COMIC BOOK SHOPS smell like comic book shops. It’s something permanent, inescapable. Like being at your parents’ house or walking into your old high school. It brings up those memories you buried a long time ago, memories that feel a lot older than they really are. When it hits you, you’re thrown back in time, young and innocent again. You’re disoriented. That smell. Shop owners say they try, but they just can’t get rid of it.

What is it exactly? It’s years—often decades—of tightly sealed paper, thin books with shiny covers that have been passed down, passed around, and sold from one owner to the next.

Places like Claymont’s Between Books are overflowing with the stuff, shelves and racks begging for mercy, so that the nearby floor space has started shouldering the burden. Near the register, under a table display, sit deteriorated boxes filled with comics, sold cheap.

Years ago, when I would come to the store, those boxes were crisp and new, and the comics were a little cheaper. The boxes were in the same place back then.

In other stores, like the straightforwardly named Comic Book Shop on Marsh Road in Wilmington, it’s collectible toys that line much of the walls and aisles, figurines (never “dolls”) from movies, TV shows, and cartoons, many of which share some relationship with comic books, either as inspiration for them or source material from them.

And so it goes, always circling back to the comics, to the stories. Today’s comics, published as single-issue books or, to use an old-school term, “pamphlets,” are often collected into graphic novels, usually comprising four- or six-issue series. And graphic novels, also called trade paperbacks, might be the best literature you’ve never read.

CAPTAIN BLUE HEN COMICS fits into a small shopping strip near the East End Café in Newark, where it’s been for more than 25 years. On one side of the store, taking up several shelves, are books of Manga, a form of Japanese comics. On the other side of the store, at least temporarily, is a display of books by the novelist and comic writer Neil Gaiman, who’s responsible for The Sandman.

There are two interesting things about this image. One is that Manga, a best-seller at the store, is widely respected in Japan, to the point where members of government supposedly get yelled at for reading it during meetings, and where it’s not unusual for copies to be found unclaimed on train seats, ready for new readers.

The other interesting thing is that it takes novels—not merely comic books—to make a writer—Gaiman—look important. In the ’90s Gaiman won awards by the armful for his Sandman creations—including a World Fantasy Award in 1991, the first time a comic book received a literary honor. But his novels, like American Gods (2001) and Anansi Boys (2005), wound up on The New York Times best-seller list, and as far as contributions to literature are concerned, that’s what counts. Never mind that both American Gods and Anansi Boys incorporate themes—especially mythology—previously explored in The Sandman.

Joe Murray, who with his wife, Danielle, owns Captain Blue Hen, sums up both points this way: “In Japan, everybody reads comics. Here, comics are a unique art form, but they’re sort of the bastard stepchild of literature. In other parts of the world, it’s so much more prevalent and so much more accepted.”

We’re getting there. More novelists and mainstream writers are turning toward comics; among them: Lost co-creator and head scribe Damon Lindelof, who’s penned issues of Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk.

Michael Manley, a comic book illustrator and professor at the Delaware College of Art and Design who worked on Batman titles in the ’90s, says the sea change began years ago. “Before, you were considered an idiot if you read a comic book,” Manley says. “Baby boomers changed that. They’re the generation that didn’t grow up with the disdain for all the stuff we worship as pop culture.”

AS BUYERS GO, baby boomers might be in the minority. Twenty- and 30-year-olds still make up the best chunk of business for local comic book stores, with kids in their teens and pre-teens representing another major market. Yet there’s no denying that the bulk of today’s comics are geared toward an older, mature reader.

“It’s still superheroes, men vs. women—more action than things like politics,” says Tom Trettel, who owns The Comic Book Shop. “But the stories have to grab the current reader, who is, generally speaking, an adult. So it can’t be fluff. It has to have good writing and artwork. It has to have substance to it.”

And so the graphic novel becomes the preferred format. “People want something that’s less flimsy, something you can put on a bookshelf,” says Trettel, who wears his black hair combed back and sports a neatly trimmed goatee. “More like a library, not a kids’ room.”

“These are adults,” he says firmly. “They don’t want comics in a box.”

Recently, Trettel has seen a spike in graphic novel sales. “If you look back eight to 10 years ago, there were maybe 30 or 40 graphic novels in print. Ten years before that, there were hardly any,” he says. “But now, trade paperbacks are a very large part of our business. We have four or five shelves devoted just to them.”

Greg Schauer, who runs Between Books, says he’s noticed a heavy industry push in the last three years toward the graphic novel. “Even libraries carry them now,” he says.

Part of it is convenience. “People don’t want to wait,” Schauer says, his voice hushed, as though he’s been trained to talk like he’s always in a bookstore. “You spend about the same—$2.99 for 32 pages or $17.95 for a six-issue series—but the perception with graphic novels is that you don’t have to wait. You get the full satisfaction at once.”

Even artists like Manley partake. “You’re seeing a trend now where a lot of people buy the trade instead of buying the issues. I do it myself, because then you get a fat wad of story,” Manley says.

The other reasons for producing paperbacks, disappointingly, have more to do with economics than art. “The comic pays for the production of the graphic novel,” Joe Murray says. “If they skipped the comic format, they’d have to jack up the price of the novel. The idea is that when you’re doing comic books, you have to pay the artist, the writer, all the people who do production and layout. When it comes time to print the trade paperback, though, that’s all been covered by the cost of the comic book. So if a title is barely breaking even as a comic, it can make its money back on the graphic novel.”

BUT WHAT ABOUT CONTENT?  Surely there’s a value to graphic novels that goes beyond corner-cutting finances, something that speaks to art or literature, or both. Something that captures the adult reader, relates to him or her, doesn’t try to mask the ugliness of news or world events with archaic superheroes and clichéd life-trials.

Something like DMZ.

“Today’s titles aren’t escapist fiction so much as they’re a mirror held up to the world,” Murray says.

A recent issue of the noirish crime comic Fell, for example, was inspired by the report of a former Delaware nurse accused of injecting her son with fecal matter.

A mirror held up to the world.

In DMZ, the experiences are broader. DMZ imagines a U.S. civil war, with homegrown militias in Middle America having surged toward the coasts until they hit Manhattan, where a stand-off has turned the city into an urban battlefield. It follows the turbulent life of photojournalist Matty Roth, who lands an internship with a news agency covering the conflict there. During his first assignment, the helicopter Roth is in gets gunned down, and he’s left to fend for himself on the violent streets. DMZ’s inaugural trade paperback, On the Ground, collects the first five issues and was released last June. A second paperback, Body of a Journalist, is due in February.

Brian Wood is the writer and one of the illustrators behind DMZ (the other being the Italian artist Riccardo Burchielli). Wood, who according to his MySpace page is 34, has been a resident of New York since 1992. He is fascinated with the idea of journalists as gatekeepers, the way they become, as he puts it in an e-mail, “our eyes to things we don’t get to see ourselves.”

DMZ’s inspiration, Wood says, was born with the first Gulf War in 1991.

“I had just gotten cable TV, and you could watch the war the way you watch any TV show. And as a result of that access, it became a different sort of war, a war of perception.”

Wood admits to pulling ideas from newspaper headlines and mirroring events that have taken place in the latest Iraq war. Insurgent warfare, journalist kidnappings, and corrupt military contractors have all come up in storylines. But DMZ is about inner conflict. It’s the protagonist—Matty—who undergoes the greatest change, who leaves behind the biggest pieces of his old self.

“Matty’s personal growth, his shedding of ingrained biases and institutional learning, is constant, and may never end,” Wood writes in his e-mail.

This can happen to a character like Matty Roth, because he’s not a superhero. Superheroes rarely grow or change as people. They face crises all the time, but nothing is ever final, no situation ever unsolvable.

Like The Simpsons, superheroes don’t age, and most of the loose ends they’ve unraveled can be tied up as easily as the troubles in a half-hour of TV.Marvel’s Civil War, which started last summer, is the latest comic series to challenge those ideas. Borrowing from DC’s Watchmen (1986) and Kingdom Come (1996), it brings together characters from many of the Marvel books (Captain America, Iron Man, Wolverine, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man) as they confront impending legislation that demands all superheroes unmask and register with the government. Some, like Iron Man, oblige. Others, like Captain America, don’t.

Like DMZ, Civil War relies heavily on current events. The entire premise is a take on the Patriot Act: superheroes either give in to the demands of the government because they feel it’s in the best interest of the public, or they oppose them because it’s an invasion of privacy and a compromise of character. It’s also divisive. An early tagline says, “The lines have been drawn,” a statement that makes the book’s political undertones all too clear.

Michael Manley calls the series a stunt. Tom Trettel agrees, but adds, “It’s how well the stunt is done that matters.” Civil War, he thinks, is a well-done stunt.

Joe Murray is fixed on the series’ ties to reality. “Even in its publishing schedule it bears too much relationship to the real world,” Murray says. “It’s this great book that’s brought in more new readers than anything else in the last couple of years, and then suddenly, they start falling two or three months behind in the issues. Which means they can’t publish Amazing Spider-Man or Fantastic Four, because it ties into Civil War.”

“They’ve gotten themselves embroiled in this thing and tied up all these resources,” he goes on, “and now they realize they don’t have an ‘exit strategy.’” He raises his eyebrows to make sure I know what he means. “I think it’s ironic that they’re trying to do this story with all these real-world ties, and, ultimately, they’ve stumbled into the biggest real-world snafu there is right now.”

ON THE FIRST PAGE of the first issue of DMZ, a panel focuses on a scribbled piece of graffiti that claims, “Every day is 9/11!”

In the worlds of DMZ and Civil War, every day certainly is 9/11, or at the very least, a lot like it. But it didn’t take 9/11 to rejuvenate the energies of comic writers. Comic books have always been political, stemming back to X-Men characters like Professor X and Magneto, who, the local artist Allen Green notes, adopted the competing philosophies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively.

Meanwhile, titles like V for Vendetta, a series in the 1980s that was turned into a hit movie last year, have proven all too prophetic. V for Vendetta envisions a post-apocalyptic England governed by a fascist regime, with an anarchist hero, “V,” igniting a public revolution against it. The film updates some of the themes found in the comic, with fascism sounding more like neo-conservatism and footage of actual protests of the war in Iraq cut into one of the scenes. “People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments,” says a masked Hugo Weaving, who plays “V.” “Governments should be afraid of their people.” (Results of the recent U.S. election may have proven just that.)

V for Vendetta is built on the aftermath of nuclear war, a very real threat in the ’80s and still one today. Tom Trettel says this response, this reflecting of views and attitudes in society, isn’t unusual.

“The stories change with the times,” he says. “In the ’40s it was about World War II. In the ’50s it was very Leave It to Beaver. In the late ’60s and ’70s there was the whole changing of culture. Today it’s a lot more open-minded. There are stories about homosexual superheroes now.”

And so it goes, always back to the stories. They don’t end, you know. A good story can go on forever. It can last through death, through war. Through culture shifts and lifestyle changes. Through apocalypses both religious and man-made. A good story, like a good superhero, is permanent, inescapable.

Or, as Elliot S. Maggin writes in the introduction of Kingdom Come:

Here before you is a clash of good against evil, of course, but more than that. There are clashes of judgment, clashes among different interpretations of what is good and of what is justice, and clashes over who is to suffer the wages of the evil born of our best intentions…The heroes of fable and fact to whose virtue we all aspire…understand the value of human life in all its places and conditions…It is the palaces a people build, the heritage they inspire, the art they create that makes their civilization…Even super-heroes need to grow.