The Comics Journal Special Edition, Vol. I Gary Groth, ed. Fantagraphics 156 pp. Available from Powell's Books.

A decade and a half on, despite an occasional breach into the mainstream consciousness -- such as Chris Ware's brilliant, meticulously conceived graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, published last year by Pantheon Books -- the commercial and artistic heights reached by Maus seem now less a new plateau than a peak that continues to defeat most climbers. Overwhelmingly, comics remain written with a target audience of twelve-year-old boys (and those who wish they were) in mind.

Since the '60s, however, a sustained assault has been waged on the mainstream of superhero and "funny animal" comics. An underground movement celebrating sexual, violent, real art-with-words centered first around artists like R. Crumb and Spain Rodriguez, and later became a fertile breeding ground for alternative comics icons and master storytellers like the Hernandez Brothers (creators of one of the best sustained works in any genre, Love and Rockets), Jim Woodring (Frank) and Peter Bagge (Hate). Championing these upstarts for the past quarter century has been the Comics Journal and its outspoken editor, Gary Groth.

To celebrate 25 years of curmudgeonly griping about the genre's failings (both self-imposed and otherwise), comes this special edition of the Journal, a coffee-table-ready tome containing interviews, articles, and, of course, a load of comics from contemporary luminaries like Charles Burns, Joe Sacco, Jessica Abel, Kim Deitch, S. Clay Wilson and pages more. A beautifully produced compendium, the book ultimately falters under the weight of its unifying theme (Cartoonists on Cartooning) and chip-on-its-shoulder attitude.

The complaints first: The art finds itself relegated to the back of the book, which might have been better served by interspersing the comics with the text-heavy material now commanding the volume's first half. More consequentially, the imposition of such a self-conscious theme has hindered the creativity of many of the contributors. Titles like "A Day in the Life of a Typical Cartoonist" and "The Boy Who Loved Comics" exemplify a prosaic quality that leeches into the mostly short pieces. Even reliably iconoclastic artists like Crumb -- whose "The Heartbreak of the Old Cartoonist" seems almost intentionally soporfic -- are straight-jacketed by the reflexive nature of the topic. The past triumphs of many of the contributors here came from exploring the world around them using an under-utilized, and therefore fresh, medium, but that engagement -- more evident in the book's interviews -- gets lost for the sake of format. Only Phoebe Gloeckner, in the acerbic, nearly art-free "I Hate Comics", transcends the autobiographical nostalgia of many of the pieces, with a broadside aimed entirely at provocation. "You think comics can be art?" she asks. "Go ahead, hold up your pathetic poster boys -- the one who got a Pulitzer and the one who made movies (Ghost World's Dan Clowes, a Fantagraphics author left unrepresented here) or whatever... Big whoop! It's all just novelty. ...In the great scheme of things, nobody cares about cartoons."

Adopting the self-seriousness that Gloeckner viciously mocks, the book's textual centerpiece, Gregory Cwiklik's "What's Wrong with Comics Today?", beats the same horse that the Journal itself killed years ago. Few readers will be surprised to learn that most comics suck. "The comic book straddles the line between high and low art," Cwiklik writes, "and the cartoonist seems to get the worst of either: sales of independent comics are of the sort you'd expect for publishing slender volumes of poetry." While true, it's also true that most of any form -- movies, say, or pop music -- also sucks. Independent poets, meanwhile, don't carry the gilted expectations of many comic theorists, caring more about their writing than about their sales. Cwiklik indulges in a kind of whining that engenders less rather than more respect for an underappreciated field. Although subtitled "A Completely Personal Overview", the piece reads like a summation of the Journal's manifesto.

So what's good about this special edition? Plenty, fortunately, from Don Phelps' lavishly illustrated overview of the career of '30s comic strip artist Bill Holman (Smokey Stover) to Gary Groth's in-depth interview with "comic journalist" Joe Sacco, whose Palestine (1993) has joined Maus as an important work of emotional and historical reporting. Sacco talks extensively about his latest work, Safe Area Gorazde, a "document (of) the lives of people suffering in, as well as the politics behind, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s." Other highlights include tantalizing snatches of new artwork from the disturbing, maddeningly unprolific Al Columbia; an extended history of the human need to combine words and pictures ("Bayeux and The Worm"); and the self-explanatory "Whatever Happened to Autobiographical Comics?" The book survives its faults due mainly to the strength of the Fantagraphics roster, arguably the finest collection of down-to-earth comic artists ever gathered under one imprint. Their work, scattered though it is here, continues to impress.

Much of the boho-intellectual finger-wringing about the lack of attention given to comics seems to rest in the search for credibility among those unsure of the true worth of their chosen hobby horse. For those that care more about the intrinsic qualities of the form itself, and less about earning a place for comics at the larger table of the "legitimate" art world, there has rarely been a dearth of talent to enjoy. The alternative comics "underground" of the last 30-odd years, from Crumb to Julie Douchet to Richard Sala to Seth to... -- the list goes on and on -- has consistently produced some of the most uninhibited, articulate, moving and funny printed material available anywhere. Should this work be receiving its wider due? No question, but that may be beside the point. The fact that it's readily available, and continues to be artistically successful, is perhaps triumph enough.

-- In the mid-'90s, Ryan Tranquilla was the bookstore manager and assistant director at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2001, Fantagraphics Books is the world's leading publisher of cutting-edge work by today's most popular alternative comic artists, as well as collections of work by the greatest of the underground comix artists and classic comic strips. Fantagraphics Books' goal is to produce comics for an audience that tends to appreciate comics as a serious means of expression on the level of film, theater, or literature.