You can tell the graphic-novels section in a bookstore from afar, by the young bodies sprawled around it like casualties of a localized disaster. There were about a dozen of them at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recent afternoon, in a broad aisle between graphic novels and poetry. Not one was reading poetry, but the proximity of the old ragged-right-margined medium piqued me. Graphic novels—pumped-up comics—are to many in their teens and twenties what poetry once was, before bare words lost their cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poet types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eighties imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing pens. Like life-changing poetry of yore, graphic novels are a young person’s art, demanding and rewarding mental flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between the incommensurable functions of reading and looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potential audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but that is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism. Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, “The Waste Land”—by which a rising generation exploits its biological advantages, of animal health and superabundant brain cells, to confound the galling wisdom and demoralize the obnoxious sovereignty of age.

Start with Chris Ware, the thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile. Set aside, for now, the graphic novelists you probably most like, if you like only a few: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes. Their peculiar literary qualities are distracting. The same goes for Robert Crumb, for whom there is the added problem of a historical significance: he is the father of art comics. Keep lightly in mind the ever-teeming regions of genre: superhero, action, horror, goth-girl. Give a respectful but wide berth to Japanese manga, which occupy most of the shelf space allotted to graphic novels in bookstores, their bindings as uniform as lined-up vials of generic, obviously addictive pharmaceuticals. Dutifully paging, right to left, through a score or so of translated manga, I register the buzz of platter-eyed characters engaged in well-designed, pointless violence. I pause at frames in which, amid suddenly silent ruins, some liquid or another drips with a sound that is invariably rendered plp plp plp. It’s not that styles of sheer sensation are contemptible, but once you’ve said “Wow,” you are close to having exhausted the subject. It is even a point of honor with action comics—as with action movies and action anything, like roller coasters—to leave us with only a suffusive, endorphin glow. As for the dizzying byways of shojo, kinky romance manga for girls, I throw up my hands in Caucasian senior-male bewilderment.

“Jimmy Corrigan” tells of a potato-headed, hypersensitive office worker—“a lonely, emotionally-impaired human castaway,” the author terms him—who lacks any notable personal resource except a limitless capacity for mental suffering. Several interlocking stories, many of which involve the miserable eighteen-nineties childhood of Jimmy’s doppelgänger grandfather, center on Jimmy’s first meeting, at the age of thirty-six, with his absentee father, a figure of crushing banality. (Jimmy’s mother, who lives in a retirement home, is a monster of self-absorption.) Ware’s visual style recalls the clean-lined perfectionism of “Tintin,” the classic adventure strip by the Belgian Hergé (Georges Rémi, 1907-83), whose book-length stories qualify as graphic novels avant la lettre, but it is far more varied in design, with densely rhythmic layouts of small and large panels and of close-up and long views, and it is subtler in color, with moody, volatile pastels. Ware exercises an encyclopedic command of literary and cinematic tactics—stream of consciousness, montage—with tropes that are peculiar to graphic art: often effects of stillness, such as a character’s blank takes, in which you sense mental wheels turning (never to any very propitious end, in this case), and landscapes and cityscapes infused with a droning dailiness. He speeds and slows time, stops it, and can even seem to run it backward, revisiting and revising recent events, or sideways, incorporating alternative accounts of what’s happening. All this is done with utmost precision. Reading “Jimmy Corrigan” is like operating an intricate machine whose function is not immediately apparent. Gradually, meanings emerge and emotions crystallize. None gladden. Let one gross example stand for the book’s innumerable bummers: Jimmy wanders outdoors, struggling to compose, in his mind, his first-ever letter to his father. (“Dear Dad, Hi! How are you? I’m your son . . .” “Dear Dad, Hi! My name is Jimmy. You might not remember me, but . . .”) A mail truck makes its rounds in the background. Jimmy sees deer behind a gas station across the street. After trying to remember whether deer bite, and assuring himself that they’re harmless, he steps toward them, happily. The mail truck hits him.

