But the medium provides a new angle on a familiar story, in a voice more directly empathetic than those of many prose histories. It gives the hipsters back their body language. In a book that is largely about license and the enlightened rebel, it is easy to find reflections of both in the graphic form. The panels, which are flat and often horrific, capture the dullness and insanity not only of the lives the Beats sought to escape but of the ones they made in their place. The Beats here inhabit a world that looks a lot like Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland. No wonder they had to go go go and not stop till they got there.

Some of the history is off. Jan Kerouac was not shown by a blood test to be Jack’s daughter (the test was inconclusive), and Pekar scrambles the chronology of some of Kerouac’s books and stylistic breakthroughs. Nancy J. Peters, a part owner of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, was unwisely tapped to help write the chapter on the store, which includes lines like “City Lights is not only a bookstore and publisher, it’s a historic public space and an international cultural center,” and “Today, City Lights has come to symbolize the American spirit of free intellectual inquiry.” Here, nonobjective history gives way to plain self-promotion, and not even cool self-promotion.

And sometimes the scope of history overwhelms the panels. There’s too much to tell, and the telling gets clunky and dutiful: “Another 1950 occurrence was Kerouac’s trip with Cassady to Mexico City, where Burroughs had been living since his last drug bust and working on ‘Junkie,’ a classic of its kind, which Ginsberg, who was always acting as an unpaid agent for other writers, encouraged him to write and finally got Ace Books to publish.”

The freshest chapters are on the less well-known characters, and those in which the writers insert themselves. Nick Thorkelson and Pekar, in their hallucinatory chapter on the jazz-influenced poet Kenneth Patchen, begin: “My high school friend Dave Burton turned me on to Kenneth Patchen’s picture poems in 1961. We were on the lookout for anything ‘beat,’ which for us meant tough, funny . . . & ecstatic. Patchen had it all!”

This, perhaps, is the Beats’ true legacy: the impact they continue to have on people who encounter them for the first time, even if that impact isn’t literary. Discussions of “On the Road” tend to begin, “I was 17 when I first read it, and it made me . . .” in ways that discussions of “Ulys­ses” or “The Great Gatsby” do not. (They tend to end there as well, alas.) “The Beats” captures some of the wonder of that first encounter and places it in historical and political context. Here was a group of writers who hoped to change consciousness through their lives and art. They fit America’s romance with the outsider. That they were products of elite colleges — Harvard, Reed, Columbia, Swarthmore — and owed their visibility to non­outsider publications like Mademoiselle and this newspaper is a paradox “The Beats” chooses not to engage. They rocked.