WORDS AND PICTURES.

You can tell the graphic-novels section in a bookstore from afar, by the young bodies sprawled around it like casualties of a localized disaster. There were about a dozen of them at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recent afternoon, in a broad aisle between graphic novels and poetry. Not one was reading poetry, but the proximity of the old ragged-right-margined medium piqued me. Graphic novels--pumped-up comics--are to many in their teens and twenties what poetry once was, before bare words lost their cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poet types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eighties imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing ...