The latest issue of the LA Times has an interesting article calling out a number of graphic novels found suitable for summer reading along with the prose selections you’d expect to see highlighted. The best part is the way there was absolutely no marginalization of the comic book artform. This is, in my mind, the best sort of mainstream coverage you can find.

When I was a kid, I considered it the height of luxury to lie on the couch in the living room with a stack of comic books and while away a summer afternoon. It’s not that I was a comics geek; I just loved the idea of reading that wasn’t, somehow, authorized. Back in the early 1970s, the term “graphic novel” hadn’t been invented yet, and one of the appeals of comics was that they stood outside accepted culture.

Thirty years later, comics have become part of the mainstream, a quintessentially American popular art. This summer brings some particularly vivid examples of the genre, beginning with Will Eisner’s “The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a work of “graphic history” completed not long before the artist’s death in January, which takes apart the anti-Semitic hoax “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in a direct and accessible way.

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