British comics at the British Library

On Sunday I went to see the exhibition of comics at the BL. It wasn't as popular as I had expected. It was reasonably busy - I must have missed some of the exhibitions as I jumped the queues around the most popular showcases, and surely somewhere they had some issues of Bunty in its heyday. That was a terrific comic, still quite stuck in the 1950's in its styling. I guess those comics trained the readers' eyes to understand the huge range of compositions that go to make the comics interesting visually. I think they are a terrific medium for a story. They get into our heads.

The oldest book on display was a religious book from Germany that was more pictures than words but showed how old some graphic ideas are: four flying angels holding a rectangle for a written message. The maddening thing is that all the exhibits are in glass boxes and you can't turn the pages. You just get to look at 2 pages of each publication, when the whole thing looks so interesting, but is out of bounds for the likes of me.

The curator, Paul Gravett, points out that comics can be a powerful tool for education and propaganda, used for example, by the Young National Front, and the anti-Nazi League. They are also used for military training manuals.There was a good political section.

At times comics have been regarded as harmful to the young - they do seem mostly to be very sensationalist in content.  Judge Dredd and Tank Girl are both British creations, while they both look very American. But I was rather sad that the exhibition's parameters meant that there were no Marvel comics, with their garish colouring and perfect line drawings.

Neither was there any mention of Maus by Art Spiegelman, which is the brilliant graphic telling of his Polish Jewish family during the Nazi years and something of their later years in the USA, and that is the only adult graphic novel I have bought myself.

There are comics with graphic sexual content, which I had never seen before. Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie have done some fearless work there, the only trouble being their fantasies involve very young girls and at this more healthy time when women are at last able to talk about the shame of being groped or sexually abused as children, publishing these fantasies is wrong. Why don't sexually mature women appeal to the imagination? Why must it prey on children?

I decided to buy V for Vendetta, because it is so famous. I noted that Alan Moore, "in Marvelman, 1982, investigated the psychological impact that superpowers would have on an ordinary person, and generally subverted superhero cliches." Well done him! Because he started a new crop of stories and films for all the old superheroes (the Spidy films with Toby McGuire) even including James Bond, not a superhero but finally discovering his vulnerability, starting from Casino Royale.

In short I made a long list of titles that look interesting, which I also did when I went to the sci-fi exhibition at the same place, and I came away with "Days of the Bagnold Summer" and "V for Vendetta", which I am reading at the moment.