The masochistic tenor of “Jimmy Corrigan,” while extreme, is typical of serious graphic novels and, in fact, of most of the modern comic strips that influence graphic novelists, at least of the male kind. Comics heroines, from Little Orphan Annie to Wonder Woman, are as a rule resiliently upbeat, however beset. (In a preface to “Jimmy Corrigan,” Ware issues a questionnaire that’s meant to gauge the relative grimness of the reader’s childhood. It begins, “1. You are a. male. b. female. If b, you may stop . . .”) A painfully humiliated hero is essential even—or especially—to “Superman” and its vast spawn. Disregarded Clark Kent is the figure readers identify with; his transformation into the Man of Steel nurses the hopes and fulfills the rage of all underestimated boys, but it can’t cure his loneliness. “Spider-Man” twists the knife by making Peter Parker’s superpowers an added torment to him: he’d rather be an ordinary guy. The theme of a publicly misjudged character’s private anguish has grown, in comics history, to dominate the form. Who today still relishes the pure ridicule of “Li’l Abner,” or the convivial folk wisdom (brilliant wordplay aside) of “Pogo”? Both were immensely popular before the ascendance of “Peanuts,” the most important comic strip of the past half century. Charlie Brown is Clark Kent without the colorful underwear, and with all the possibly compensatory qualities split off and given to other characters, mainly Snoopy. Jimmy Corrigan, in turn, is Charlie Brown without the eternal childhood in an Arcadian neighborhood. Ware teases out a nightmarish aspect of “Peanuts” that Charles Schulz cushioned in whimsy: Charlie Brown is incorrigibly mediocre, incapable of satisfactory relationships or achievements, doomed to obloquy. His generous and trusting heart sets him up for mishap and betrayal—which, in his little four-panelled world, where nothing changes, he meets with a sigh. Jimmy’s world is big—Chicago’s Sears Tower looms in misty silhouette outside his window—and events in it have consequences. They give him nosebleeds. They make him cry.

The influence of “Peanuts” pervades one variety of graphic novel, the influence of the early MAD magazine another. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan astutely called MAD, which first appeared in 1952, “a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness.” Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, and the magazine’s other inventors counterattacked the manipulative forms and messages of mass culture with a none too subtle parodic wit that was angry at its root. It fed a furious, slightly scared cynicism in its readers that was born of perceptions of falseness in advertising, certainly, and in perhaps, well, everything with which “they” presumed to know and affect our thoughts. What “they” imagined we must be like, to swallow it all, was caricatured in the sunnily moronic countenance of Alfred E. Neuman. MAD was almost as significant a cultural depth charge of the nineteen-fifties as Elvis was. (I came across my first issue in 1956 or so and immediately phoned two friends. All they heard on the line, before they hung up, was convulsive laughter.) Blending with the popularization of Beat literature and the comedy of Lenny Bruce, MAD’s attitude entered into the great generational joke of the sixties: feigned idiocy, faux innocence, the put-on, camp. (Cogito: people over thirty don’t get it, therefore I am.) Cartooning acquired a new, prevalently drug-enhanced function configuring madness as entertainment. Its new paragon—a writer-artist whose greatness still defies conventional description—was R. Crumb, who inaugurated “Zap Comix” in 1968 in San Francisco, at the center of a countercultural circus that was going rancid around the edges. Crumb regrounded comics in the experience of aging youths who, having embraced lives of antic alienation, were stuck with them.

Even full-on, Crumb’s drawings tend to have an up-from-under feel. The fat shoes of the striding character in his iconic “Keep on Truckin’ ” image suggest a ground-level viewpoint, as does the physiognomy of his feminine ideal: girlish above the waist, rolling thunder below. (His unedifying sexual penchants and frankly jerkish attitudes are inseparable from the truths he tells, unfortunately.) Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact. It’s a small matter of emphasis with big correlatives, ushering comics from stylized backgrounds for fantasy to projections of tactile space. The effect needn’t entail anything like realism. Its precedents include, in comics history, the topography of Coconino County, in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (1910-44). In that pocket immensity, as indifferent as the universe, a mouse might hit a cat with a brick, and a cat might enjoy it though a dog objects. After Crumb, a widespread rediscovery of Herriman became crucial to several styles of the nascent graphic novel, in particular that of Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1986, Pantheon). The Jewish mice, German cats, and Polish pigs of that extraordinary epic live their fates in surroundings that not only contain but witness and reflect on the action: the kitchen in which Spiegelman interviews his father, a setting of safety in the here and now, emotionally frames the all but unbelievable ghastliness of the there and then. To become novelistic, comics needed capacious structures of space and time in which their characters could come and go.

Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification that makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism, in the writing no less than in the reading. Why arduously muster the persona of a Charlie Brown or a Jimmy Corrigan when your own fascinating self is right at hand? A problem for the autobiographical graphic novel is that its author’s life experience may consist mainly in compulsive cartooning. But the trailblazer of this mode, Harvey Pekar, is not a cartoonist at all, barely a writer, and well past adolescence, at least chronologically. Pekar, a lumpish Cleveland file clerk, came to public notice in several appearances on the David Letterman show, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, and was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in “American Splendor” (2003), a movie based on comics that Pekar wrote and others drew. A jazz and comics buff blessed with a connoisseur’s taste and remarkable powers of persuasion, Pekar met Crumb in Cleveland in the sixties and enlisted him to illustrate long, grumpy monologues that told the story of his shambling existence. (Desultory personal content in a bravura visual form quickly became fashionable among younger artists, most of it quite bad.) Pekar has since dragooned several other cartoonists to his exquisitely tedious ends. The latest is Dean Haspiel, who performs with virtuoso flair in “The Quitter” (2005, DC Comics/Vertigo), relaying Pekar’s confessions as a working-class dude who grew up with little in his favor except a knack for beating up other dudes. Pekar reviews the futilities of his life with humorless fixation and zero insight. He is the accidental minimalist of the graphic novel.

The best first-person graphic novel to date, “Persepolis” (2003), and the second-best, “Persepolis 2” (2004, both Pantheon), are by a woman, Marjane Satrapi. They suggest a number of rules for the form: have a compelling life, remember everything, tell it straight, and be very brave. “Persepolis” is about Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War. “Persepolis 2” follows her to school in Vienna, then back to Iran, and again to Europe, perhaps for good. Her parents are upper-middle-class Marxists, whose extensive family and social connections and political involvement exposed her to the full tumult of the times. Her uncanny way of incorporating exposition, with nary a stumble in her pell-mell narrative momentum, immerses us in the lore of Iranian history and culture. Drawn in an inky and crude visual style that is as direct as a slap, the books track her imaginings and her passions, which are wonderfully responsive, though usually inadequate to the realities of the situation. It’s a comic strategy that maintains buoyancy even in the face of the oppression, torture, and death of people dear to her, without for a moment treating the ordeals of others as secondary to her own. Satrapi’s unforced empathy contrasts with the self-pitying tendencies that are common to first-person comics written by men. Her stubborn ingenuousness may cloy (she has said, “Instead of putting all this money to create arms, I think countries should invest in scholarships for kids to study abroad”), but we don’t go to graphic novels for political philosophy.

At least one artist, however, raises hopes for the graphic novel as a vehicle of political journalism. The Maltese-born Seattle resident Joe Sacco’s much lauded “Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-95” (2000) and “Palestine” (2001, both Fantagraphics) are personalized explorations of those terrible imbroglios, packed with illuminating information and peopled with hurting, raging, sometimes hilarious denizens. The raucous, tumbling visuals commandeer the reader’s attention; we’re along for the ride, and we hang on tight. But Sacco’s success in combining the nerve and the savvy of war correspondence with the infectious rhetoric of comics may be not only inimitable but sui generis. In the new “Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea,” by Guy Delisle (2005, Drawn & Quarterly), the French-Canadian cartoonist describes, in a twee drawing style without a whisper of emotional force, a recent two-month stint during which he supervised animators of children’s cartoons in the world’s most disheartening capital city. Confined to an office and a nearly deserted hotel, and shadowed by taciturn guides and interpreters, Delisle adds only topical highlights to what might otherwise serve as a standard account of an unusually boring work assignment anywhere. Steve Mumford’s “Baghdad Journal: An Artist in Occupied Iraq” (2005, Drawn & Quarterly) disappoints in another way: it offers realist watercolors that are accomplished but no more expressive than photographs, and the writing that accompanies them is pedestrian and prolix. If it weren’t for Sacco, the lately alluring idea of fully engaged and engaging illustrated reportage would be a chimera.

