[In the following essay, Rose discusses the development of the modern graphic novel, citing the works of Frank Miller, Dave Sim, and Howard Chaykin as satirical representations of society and culture.]

Howard Chaykin has seen the future, and it's full of garter belts. In his comic-book series American Flagg!, which is set in the mid-twenty-first century, Chaykin's women have the requisite amount of pop-cultural post-feminist toughness: they fly jets and perform emergency operations on lunch counters and tote the occasional automatic weapon. But what one can only refer to as their gams—the kind of legs found nowhere on earth except Las Vegas and in comic books—are upholstered and decorated with an assortment of hose and garter straps that would make Frederick (of the Hollywood Fredericks) look twice. This silky-seeming legwear must be made out of some futuristic miracle material, for Chaykin's ladies come through the worst kinds of gunfire and disaster with their stockings serenely unladdered.

It may seem a long way from the countercultural underground “comix” of the sixties and early seventies, with their explicit criticism of American society, to the violence and hedonism of Chaykin's work—a retreat from “relevance” to mere entertainment. But the comic books of the eighties are probably more diverse and more geared to an adult audience than those of any previous era. The growth of comic-book “specialty stores” in the past eight years or so has made it possible for companies like First, Pacific, and Fantagraphics to compete with the majors (DC and Marvel) in distribution, and these small publishers have provided a place for individual artists to work without being shaped to a company mold. Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman's beautifully produced Raw magazine features work by American, European, and Japanese artists of post-punk, jagged ugliness: grim, surreal political critiques, and depictions of various states of numbness and paranoia. Raw also contains Spiegelman's extraordinary picture novel Maus, in which he tells the story of his parents' experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe using animals, mostly mice, as characters. Harvey Pekar's American Splendor (drawn by various artists, among them that grand old man of the comix Robert Crumb) is a shaggy, sweet-rueful account of down-and-out life in Cleveland. In Love and Rockets, the Hernandez brothers play every modernist game they can think of, from text-and-pictures deconstruction to Heisenbergian perceptual jokes on the reader.

Even what most people think of as the American comic book—the colorful, energetic adventures of ultra-powered beings like Superman and Spiderman, who fight their way across the roofs of skyscrapers to the accompaniment of boldly lettered Zaps and Pows—even these superhero comics have been reclaimed for adults and made sophisticated. Generally—and accurately—denounced for its stupidity, male-adolescent outlook, sameness, and sheer junkiness, the superhero genre has nonetheless produced a trio of uneven but fascinating talents: Frank Miller (Daredevil, Ronin, and Dark Knight), Dave Sim (Cerebus), and Howard Chaykin (American Flagg!, The Shadow). And the satirical worlds these artists have created—often amusing, sometimes horrifying—say as much about the eighties as comix ever did about the sixties.

All three men owe something to Will Eisner, whose The Spirit in the early forties pioneered what might be called the cinematic comic style and was written for a pulp-loving adult audience. But Eisner's inspiration came from hard-boiled detective stories. Miller, Sim, and Chaykin are working out of their affection for and skepticism toward those overmuscled overachievers whom Sim refers to generically as “Mucusman.” Sim has always been an independent, publishing with his own company, Aardvark-Vanaheim. But Miller and Chaykin have worked in “the industry” (that is, for DC or Marvel).

Miller first made a name for himself with Marvel's Daredevil, which he wrote and drew from 1979 to 1981. Violent, kinetic, and set in a moodily lit New York City, Daredevil was the first film noir comic book, and it remains the most successful marriage of beauty and blood in mainstream comics.

There is a lot of sadism, almost exclusively directed toward women, in comic books. But Miller's violence isn't sadistic—it seems part of the fierce, erupting movement of his graphic style, sensual yet abstract. His draftsmanship is weak, but that hardly matters. Looking at his fight scenes, you can practically feel the amoral, physical joy of his characters, as if you were watching dancers. He reminds you of how sexy superhero comics are—not because all the women have gravity-defying D-cup breasts and all the men thighs like Baryshnikov but because the characters, in their skintight outfits, are always extended in motion: leaping across roofs, falling through space, springing at their enemies. The flesh is celebrated, expressionistically and passionately.

