08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail | By Michael Crowley And Dan Goldman | Three Rivers Press | 160 pages | $17.95


The Beats: A Graphic History | Edited by Paul Buhle | Hill and Wang | 193 pages | $22


Che: A Graphic Biography | By Spain Rodriguez | Verso | 106 pages | $16.95

No greater dichotomy informs the history of comics than the seemingly unbridgeable chasm separating Superman, a godlike alien, from his secret identity as mild-mannered Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent. At the same time, the journalist and the superhero form a perfect synthesis of observer and observed. Superman performs the sensational feats that Clark Kent subsequently covers on behalf of his paper’s readers. As the authentic subject of his own stories, albeit anonymously, Clark Kent is a sort of anticipatory New Journalist.

In an essay collected in The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, Vanessa Russell takes the journalist/superhero dichotomy an intriguing step further. Russell suggests that it’s the reporters who transcend mortality in nonfiction comics—specifically, in Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus and Joe Sacco’s Palestine. “The superhero is superfluous,” she writes, “because the reporter, through extensive research, interviews, physical trips to the conflict site, photographs, oral history, and memory work can reproduce a coherent authenticity that mimics a superhero’s vision of omniscience.”

That may be overstating the case (although at this point, the average journalistic ego needs all the boosting it can get). And the ascendance of nonfiction comics undoubtedly poses less of an economic threat to mainstream journalism than do Google, Wikipedia, citizen journalism, fake news shows, and blogs unlimited. Yet even a quick flip through journalist Michael Crowley and artist Dan Goldman’s 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail reflects what mainstream journalists are up against in the marketplace of attention.

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