurrier and Night of the Living Dead artist German Erramouspe

As theorist and creator Scott McCloud has said, comics are a form of “amplification through simplification” – it is the simplifying of objects, faces, and action that allows us to identify with the meaning beneath. The image is stripped bare, the meaning exposed and easily magnified. The form demands focus, which is one of many reasons that comics are a great educational tool.

Simple style does not necessitate simple storytelling – something to which any art, music or literature critic can attest. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis can be dismissed as unsophisticated, but it has an immense force; clever juxtapositions of joy and horror mingle, and it has a sympathetic protagonist. The works of Grant Morrison or Elaine Lee revel in multi-layered, non-linear narratives, hiding complexity beneath a bubblegum surface.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and X-Men, in 2002. Photograph: Reed Saxon/AP

Comics come in a multitude of genres, types and intents. Artists such as Chris Ware feature in literary supplements, and celebrities are admired for tackling graphic storytelling, while Spider-Man creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko remain underappreciated and the 2000AD artists get short shrift. Highly designed “literary” work is given preference over science fiction, with some comics designated “worthy” while others are trashed as disposable pop.

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It would be untrue to say such divisions do not exist within the comics industry itself. Yet the superhero reader is also likely to have read Art Spiegelman’s Maus; the science fiction fan will read 2000AD; and the fan of the obscure comix zine is also likely to have a working understanding of Persepolis and Guardians of the Galaxy. As the diversity of the audience continues to expand – thanks largely to the new underground digital and webcomics – the English-speaking world is producing an abundance of popular characters, talented creators and a clamouring young readership, while, ironically, undervaluing one of the world’s most international and dynamic artforms.