In 2006, at long last, it has become unnecessary to preface a discussion of recent graphic novels with an assurance that “comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” The long march to mainstream respectability, beginning with superheroes’ exploration of “social themes” in the 1970s and continuing through touchstones like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus, has all but concluded. Today, the New York Times Magazine runs Chris Ware’s art on a weekly basis, and Entertainment Weekly regularly features reviews of graphic novels in its Books section. Lovers of the medium might feel spurred to sing a “Hallelujah!” chorus.

An additional perk of the current respect accorded to sequential art is that critics no longer feel the burden of being messengers to the public, only reviewing the absolute best the form has to offer, and fearful of criticizing too harshly for fear of confirming the perception that graphic literature must inevitably be pedestrian. What is important to readers of this young medium is not the unique profundity of each work, but whether it leaves you with the feeling that you have experienced something that had to be a comic book, and could not have been a novel or a movie. Three recent works, by very different cartoonists, deal with such weighty subjects as the relationship between futility and violence, each in its own unique way. The sum of the differences between them is a powerful argument for the vitality and potential of the comic-book medium today.

The Left Bank Gang, by the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, is one such peculiar little gem. Jason envisions a 1920s Paris in which Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald struggle to write and draw their comic books (!) while spending their free time congregating at local cafes to discuss life, the universe, and everything. All of Jason’s characters are anthropomorphized dogs or birds, drawn and colored in a clean, simple style reminiscent of Hergé’s Tintin work. As anyone who has read Scott McCloud’s essential Understanding Comics knows, however, ultra-cartoony representation often has a paradoxical power: Jason is able to reproduce staggering emotions in the silent expressions of his characters. Every page is laid out into 9-panel grids, but Jason’s pacing varies nonetheless: one page might depict the passing of a few seconds, another page a few hours. When Hemingway comes up with a dangerous idea for making fast money, the plot of The Left Bank Gang climaxes in a series of retellings of the same moments from different characters’ perspectives. That’s when one realizes that in the space of 46 brief pages, Jason has constructed a moving meditation on artistic striving, frustrated masculinity, and what makes a life well-lived.

The Left Bank Gang by Jason, pg. 10

Rick Veitch’s bizarre and idiosyncratic Can’t Get No touches on some similar themes, but could not be more different from The Left Bank Gang; where the latter is intimate and quiet, its ambitions modest, Can’t Get No aims to be a Major Contribution to Our 9/11 Literature. I use the slightly mocking capitalization because the florid, often purple writing in Can’t Get No seems to invite it; we are being given a lesson, by some kind of mystical adept, in the Meaning of It All. What makes Can’t Get No interesting, however, is the primary way in which it takes advantage of its medium: the silent, dialogue-free pictures tell a story on their own, without reference to the captions, which comprise an extended prose-poem that runs parallel to the story and make up a kind of skewed commentary on the action. Our protagonist is Chad Roe, the type of soulless businessman who tends to populate stories about the emptiness of contemporary Western existence; the difference here is that the termination of his employment, which kicks off his existential crisis, happens to coincide with the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. Having gone on an all-night bender culminating with his waking up to find himself covered in a full-body permanent-marker tattoo, Roe wanders off into a series of increasingly surreal escapades in various locations across America. When Roe is peeing at a roadside urinal, being ogled for his bizarre appearance by other bathroom-goers, the caption-story is going on about how “we” (there is much use of the all-encompassing “we” of humankind in Can’t Get No) have become “crystalline structures of palpable light . . . free of all the antiseptic framework . . . that defines our social etiquette.” The metaphors pile upon each other in waves, making the prose-poem aspect of the book impossible to follow on its own, but taken as a kind of seasoning on the main story told through Veitch’s busy and detailed artwork, Can’t Get No’s ditzy and “deep” meditations are more digestible.

Can't Get No by Rick Veitch

Honesty is the value that much great creator-owned comics work is striving for: to tell the truth about something human, through surreal and fantastic circumstance, is the goal of Veitch, Jason, and all the best cartoonists in comics today. For raw honesty in storytelling with fantastic and bizarre art, the gold standard has to be French artist David B., who in his magnum opus Epileptic (released serially in France since 2002, but collected in an English trade paperback this year by Pantheon) tells the story of growing up with his epileptic brother Jean-Christophe. David B. excels at filling his heavily-inked panels with snaky, dragonlike monsters, and he depicts his brother’s epilepsy as one such monster, weaving it through the tale of his family’s endless search for cures through every form of alternative-medical quackery. He also chronicles his own growth as a cartoonist, which begins as a child drawing vast and epic battle scenes as a way to cope with his powerlessness. The similarity between David B.’s snaky monsters and his brother’s contorted form, fallen to the ground in the grip of a seizure, represents Epileptic’s achievement: the demonstration of a connection between the desire to take control of one’s own life and intimate circumstances, and the vast tapestries of war and violence that make up much of human history and that entrance David and his brother as children.

Epileptic by David B., pg. 165