Look, I get why people want to gatekeep what counts as "high literature." But that just feels like snobbery dressed up as standards. Watchmen deals with moral ambiguity, trauma, and the nature of power better than half the novels I had to read in college. Maus literally won a Pulitzer. Are we really gonna say the Pulitzer committee got it wrong?
Comics can do everything prose does — character development, theme, symbolism — plus they add visual storytelling. That's not a downgrade, that's more tools in the toolbox. Art Spiegelman wasn't writing "lesser" work because he drew mice instead of describing them.
Gatekeeping literature by format is like saying movies aren't art because they're not paintings. It doesn't hold up.
04:02 AM