After he left Daredevil, Miller contracted with DC Comics to write and draw his own comic, Ronin, a six-book series. Ronin isn't fully successful, but it has its own peculiar power, and there's nothing else quite like it. The eponymous hero is a samurai reincarnated into the body of an armless, legless mental deficient who is used for testing new prosthetic devices. This bizarrely sadomasochistic setup evolves into a bloodily heroic action tale set in a dreadful urban society of the future. Miller's mixture of plot elements from all areas of pulp (demons, outré technology) never quite gels. But visually Ronin is striking and disturbing—it bubbles with disease. Everything seems blistered, and the color (by the talented Lynn Varley, who also did the first issues of American Flagg!) is mostly a bilious green, or the blues and yellows of a bruise. Miller's work here has been compared to that of the French comics artist Moebius, but it's much less clear-lined and cartoon-like. The world of Ronin is full of organic machinery, and it all seems to be rotting. Miller experiments with depicting movement abstractly, and the earlier clean power of his bodies charging through space has been lost. Here even motion decays, and the bodies are now scarred and mutilated. Ronin is about vulnerability and the corruption of the flesh, how it can be damaged and made to hurt.

It was hard to see, after Ronin, how Miller could go much further. But his reworking of that old comics chestnut Batman in Dark Knight, his four-book series for DC, is, in the most literal sense, nightmarish: the story is like a fever dream that a disturbed and imaginative city-dweller might have after binging on comics. As in Ronin, all the usual components—monstrous villains, justified vigilantism, the tormented hero—are in place; and as in Ronin, they have almost nothing to do with what the comic is about. What it's about is our ordinary urban fears brought to a pitch of ferocious hysteria. Reading Dark Knight is like seeing your squirmiest, grossest street fears brought into the light and given, if not exactly reality, at least shape.

Dark Knight is inked by Klaus Janson, who worked with Miller on Daredevil, and it's not as decayed-looking as Ronin (which Miller inked himself). Janson has a hard-edged, rather geometric linear style, and under his pen Miller's figures seem more traditionally comic-book. This makes the ugliness of their adventures even harder to take, and Lynn Varley is still around to soak the pages with her nighttime colors.

Miller has attempted to extend the superhero comic and make it carry images and ideas it may not be capable of carrying; he always seems to be straining the edges of the form. But Sim and Chaykin have embraced it. Cerebus, American Flagg!, and The Shadow aren't so much attempts to transform pulp as they are lively springboard somersaults into the air above it. Where Miller gets down and dirty, Chaykin and Sim get high.

Cerebus began as a straightforward funny-animal parody (Cerebus is an aardvark) of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian. But Sim's uninspired aardvark-as-barbarian joke has developed into a sophisticated and acidly amusing political satire. The country Cerebus inhabits is full of competitive city-states, each with its own economy (unlike most pop satirists, Sim has some idea of how political reality actually works) and quarreling political parties and religious movements. Cerebus is the only anthropomorphic animal in an otherwise human world (a fact none of the other characters remarks on) and for this reason alone is an outsider and the perfect ironic observer. He's a greedy, vile-tempered, selfish little critter, but Sim likes him. A while back he made him Pope. One of Cerebus's first acts as Pope was to send a baby he was asked to bless whizzing off over the heads of the crowd like a well-thrown football. Sim's effervescent cruelty has a tonic shock to it, and though one may hesitate to say so, his extremes of misanthropy can be very, very funny.

As a stylist, Sim is in many ways an illustrator in the old-fashioned sense. He poses his characters to be looked at: your eye wants to linger over them rather than move on. And he does things like experiment with large areas of black and white, and surround his pages with decorative borders. Yet his work isn't static. Part of the surprise of his style is the way he achieves a sense of movement, not through shifts in his composition (that is, flinging his characters across the page—though he can do wonderful parodies of superhero building-leaping) but by manipulating perspective. Miller's work is influenced by and imitative of film storytelling, but Sim really does have a cinematographer's eye. He swoops in for close-ups, gazes down from a ceiling corner, focuses on a detail of movement and depicts each of its stages. Sometimes he draws a character standing beside himself in consecutive states of motion—it's like looking at a strip of Muybridge photographs. The drawings carry a sense of impending movement within them—they're poised on the edge of transition from one image to another. At times Sim seems like an animation director who happens to be drawing comic books. (He has done a portfolio of what might almost be a director's primary drawings for three short films, called, appropriately enough, The Animated Cerebus.) Two years ago Sim took on a collaborator, Gerhard, to provide him with detailed and atmospheric backgrounds (never his strong point) against which to place his aardvark's adventures, and the drawings now have a new depth and texture.

Yet in some ways Sim is more like a writer illustrating his own stories than a comics artist who thinks mostly in visual terms. Cerebus really has to be read in order to be enjoyed. Sim has sometimes devoted whole pages to text, and the writing doesn't need pictures—it stands on its satirical own. As a dialogue writer, Sim has a certain nostalgie de la vaudeville, and I can give him no higher praise than to say that when he presumes to write lines for a character based on Groucho Marx, he's up to the task.

