Nos Qui Morituri

My latest piece is now up at www.tcj.com/rr-nos-qui-/

It begins:
At some point in the late 1980s or early ‘90s, when I was working to establish cred with The Comics Journal, I told an editor that I considered Watchmen the best novel of the last decade. Oops, I later thought. I should have said Love and Rockets.
Watchmen had been lauded at the time. It is taught, I see, in high schools today, which means it has been deemed no more troublesome than To Kill a Mockingbird. It does not excite Moms as do trans-sexuals and Toni Morrison. (Only in Missouri have school districts banned it.) Was it not the driven and demented work which had hooked me? It has fallen out of the conversations in my cafe – if it ever had been part of them. Perhaps the poorly received movie, which I didn’t see, or the highly lauded HBO series, which I’d been unable to watch, had overwhelmed the knife’s edge I had sensed sheathed between its covers. When I told a friend I was writing about the graphic novel, he was flabbergasted to learn it did not concern African-Americans. Its place in the pantheon might be worth a second look. While it was the only graphic work on Time magazine’s list of the greatest novels ever, the more elitist Journal ranked it only the 91st best English-language comic of the 20th century.