By Kate Isenberg

IN JULY, the New York Times Magazine announced that "the next new thing, the new literary form ... might be comic books. Seriously." Imagine the rejoinder of snorts, armpit farts, and Bronx cheers emitted by today's long-suffering comic-strip artists and graphic novelists, who know that while the mainstream media have only recently paid attention to them, people have been telling stories in sequential art for at least a millennium. Nonetheless, the present cultural moment is ripe for comics' coming-out party. Picture a guest list of your favorite cartoon superheroes, underachievers, and anthropomorphic animals, together with their (mostly nerdy) creators, gathered around a cake. Art Spiegelman (who, with his Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus and his editorship of Raw magazine, has spearheaded comics' literary debut) gives the keynote address. Then the cake blows up, and ... everyone laughs. If some guests are dead or dismembered, so much the better, because morbid humor is not only comics' peculiar pleasure, it may also be key to their current popularity.

Consider the 13th issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a 264-page hardback anthology devoted to comics. For those who fork out the $24 for a full-color, shrink-wrapped copy, morbid probably won't be the first word that springs to mind. Like a log sheltering an ant colony, that shrink-wrap, once it's removed, reveals a microworld teeming with vitality. Edited by Chris Ware (author of acclaimed graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan), the anthology comprises sample strips by about 40 contributors. These include founding fathers, like Charles Schulz and George Herriman, as well as contemporary innovators like Seth, Lynda Barry, Debbie Drechsler, and Joe Sacco. Interspersed among them are essays about comics' appeal; Ware discusses their musical aspects, while Ira Glass, John Updike, and Chip Kidd describe how comics shaped their artistic sensibilities. A 1925 essay called "Great Health Value of Comic Strips" argues that comic-strip humor provides an antidote to the stress of urban living, "a health value which goes straight down to the roots of life."

But a closer examination of the anthology shows that, whether comics are music or medicine, their humor is distinctly dark. In "The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck" (an 1842 strip by Rodolphe Töpffer, whom Ware credits with inventing modern comics), Obadiah pursues romance and suicide with equal abandon. In "Noodles's Attempts at Suicide" (1859), all the yuks come from the hero's attempts to hang, shoot, decapitate, and poison himself. Suicide, dismemberment, and execution are no less a part of contemporary strips, as in Mark Newgarden's "Little Nun," Kaz's "Balloon Army" (in which a balloon platoon, armed with rifles, "keep a sharp eye out for anything pointy"), Kim Deitch's "Ready to Die" (a portrait of a death-row inmate), and Chester Brown's "Death of Thomas Scott." To signify Scott's execution, Brown ends his black-and-white strip with an all-black panel. It's as if the ink lines that created the illusion of Scott's life in previous panels have now merged in a conceit: the medium is mortality.

Such a conceit fits with the exaggerated nature of comics, in which many artists encode the human condition in a few characteristic lines and icons. In a paean to Schulz, Ware presents sketches for Peanuts, along with an essay on Schulz's masterful concision. From these "hand-doodled abbreviation[s]," the reader can easily identify – and identify with – Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Sally. The same goes for the strip's perennial trope of a kite caught in a tree, with Charlie Brown "tangled in string, saying the punchline." Ira Glass describes the "dark-but-happily-dark feeling" of reading Peanuts, in which the home team always loses, and Lucy always yanks the football away so Charlie Brown falls on his ass. The pleasure of such tropes is inextricable from their fatalism: we know what's going to happen, and we read on to the final panel anticipating the fix, the punch line that satiates our expectations.

Fatalism is the deeper theme of the McSweeney's anthology, and in its austere light, humor and death play in each other's shadow. Death is the punch line the Little Nun, Noodles, Obadiah Oldbuck, Mutt and Jeff, and countless other characters wind up for, yank away, or succumb to. Humor often begins with the characters' physiognomy, and physiognomy is destiny – as in Mark Beyer's "Amy and Jordan," where the characters' pointy heads and stunted arms codify their ruminations on, and paralysis to change, their bleak circumstances. Even for artists who favor novelistic storytelling over slapstick gags, their aesthetics convey a similar preoccupation with determinism. Ware, for example, delineates his murky domestic scenes with right angles and straight edges; even the raindrops fall in parallel lines. Charles Burns's black shading makes his strip – excerpted from his magnum opus, Black Hole – look like a series of woodcuts, suggesting there's no erasing what's written, no escaping the progression toward the final panel.

Ultimately, the conceit of the panel itself encapsulates comics' relationship with fate. As Scott McCloud points out in "Understanding Comics," each panel encapsulates the present moment; the characters' future, prescribed in the next frame, is held at bay only as long as the reader lingers in intermediacy. But endings exert a stronger narrative pull than intermediacy, and death is a most uncompromising ending. The determinism of the frame is most clearly represented in Richard McGuire's "CTRL," in which each panel shows a scene from above: a divine perspective. The tension lies in the graphic relationship between the rectangular frame and the story line; a man rakes leaves in his rectangular yard, sweeps a rectangular pile of crumbs from his breakfast toast, works in a cubicle with a rectangular aquarium, dies in a collision of rectangular cars, and is buried in a rectangular plot of dirt, among countless similar plots. McGuire seems to suggest that comics mete out life the way modernity does, allowing inhabitants a limited range of motion from controlled space to controlled space.

Characteristically, it's Spiegelman's contribution that gives these aesthetic riffs geopolitical resonance. In a meditation on the Sept. 11 attacks, Spiegelman's panels are TV-screen shots of the burning World Trade Center towers. That image, which TV made an instant trope, suspended the national consciousness in a state of intermediacy and fatalistic narrative tension, with the possible plot turns meted out on the terror-alert scale. Tapping that tension, Spiegelman turns the familiar cartoon panel sideways, deepening its dimensions, until it becomes a silhouette of a skyscraper with a burning gash: the final frame as apocalyptic icon.

As a keepsake, the McSweeney's anthology, though well-timed for the market, is anachronistic in a sense: comics' vitality lies in progression, panel-skimming, page-turning, recycling. The anthology serves as a kind of gorgeous mausoleum for strips that do indeed tap the death instinct at the root of life. No other form surpasses comics' "health value" in representing fate as something you can smirk at, laugh at, or just be glad you're around to read. That's why, at a time like this, we can hardly help but love them.

Kate Isenberg (www.kateisenberg.com) is a writer and comic-strip artist in who lives in San Francisco.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 13: An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c.

Edited by Chris Ware. McSweeney's, 264 pages, $24.