Books: The Passing of Pow! and Blam!

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You may still recognize him. He remains solid for a guy of advancing middle age, even if there is a little thickening around the middle, some slackening under the firm jawline. Sartorially, as ever, his daywear is conservative, the evening wear outrageous: long flowing cape, high midnight-blue boots, tights that fit closer than epidermis and, across his chest, the shadow of a black bat, ascendant.

Batman may look the same, but he has never acted quite this way before. Grimly going after wrongdoers, he is part avenger and part vigilante. While some citizens cheer, others denounce him as the Bernhard Goetz of Gotham City, and the police commissioner issues a warrant for his arrest. He is not only a hero for a more cynical time, but the standard-bearer of a fresh form of imaginative fiction. In 1986, when Writer-Artist Frank Miller created his formidable Batman epic The Dark Knight Returns (Warner; 188 pages; $12.95), he conceived the adventure as a single narrative flow. Pictures went with the story, which was told like a movie in panels on paper. By strictest definition, that made The Dark Knight Returns a comic book, but that term, with its unfortunate suggestions of arrested adolescent development, did not accommodate either the breadth of Miller's story or the height of his ambition.

Something was stirring, all right, not only in the Batcave but also on the fringes of cultural experimentation. There another writer-artist, Art Spiegelman, brought forth Maus, a black-and-white line-drawn memoir of Hitler's Germany, where the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice. Like The Dark Knight Returns, Maus (Pantheon; 159 pages; $8.95) came out in 1986. Warner has 80,000 copies of Knight in print. Pantheon reports that Maus, after eight printings totaling more than 100,000 copies, still sells an average of 1,000 a week. Spiegelman's tale is a hellish metaphor for history; Miller's is an evocation of pop apocalypse. Spiegelman draws simply, with calculated primitivism, while Miller is a boisterous stylist whose pictures dazzle, pummel, streak past the eye. The books have nothing in common except their success and a term that has been coined to describe them and others that are breaking off the newsstands and comic specialty shops and invading bookstores: graphic novels.

"That's just a sexy handle," says Pantheon Senior Editor Tom Engelhardt. "You take a little from a TV mini-series, a little film noir and a little Burroughs and call it a graphic novel." Call it commercial too. In Europe graphic novels command 10% of the book market. At Waldenbooks, the nation's largest bookseller, they are being given prominent display. Says Margaret Ross, manager of Waldenbooks' magazine department: "We thought they could bring in people we wouldn't usually see -- from early 20s to early 30s, science-fiction and comic collectors, well educated." Writer Alan Moore, author of Watchmen (Warner; 384 pages; $14.95) and Saga of the Swamp Thing (Warner; 161 pages; $10.95), puts the age range higher. From the nine- to * 13-year-old audience he began with in the early '80s, he says, he has shifted to 13 through 40. "People," he observes, "are beginning to take comics seriously."