Comic Books

A rare copy of the first comic book featuring Superman has sold for $317,200 in an Internet auction. The previous owner had bought it secondhand for less than a buck. It is one of the highest prices ever paid for a comic book, probably a testament to the volume's rarity and excellent condition, said Stephen Fishler, co-owner of the auction site ComicConnect.com and its sister dealership, Metropolis Collectibles. The winning bid for the 1938 edition of Action Comics No.

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."

BILL GAINES was supposed to be a chemistry teacher, but blood, ink and Dexedrine sweat carried him down a different path. He had a passion for science and a quirky mania for measurements; to organize his desk, he used a ruler and T square, arranging his blotter, stapler and letter opener in a precise pattern. None of that mattered, though, after his father, comics publisher M.C. Gaines, died in a boating accident on Lake Placid in August 1947.

"SKYSCRAPERS OF the Midwest," long awaited by fans on the indie comic circuit, is a collection of floppies (comic-speak for comic books) that Joshua W. Cotter eked out over several years. Many of these stories are vignettes, some of one or two pages, such as a wordless sequence in which a robot lands its space ship, then declares its love for a rabbit and a flower. A nuclear bomb explodes in the distance and the robot leaves.

Context is all: It's hard to imagine "The Middleman," a new ABC Family series, arriving as part of a broadcast network fall season, or doing well there, even though it has much in common with last year's "Chuck" and "Reaper," other stories of average folk drafted to fight extraordinary foes. There is something too light about it, too self-mocking, too narrowly aimed.

IT'S THE Cannes of Capes, the World's Fair for Fanboys, the ultimate Bazaar of the Bizarre. Comic-Con International gets underway today at the San Diego Convention Center and 125,000 fans will attend this frothy celebration -- and hard sell -- of pop culture. Like at a rock festival with multiple stages, you can go to Comic-Con and have an experience completely different from the next fan.

This is the year they tried to take the comic out of Comic-Con. The Comic-Con International in San Diego, which came to a close Sunday, has become a frenetic Super Bowl of pop culture, but the home team has mixed feelings when it looks at the scoreboard. "I think Comic-Con is in danger of having Hollywood co-opt its soul," said Michael Uslan, who attended the first comic-book convention in summer 1964 in New York. "It's turning into something new, and you could really see it this year.

ART SPIEGELMAN'S SoHo studio sits across the street from one of the great hidden pieces of public art in this city: an oversized subway map, laid into the sidewalk, thin metal strips with small glass disks to mark stations on the various lines. On a weekday evening in early fall, shoppers and clubgoers pass along the pavement without ever seeing what they're stepping on. After 30 years, this is what SoHo has come to, an open-air fashion mall, full of high-end boutiques and restaurants.

MANY Americans know every line of the children's books starring Madeline, the pesky, hat-wearing redhead who lived in an "old house in Paris that was covered in vines." Growing up in the 1970s, John Bemelmans Marciano was not one of them. "I didn't really understand [the books' importance] till I was older," Marciano said. "People weren't reading children's books," he said of his rural New Jersey hometown, "or they weren't reading those children's books."

The Oscars present Hollywood as it wishes to be -- refined, glamorous and high-minded -- but on Saturday night at the Greek Theatre, the Spike TV Scream 2008 Awards showed the movie industry as it truly is in 2008: obsessed with superheroes, overflowing with fake blood and relentless in its pursuit to sell popcorn to teenagers.