WHEN Edward Said says a book about Palestine is important, it’s something to heed. When, in describing artistic representations of everyday Palestinian struggles, he says that, “with the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better,” that’s extraordinary praise indeed. That’s just what he said about Joe Sacco’s Palestine. What makes this even more noteworthy is that Palestine is a comic book, or — as the publishing industry calls it — a graphic novel. The series was originally released throughout the 1990s, then collected and published in a deluxe, hardcover format in 2007. I’m not sure whether to call Palestine a comic or a graphic novel, and it doesn’t much matter. I’ll just follow Said’s example and call it “a surreal world as animated and in its own way as arrestingly violent as a poet’s vision of things”.

Comics have come into their own, and anyone who thinks that the term refers only to Spiderman and Batman just hasn’t been paying attention. For 30 years now, the form has grappled with the darkest episodes in human history, like Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, which recounts some of the horrors of the war in Bosnia, or Footnotes in Gaza, which uncovers a little-known massacre of Palestinians in 1950s Israel.

Sacco isn’t the only one plumbing the depths. Arguably, comics came of age with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1986. Spiegelman, born in 1948 as the child of Auschwitz survivors, revisits the Holocaust in this book, and in doing so makes the horrors of that event fresh for new generations of readers, albeit through the unlikely technique of telling the story with animals. The notion of presenting Nazis as cats and Jews as mice might seem problematic for many reasons, but Spiegelman pulls it off, managing to avoid trivialising the events described, as well as the participants involved on either side.

Graphic novels have come a long way from the superhero comic book

Going further back in history, Alan Moore probes the still-unsolved mystery of Jack the Ripper in From Hell — the phrase used by the Ripper to sign off his taunting letters to Scotland Yard. Illustrated in sketchy, unsteady black-and-white by Eddie Campbell, the book is over 500 pages of closely packed text and image, and if you don’t have a permanent squint when you begin reading it, you just might have one by the end. From Hell practically dares you to deny that it is a work of literature, and serious literature at that. Originally published in the 1990s, the book saw a recent re-release in 2016, which is likely to bring a new audience of readers seeking substance in their illustrated stories.

Not all comics are overtly political or even historical in nature. Memoir has proven to be fertile ground for the genre, as evidenced by the likes of David Small’s relentlessly grim Stitches and Alison Bechdel, whose twin memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? detail her fraught relationships with her father and mother respectively. Autobiographical and intensely personal, Bechdel’s stories eschew visuals that are in any way unorthodox, relying instead on a text-heavy “illustrated prose” style that is only intermittently compelling. She gets credit, however, for her emotional honesty and forthrightness about her own sexuality, which is a strong undercurrent running through her work. (Before these stand-alone graphic novels, Bechdel wrote a long-running newspaper comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For.)

Readers looking to explore memoirs of a more international bent have the good fortune of Marjane Satrapi’s two-volume Persepolis, her story of growing up in post-revolution Iran and, later, living as a teenager in France. Hugely popular in Europe, Persepolis was adapted as an animated film that mirrored her artistic style with its simplified human figures and heavy, brooding black ink. Satrapi’s visual style is instantly recognisable, and her pages are filled with shadowy, striking images that do much to convey the power of her story. Like the best comics, it is a seamless fusion of image and text that creates an impact which neither would have without the other.

Lighter in tone, though no less serious in intent, Riad Sattouf’s two-volume The Arab of the Future charts a journey similar to Satrapi’s, but in reverse, as the author describes his experiences as a young boy who relocates along with his family from France to his ancestral homeland, Syria. Although the artwork is less severe than Satrapi’s, with a two-tone colour palette and a reassuringly ‘cartoony’ look reminiscent of The Simpsons, many of the issues raised in Persepolis are present in Sattouf’s books as well, and are considered no less seriously. Issues of ethnic and religious identity, geopolitical belonging, and familial duty lie at the heart of this story.

All these books announce their ‘serious intentions’ with ‘serious artwork’, i.e., black and white (or in Sattouf’s case, black and white with a one-colour wash for contrast). Black and white is much easier and cheaper to produce and publish than coloured artwork, and its stark contrasts are useful for producing striking images. The addition of colour complicates things artistically, and it’s expensive besides, requiring that the book reach a wider audience in order to be considered successful.

Fortunately, some writers and artists are willing to take that chance. Bitch Planet is a title you might not say aloud in front of your grandmother (or your grandchildren), but it’s an intriguing book nonetheless, one that introduces a dystopic future society where women can be incarcerated for such crimes as being overweight or arguing with their husbands. Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine de Landro channel a distinctly retro vibe that recalls the science fiction movies, exploitation films, and comic books of the 1970s, to imagine a future where, really, nothing much has changed — except for the worse. As its very title suggests, this is a book that sets out to confront, in a way that is simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and very serious indeed. In fact, that’s how the colour works here, too — at times garish and over the top, other times washed out almost to the point of being entirely absent. This is not a book that traffics in subtlety, either in terms of story or visuals, and as such it’s not always successful — for one thing, its characters rarely go above the level of type. But it’s always interesting, and the writers get credit for trying to do something different.

The colour palette is more muted throughout Daytripper, a collaboration between Brazilian brothers Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, in which the artwork’s flowing lines and energetic, eye-catching compositions are well-complemented by colourist Dave Stewart. The story focuses on a series of widely separated days in the life of protagonist Brás de Oliva Domingos. The reader encounters Brás as a suave 32-year-old, later as an old man, then as a young father, as a little boy, and so on. Each self-contained chapter narrates a day in the life of Brás as he makes his way in the world, and at the end of each day, he dies — it makes sense when you’re reading it. Sort of. With a theme that could be summed up as ‘live each day as if it’s your last’, Daytripper manages to avoid easy sentimentality while delivering a series of images and storylines that are engaging both emotionally and visually.

The Nightly News (reissued in 2011) is Jonathan Hickman’s visually arresting, text-heavy take on the media, societal violence, and gun culture. A deceptively slender volume packed with eye-catching graphic design, snappy dialogue, secret societies, black humour, and occasional outbursts of feverish violence, The Nightly News is a sledgehammer of a story, as cynical as it is compulsively readable, or maybe the other way around. Written years before the rise of Donald Trump, it is almost creepily prophetic in its portrayal of widespread scorn for “the media” — whatever the reason — and a populace happy to use violence as a way to register grievances.

Looking over this list, it’s easy to imagine that ‘serious’ comics writers today are concerned only with self-absorbed autobiographies, feminist screeds, immigrant narratives, and gritty social commentary. Not so! Comics form a big tent, and there’s plenty of room inside for all kinds of stories. I’ve barely mentioned science fiction and fantasy books (there are a lot of them), or horror books (plenty of those, too), or books about Vikings, witches, gangsters, cops, or the Gulf War. And of course, the apocalypse — practically an entire genre unto itself. There is manga, the massively popular Japanese version of comics which your children (or grandchildren) probably read, even if you don’t. There are French legends like Moebius and Indian writers like Sarnath Banerjee, and other ‘comics journalists’ have been inspired by Sacco, such as Sarah Glidden, whose Rolling Blackouts is a travelogue of wartime Syria and Iraq.

So stay tuned: comics aren’t going anywhere. If anything, they will likely be more prevalent than ever in coming years. Neither will they consist solely of Batman and Superman running around in spandex to fight evildoers. Life has become more complicated than that. And happily, comics have too.

The writer is the author of five novels, including The Preservationist and Fallen.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 22nd, 2017