coalescent

The New York Review of Books compares comics to music:

Comic books, the rock 'n' roll of literature, have always been a rigorously disreputable form of junk art for adolescents of body or mind. Hyper-energetic, crude, sexually regressive, and politically simplistic, comics—like rock (and, in recent years, hip-hop)— give fluent voice to their audience's basest and most cynical impulses. These are their virtues, arguably, as outlets for emotional release and as social counteragents.

It's an interesting enough piece, although even I can tell it's not exactly dealing with the cutting edge of comics. Still, it might give me a conversation-starter at