Comic books helped me to define myself and my world in a way that made both far less frightening. I honestly cannot imagine how I would have navigated my way through childhood without them.

Today, the comic book industry is an entertainment business not unlike Hollywood. Just as there are popular actors, there are also the star comic book creators, writers, and pencilers, who attract crowds of hundreds -- sometimes thousands -- of eager, autograph-seeking fans at every comic book convention they attend.

Specific, closed cultures like that surrounding comic books have allowed voices to be heard that might not have been audible in a world in which all cultural texts speak the same common language.

Comic books epitomize the accessibility, disposability, and appeal to instant gratification that lie at the core of modern consumer culture.

A critical analysis of the comic-book form is especially necessary now, when a growing number of contemporary American comic books are being written as literature aimed at a general readership of adults and concerned, not with the traditionally escapist themes of comics, but with issues such as the clash of cultures in American history, the burdens of guilt and suffering passed on within families, and the trials and small triumphs of the daily workaday world.