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Reviews Fri Sep 04 2009
Julia Keller Likes Graphic Novels
In a review of the new illustrated Fahrenheit 451, Tribune critic Julia Keller talks about graphic novels, her growing love for the form and the responses she's received after reviewing them:
[The reader's] contempt arose in response to a column I wrote praising certain graphic novels. And she was not alone in her seething censure. I heard from several other readers as well, wondering why I had allowed myself to be seduced by the easy enchantments of comic books. Frankly, they expected better of me -- given my doctoral degree in English literature and my well-known and oft-alluded-to affinity for dense, difficult, high-minded novels by the likes of Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad.
How had I allowed myself to be plucked from the stately, dignified ivory tower and lured down into the publishing world's damp basement, a place of shag carpet, flea-market furniture and flea-bitten ideas, X-Men posters on the wall, empty pop cans underfoot and stacks upon stacks of comic books? Just what did I have to say for myself?
