Serious about comics

ONCE upon a time, you could safely speak up at a dinner party and mock comic books as the empty calories of a juvenile diet, the brightly colored cotton candy of the magazine rack. Those days are gone. Comic books (sorry -- \o7graphic novels\f7) are now treated in some quarters as museum pieces -- that is quite literally the case at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum, which, starting Sunday, will co-host an exhibit that anoints and annotates the "Masters of American Comics."

Graphic novels seem to be everywhere. At USC and UCLA, students (and some professors) arrive at class with Japanese manga novels tucked in their backpacks. In Silver Lake, the coffeehouse crowd mixes its espresso with comics of hipster ennui by artists such as Dan Clowes and Adrian Tomine. At Hollywood meetings, graphic novels are handed across tables as ready-made movie pitches with word balloons -- and not just the superhero stuff, either, as proved by "A History of Violence," "Sin City," "American Splendor," "Road to Perdition" and plenty of other non-spandex films.

Perhaps it's time to set aside your bias and concede that, just maybe, comics have evolved since you said goodbye to "Archie" in seventh grade. After all, the graphic novel "Maus" did win a Pulitzer Prize --\o7 13 years \f7\o7ago\f7.

If you are willing to indulge in a different sort of narrative, you'll need to know where and how to start. What follows is a highly subjective guide of some of the best graphic novels (or compilations of classics) published in the last two decades and some suggestions on where to find them.

The old masters

The exhibit at MOCA and the Hammer Museum celebrates some of the pioneers who date to the 1940s Golden Age of comic books, among them Will Eisner, Jack Kirby and Harvey Kurtzman. To check out their work, you can track down original copies and spend tens of thousands of dollars to buy them -- or you can take advantage of the recent flurry of deluxe reprints that have been collected and packaged in handsome hardcover editions.

Assuming you opt for that latter approach, a good place to start browsing through comic-book history is Book Soup, Sunset Boulevard's independent bookshop of renown. Founded 30 years ago, the landmark has been a stable brand name on the ever-churning Sunset Strip. Star maps, rare first editions, restaurant guides -- the shelves at Book Soup have a spot for just about everything. To find the graphic novels and classic reprints, walk in, veer to the right and -- in the prime shelf property between books on L.A. history and culture and the humor section -- you'll find colorful editions that also make pretty cool eye candy for the coffee table.