Comics fans, grow up!

No one ever really made their fortune as a comics investor, but the legions of clueless speculators brought on a few boom-and-bust cycles in the industry. The comics speculation game got a slightly disgusting twist in 2001, with the launch of Comic Guaranty LLC and "slabbing." CGC, as it's better known, grades collectible comics for condition on a ten-point scale, then seals them between hard plastic slabs, so that they can never risk being damaged -- or read-again: perfect financial fetish objects, entirely severed from their original aesthetic purpose.

That's the sort of protective response that's arguably appropriate for a singular object whose meaning as art can be experienced through clear plastic -- something with what Walter Benjamin called "aura." There's something almost parodically wrong about seeing a piece of mass-produced entertainment framed like an irreproducible original. Naturally, the art-comics world mostly thinks of CGC and comics investment as beneath contempt -- one piece of industry slang is "FYOV," the "forty-year-old virgins" who fuel the collector market. (It was around long before the movie.)

At the same time, even within art comics, there's a longing for the medium to get more of something that's usually called "legitimacy." There's an element of comics culture, sometimes called (a little derisively) "Team Comics," that gets excited whenever anything that looks like that acknowledgment or respect I mentioned above turns up in the outside world -- a college class on the graphic novel, a Hollywood movie based on a graphic novel, a newspaper or magazine article about a cartoonist, somebody reading a comic book on a TV show. Different segments of Team Comics take notice if a TV character is reading a new issue of "Aquaman" or Lynda Barry's "One!Hundred!Demons!," but the principle is the same.

Both the "Team Comics" culture vultures and the alternate-cover-hoarding mavens are driven by the desire to turn their hobby into some kind of success or validation, whether through affluence or cultural power, and that impulse is directly connected to the class aspirations that afflict the entire medium. A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect -- to show the world that they were right all along.

It's probably time to let go of that strain of earnest defensiveness. The snobbery of the rest of American culture toward comics is, if not entirely gone, dissipating quickly. In late 2006, Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel "American Born Chinese" was nominated for a National Book Award (in the Young People's Literature category); when one commentator -- Tony Long, a blogger at Wired News -- opined that it shouldn't have been nominated because it wasn't prose, the comics world jumped down his throat. But it's not as if literary culture revolted as one: Long appears to have been the only voice of dissent, and as clueless as part of his argument was (he noted that, well, he hadn't actually read "American Born Chinese"), his point that Yang's book was the wrong medium for its award was at least debatable.

What's actually happening in culture at large is more like everyone trying to jump on the comics bandwagon -- as a 2004 New Yorker cartoon's caption put it, "Now I have to pretend to like graphic novels, too?" The medium's new enemies are internal: the much less casual snobbery of the commercial mainstream and the art-comics world toward each other, and cartoonists' nostalgic yearning for the badness of the bad old days. Reading only auteurist art comics is like being a filmgoer who watches only auteurist art cinema, but more than a few art-comics enthusiasts wouldn't dream of picking up a mainstream comic book, even as entertainment. Likewise, plenty of superhero buffs can't imagine being interested in some actionless black-and-white independent comic.

The most frustrating effect of the art/pop divide in comics, though, is nostalgie de la boue. A lot of the best cartoonists of the moment have picked up their visual vocabulary from the crap and hackwork of the past, and they're fondly and unhealthily attached to it in a sentimental, self-loathing way, as a curdled by-product of the attachment they felt to it as children. You can find this fascination with the feeble, uninspired comics of the artists' youth in Chris Ware's "Rusty Brown," in Dan Clowes's "Ice Haven" and "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron," in Ivan Brunetti's "Misery Loves Comedy," and in a lot of other art comics, and it's an utter drag. Robert Crumb is a particular offender: most of his early work riffed on the toothless pop culture of his youth, and his drawing and sense of humor still haven't entirely let go of fifty-year-old issues of "MAD."

In mainstream comics, nostalgie de la boue manifests itself as stories whose main point is to trigger nostalgic responses in their older readers -- forgotten Golden Age characters being trotted out again and integrated into the tapestry of continuity; "retcons," or "retroactive continuity," meant to explain apparent contradictions in old comics or draw connections where there hadn't been any intended in the first place. The inbred children of that approach are stories nostalgic for old retcons, attempts to recapture the past of attempting to recapture the past, even if it wasn't that good the first time and was even worse the second.

Nostalgia, especially nostalgia for childhood, is a heavy burden for a medium to bear, and comics have been carrying it since the culture around them began to coalesce. The comics collecting market was called the "nostalgia market" at first; The Comics Journal was renamed from The Nostalgia Journal. The earliest books of essays about comic books were collections like "All in Color for a Dime" -- reminiscences of early childhood experiences with funnybooks. As far as thinking about what makes comics interesting, though, nostalgia is poison -- not just because it makes people overvalue the stories that fueled their childhood fantasies but because it makes them misunderstand the reasons why the good stuff or even the resonant crap affected them so strongly, and what exactly might have been messed up about it, or the way it made them feel the first time around.

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