Så er det officielt: tegneserier er ikke litteratur!

I Wired kan man læse følgende klumme:

Let me slip into my moldiest Andy Rooney sweater here, because I know how much you guys love it when I whine about the Age of Mediocrity. (We’re in the midst of it now, in case you’re new to this bimonthly screed.)

Gene Luen Yang is a teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area who also happens to be a fine illustrator. He produced a graphic novel (or “comic book,” as we used to call them), American Born Chinese, which has been nominated for a National Book Award in the young people’s literature category.

I have not read this particular “novel” but I’m familiar with the genre so I’m going to go out on a limb here. First, I’ll bet for what it is, it’s pretty good. Probably damned good. But it’s a comic book. And comic books should not be nominated for National Book Awards, in any category. That should be reserved for books that are, well, all words.

This is not about denigrating the comic book, or graphic novel, or whatever you want to call it. This is not to say that illustrated stories don’t constitute an art form or that you can’t get tremendous satisfaction from them. This is simply to say that, as literature, the comic book does not deserve equal status with real novels, or short stories. It’s apples and oranges.

If you’ve ever tried writing a real novel, you’ll know where I’m coming from. To do it, and especially to do it well enough to be nominated for this award, the American equivalent of France’s Prix Goncourt or Britain’s Booker Prize, is exceedingly difficult.

Juvenile literature is a fairly new category (1996) to the NBAs, which have been around since 1950. It’s possible that no author wrote a great book aimed at that audience in the past year, but I doubt it. Juvenile literature attracts a lot of first-rate authors. Always has.

Sorry, but no comic book, regardless of how cleverly executed, belongs in that class.

Så I kan nu gå tilbage til jeres ubetydelige, kulørte blade, mens onkel Tony beskæftiger sig med alvorlige ting.

Jeg kan sagtens se, at romaner og tegneserier er to forskellige ting, men derfra og så til at sige at tegneserien ikke har nogen litterær værdi, der er et spring af de helt store. I mine øjne er han en masse år for sent på den med sin forargelse - tegneserier har allerede vundet en Hugo, World Fantasy Award, en Pullitzer og The Guardian First Book Award (og det er bare hvad jeg sådan lige kan huske på siddende balle).

Argh, bogsnobberi. Hader det, hader det, hader det.