Panel Discussion

A few weeks back, The New York Times Magazine wondered whether the graphic novel would supplant the more traditional sort. Perhaps, but this maturing medium doesn't intimidate the novelists and critics in Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, who have penned 17 rhapsodies to the glorious underpinning comics can provide the literary life. Aimee Bender draws a parallel between Chekhov's maxim that "good writing should be grasped at once—in a second" and Chester Brown's simple panels in Yummy Fur, where two storylines unfold side by side, stoking the teen protagonist's rage until the "page begin[s] to thrum with it." A full-page illo opens each essay, including some overstuffed graphics from Howard Chaykin's mid-'80s American Flagg. Novelist Steve Erickson champions the series' "vaguely populist iconoclasm, a seething indignation that patriotism somehow had been requisitioned by the political right."

illustration: Chester Brown

Peer pressure: Yummy Fur

Details

Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!
Edited by Sean Howe
Pantheon, 228 pp., $24.95
Buy this book

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