This character, Lord Julius, is an example of the way pop-cultural figures wander into Cerebus and take on a life of their own. (The latest examples are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.) At some point after a viewing of Duck Soup, Sim must have asked himself the question, What would a country run by Groucho Marx really be like? and then created a madhouse bureaucracy that would make Kafka quail. Lord Julius fits quite comfortably into this world, as, indeed, do Sim's parodies of superheroes and fantasy heroes and his talking aardvark. The world of Cerebus is so detailed and—with its politicians, warring interests, hypocrisy, opportunism, and folly—so familiar that we accept its odd citizens as mere eccentrics. There's a streak of Lewis Carroll in Sim—the politicians and flunkies have all the fantastic reality of the court of the Queen of Hearts. None of the characters has yet said “We're all mad here,” but they all are. For Sim this madness is ordinary, matter-of-fact: Was the world ever any other way?

The brutal, porny, stylish worlds of American Flagg! and The Shadow are mad too, but Chaykin, unlike Sim, doesn't take the madness for granted. He revels in it. In contrast to the lurid goings-on, the pictures have a crisp, pop elegance; Chaykin seems to have taken his inspiration from between-the-wars American illustrators like James Montgomery Flagg and J. C. Leydendecker. This nostalgic style gives the books their visual charm, but they're far from quaint. The style is matched to a hectic, razzle-dazzle sense of movement—the images rush and tumble past you, the sound effects screech across the page.

In The Shadow, Chaykin is reworking the old hero of radio fame, and although he makes the story zing nastily along, he's not as unfettered as he was in American Flagg! He no longer writes or draws Flagg! (though back issues are available, and the first few stories have been issued in a large-format paperback under the title Hard Times), but in its day he made it the Miami Vice of comic books. It's set in a somewhat confusing future dystopia in which, as far as I can figure out, the United States government has relocated to Mars, the East Coast has been destroyed by a gigantic nuclear meltdown, and Brazil wants to buy Illinois. A lot of Chaykin's future is built on exaggerations of present social conditions. (He has said in an interview that the future “is a lot like the present only later and more so.”) The gap between rich and poor is enormous. The cities are jungles inhabited by street gangs, and the centers of civilization more or less as we know it are huge shopping malls. Racial hatred is commonplace (though so is racial tolerance) and fuels politics to a vicious degree. (The neo-Nazi party is called, in a piece of typical Chaykinian wit, the Gotterdammercrats.)

This is a shallow parody of America, exactly what people mean when they use comic-book as a disparaging adjective. But Chaykin isn't stupid, and he's on to something. The shallowness is part of the point. It plays to our worst fears about our plastic, violent culture, with its philistine tastes and hunger for novelty. Chaykin has taken the silliest extremes of our cultural despair—“No one will be able to read in the future!”—and brought them to life.

It's kind of a fun life, too. Chaykin has said that American Flagg! is a leftist response to the expropriation of the idea of patriotism by the right. And it's true that Reuben Flagg, his hero, is a sort of superpatriot, the lone decent man in a society gone foul, a descendant of the western lawman. But though Chaykin may care about American decency, what he loves is American junk. His consumer-mall society is a circus of cheap elements from action movies, porn films, comic books, sci-fi, TV, all going off as gloriously as fireworks.

Chaykin has charged right through the superhero genre and come out on the other side. Miller has burrowed down into pulp hell. Sim appears to have taken a left turn at Albuquerque and ended up in his own no-aardvark's-land. But the impetus behind their books is the same. Instead of outgrowing the comics they read in their teens and early twenties, Chaykin, Miller, and Sim have found what they loved in them all along and turned that into a personal artistic reality.

What they have created may not exactly be art, but in America the self-conscious and self-defined avant-garde has always had as an unruly twin the low-culture entertainment that turns out to be a junk parable. From Raymond Chandler's neon-dream Los Angeles through the homegrown surrealism of Buster Keaton's movies to the sci-fi political allegory of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the lowbrow art form that usurps the effects (and sometimes the power) of high art is a commonplace. Grace and poetry have their place here, but so do vulgarity, sloppiness, and sentimentality, the accidental and the overdone. We're in a subaesthetic area, with no redeeming intellectual or social qualities, only instinct and rude energy. In this despised and largely unexplored terrain Miller, Sim, and Chaykin have staked their claims. Their success is an apotheosis of the uncritical fannish attitude, the triumph and redemption of shameless love of trash.