Most of the business at comic book stores isn't in comic books anymore. According to pop culture trend tracker ICv2, graphic novels have begun to outsell comic books. Graphic novels are essentially comic books on steroids, with longer, more complex, darker stories. The term can also include putting together a long story arc initially published in half a dozen regular comic book issues, but purists tend to refer to those as trade paperbacks.

Statistics aren't available yet for 2007, but 330 million graphic novels were sold in North America in 2006--a 12 percent increase. That wasn't bad news for comic book publishers like DC and Marvel. There was an even bigger jump in sales of traditional monthly periodical comic books like "Batman" and "Spider-Man." They were up 15 percent to 310 million in 2006. And comic book publishers like DC are doing quite well with graphic novels. Where they once appealed almost exclusively to teenage boys, they now sell to people of all ages, male and female.

In Spotsylvania County, Mike Porter, comics collector and owner of the new Little Fish Comics & Collectibles store at Cosner's Corner, isn't just trying to ring up sales when he insists that graphic novels like "Watchmen," "Kingdom Come" and "V for Vendetta" qualify as legitimate literature.

Porter is a true believer. In 1995, he was a teacher's aide lecturing on Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta" as part of a science-fiction literature course at Guelph University in Ontario, Canada. He says students and their parents would come to him and ask if there was additional literature they could read to help with the course. You know, Mr. Porter, "real" literature. "Real" books. Not comic books. No, Porter would say, the best examples of the graphic novel form are real literature. "It's definitely literature," he says standing in his store surrounded by Batman, Spider-Man and Superman comics and action figures. "It stands up to any distopian literature."

George Orwell's "1984" is an example of distopian literature. Distopian protagonists, such as Winston Smith in "1984" and the character V in "V for Vendetta," challenge negative aspects of their societies, putting themselves at risk in the process.
An argument can be made that anything that gets people--especially young people--to read in today's TV and video game culture is good. For the rest of Michael Zitz' Free-Lance Star article, click here.