Will Eisner’s “A Contract with God,” a book of stories finished in 1978, is regularly termed “the first graphic novel,” at the instigation of the author himself, who died this year at the age of eighty-seven. Eisner created a masked-crime-fighter comic book, “The Spirit,” in his youth; he was not a modest man, but legions of admirers forgave him that, as they forgive his work’s cornball histrionics. Rooted in German Expressionism but more reminiscent of MAD-type burlesque than of George Grosz, his characters rub their hands, tear their hair, and, if they happen to fancy something, slaver. Next month, “A Contract with God” will be reissued with two other collections—“A Life Force” and “Dropsie Avenue”—as “The Contract with God Trilogy” (Norton). All the tales, which take place on a single block of the fictional Dropsie Avenue, in the Bronx, concern mostly Jewish characters and are set largely in the Depression era. The title story tells of a Russian immigrant, Frimme Hersh, who promises God a life of service in return for his favor. He is a beloved member of his synagogue community until the death of his adopted daughter embitters him, whereupon he curses God and becomes a rapacious real-estate tycoon. Heartsick in old age, he asks the rabbis to write a new contract, committing him to philanthropy. That night, Hersh dies, and lightning immediately strikes Dropsie Avenue—never leaving well enough alone is apparently a principle for Eisner. Over-the-topness is endemic to the comics, of course—an industry standard for popular action and horror titles, as well as for manga, and the default setting for Crumb’s work. But it is ill suited to serious subjects, especially those that incorporate authentic social history.

Comics used to inhabit a world separate from that of grownup cartooning (a specialty of this magazine), which exploits the clownish and melodramatic proclivities of comics in reverse, and with studied understatement Daniel Clowes closes the gap. To winkle out meaning from indirect or muted expression flatters and delights our intelligence; it is a cynosure of urbanity. Clowes extends it to realms of middle-class comedy, set in small cities, with admixtures of the surreal and the gaudily neurotic—“Peanuts” with grievous tics. His “Ghost World” (1998, Fantagraphics)—transposed to the screen by Terry Zwigoff, in 2001, with flat compositions and an all but affectless acting style faithful to the original—is about the coming of age of two high-school girlfriends, in glum and often sinister circumstances, and involves a good deal of snappy patter, considerable cruelty, and an ultimate betrayal that would make you feel like a sucker if you hadn’t observed the author’s abundant warnings not to identify too poignantly with the heroines. Clowes plays crisp, bland cartooning, at times reminiscent of the old “Can You Draw This?” matchbook ads, against stealthily nuanced writing; reading him, it’s as if someone or something, nonchalant and a trifle bored, had invaded the control room of my thoughts and feelings, and were flipping switches. The short but replete “Ice Haven” (2005, Pantheon), a pageant of twisty characters and subplots, tells of what seems to be a murder along the lines of Leopold and Loeb but isn’t, although there’s plenty of psychological collateral damage to all.

One character, a “comic book critic,” ruminates over his breakfast cereal, “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness . . .” Well put, though it’s rubbish. (Clowes’s critic is a figure of fun.) If the true nature of human consciousness were replicable, the art form that succeeded in doing it would crowd out all others. The true nature of human consciousness—in the time that can be spared from the quest for food, sex, and whatnot—is to enjoy itself by every means possible, an aim enhanced by aesthetic inventions from the “Ring” cycle to Cracker Jack prizes.

A certain theoretical frenzy about comics today is understandable, as it has been in other art forms in periods of their rapid development—think of the debates about painting that roiled Renaissance Italy. But such intellectual arousal rarely precedes creative glory. On the contrary, it commonly indicates that an artistic breakthrough, having been made and recognized, is over, and that a process of increasingly strained emulation and diminishing returns has set in. Nearly all art movements are launched by work that, when the dust clears, turns out to have been their definitive, peak contribution. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” looms over the busy ramifications of Cubism as “The Waste Land” looms over the modern poetry that it inspired. Accordingly, there may never be another graphic novel as good as “Jimmy Corrigan,” even by Ware himself—whose current serial in the Times Magazine, though tangy, bespeaks a style on cruise control. But if the major discoveries of the graphic novel’s new world of the imagination have already been accomplished, its colonizing of the territory, like its threat to foot traffic in bookstore aisles, has only just begun.