SOURCE: "Comic Relief: From 'Gilgamesh' to 'Spiderman,'" in Commonweal, Vol. CXIX, No. 4, February 28, 1992, pp. 21-2.

[In the essay below, McConnell remarks on the development of comics and their relationship to society and traditional literature.]

The first time I assigned a comic book—Frank Miller's grimly revisionist Batman saga, The Dark Knight Returns—for my course in "The Art of Narrative," the consensus of my colleagues (I heard it through the grapevine) was "God—what's he trying to do now?"

Well, maybe just be honest. The fact is—though you're not going to hear it from many of the tenured priesthood of what Ezra Pound contemptuously called "Kulchur"—that some of the best and most human fiction in America, not to mention the rest of the world, is appearing not as "novels" but as that more-than-faintly-contemptible form, the comic book.

Of course, the publishers refer to them as...