Not Just for Kids Anymore.(comic books)(Brief Article)

Rasim, an elderly Bosnian Muslim, describes a grim night in 1992 when Serb forces came to the town of Visegrad. They rounded up his Muslim neighbors and took them to a bridge on the Drina River. "Sometimes they shot them, but they preferred to cut their throats," he says. His story is not in a magazine or a news documentary. It's in a comic book--but not the kind full of caped superheroes. Artist Joe Sacco, who calls himself a "comics journalist," spent four weeks in the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Gorazde in late 1995 and serialized his reporting in stark, black-and-white drawings that make up the book "Safe Area Gorazde."

The work is surprisingly affecting. Sacco's 230-page narrative unfolds through the stories of ordinary people--a group of teenage girls longing for Levis, a soldier who incessantly sings "Hotel California," an unemployed teacher--whose personal travails capture the reality of the Bosnian war more poignantly than any daily newspaper. "If I describe my experiences in Gorazde to people, they get really fed up really quickly," says Sacco, 40. "No one wants to hear that stuff. But if I present it in comics, somehow it becomes palatable."

Long considered a staple of lowbrow culture, comics are expanding into more serious subject matter. Thanks to Sacco and a handful of other artists, they are tackling important themes like racism, religious strife and ethnic cleansing. Some of the world's literati think that's a good thing. Columbia University Prof. Edward Said heaped praise on "Palestine," one of Sacco's earlier comic books, which won an American Book Award for its pointed portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The appeal of such works, Sacco explains, lies in their ability to "convey difficult information in a way that people can appreciate. They're attracted by the images."

Historical comics have been around for decades. But the newest ones are often political, following in the tradition of Art Spiegelman's "Maus," a tale of Holocaust survivors illustrated with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Spiegelman now serves as a mentor for many of the younger cartoonists. Increasingly, their readers favor nonfiction and literary fiction. "These comic books don't belong in the humor section," says Spiegelman. "So you're left with a literary work that ...