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Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005). 182 pp. ISBN 978-1578067190 (paperback, $22.00)
The growing significance of comics and graphic novels within academe has led to an increasing number of critical interventions and attempts to think through both formal and socio-political aspects of the genre. Charles Hatfield's study might be said to belong to the 'emerging literature' of comics criticism, keen to emphasise both the importance of the economic and logistical basis of comics' production and distribution, on the one hand, and the medium's capacity for sophisticated and serious artistic expression, on the other. The book's often casual prose, its author's obvious expertise concerning underground comics (or 'comix', as he terms them) and, indeed, the study's title all signal the desire to situate the award-laden, commercially successful and academically respectable graphic novel within a tradition of the 'alternative comic' going back to the late 1960s and the work of Robert Crumb and his contemporaries. The early chapters explore the tradition of comic book publishing and post-1968 developments towards more adult-oriented and idiosyncratic work. They also consider the formal qualities specific to comics...