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Last semester I had a discussion with a colleague about the teaching of comics and graphic novels in which she expressed a justifiable confusion over what constituted the difference between them. To which I, with a slight grin, responded, "You call them comics when speaking to undergraduates and graphic novels when speaking to the dean." After reading Christopher Pizzino's important new book, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, I see that my quip unintentionally exemplifies his book's central concern: the problem of the medium's legitimacy (to use one of Pizzino's keywords). If the idea of code switching in the face of institutional authority expresses a fundamental anxiety over the status of comics, the particular code invoked points to the way some comics creators and many comics scholars have sought to legitimize the medium by aligning it with literature, an art form with a privileged cultural status.
To treat comics-a handful of which have been considered for and even won important literary awards-as literature undoubtedly has conferred a measure of cultural value on certain works. But more importantly for Pizzino the literary laurels some comics have won has given rise to what he refers to as Bildungsroman discourse, the narrative repeated ad nauseam in journalism on comics and in comics scholarship "that comics have changed over the past few decades" from "a medium intended only for children to one sometimes fit for adults" (30). Yet in his book's first chapter Pizzino makes the counterintuitive argument that the acclaim meted out to these works has not elevated the status of the medium as a whole. The Bildungsroman discourse, in other words, implicitly affirms the logic whereby exceptional literary comics merely prove the rule that the medium is by and large ignoble. (Thus Pizzino evidently invokes the literary term Bildungsroman with intentional irony.) Comics enthusiasts that espouse the Bildungsroman discourse, then, unintentionally contribute to conditions that devalue the medium. Moreover, Pizzino identifies at least two consequences that follow from Bildungsroman discourse that anyone who values the medium should find unsettling. On the one...