Yeah, tongue in cheek a bit there francesco, sorry, just got a bit excited. But its about time there was a comics thread on here for sure.
What i was poking at (insubstantially) was that considering how long the medium has been around (far longer than cinema for instance) its been a hard long slog for them to be taken seriously in most circles. And it struck me that it was strange that audiences are currently praising the serious undertakings of the most outlandish, pulpish, pre-pubescent and sensational elements of comic history, that of the super-heroes. Spidey, Batman, X-Men etc. Of course, Ghost World, American Spendor, Crumb are all brilliant, but as K-Punk rightly points out in his Batman Begins piece: Dark is the new cliche. Perhaps those last three films mark a veering off point of some kind, Clowes is currently making Art School Confidential based off an old short strip for instance. Who knows?
Faves: Spidey, Hey Wait.../ The Iron Wagon by Jason, Preacher, V for Vendetta, Crumb, The Mighty Golem, Box Office Poison, Hate, Stray Bullets, (my mate and soon to be comics legend Steve Knowles and) 5 Days Out Of 7, and of course, Eightball, Acme, and Optic Nerve.
I just think those three have really pushed things wide open in terms of possibilities. I remember the only reason we ever used to go to the comic shop was to pick up Jimmy Corrigan because it looked so great for the time, and was so weird. Just the attention to detail and humour in the opening, meticulous text alone was enough to make it great, let alone the rest of it, and let alone before it was compiled so i could make sense of the main story. Like a £3.50 work of art that had more pertinent observations on life than any thing in an art gallery. What all of those comics have in common is the devasting silences: The emotional explosions loaded by the reader into these gaps that occur between words, and between frames, referring to very specific, but ultimately very real and universal, and mostly very flawed, characters.
), fairly shit. 
