TIL the 'comics aren't literature' take keeps showing up at my local shop, and I think both sides are half wrong
I was at my shop in Boise last Saturday and heard a guy say comics are just picture books for adults, and a regular jumped in and said Maus belongs next to any novel. Both of them were kind of missing it. The "not literature" side keeps pointing at superhero monthlies where the plot resets every few years, but the other side always names the same three serious books and acts like that wins the whole argument. What gets me is that neither one ever brings up the craft itself, like how a good page break does the work a paragraph does in a novel. I've read maybe 200 trades in 5 years and the ones that stuck with me weren't the ones people call important, they were the ones that knew how to use silence between panels. So my question is for folks who hang out at shops: do the shelves actually back up the idea that this art form stands on its own, or are we just grading it on a different curve because it has pictures?