MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 67, Number 4, Winter 2021. Copyright © 2021 for the Purdue Research Foundation by Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. How We Read Comics Now: Literary Studies, Computational Criticism, and the Rise of the Graphic Novel Alexander Dunst In a 2014 conversation with W. J. T. Mitchell, Art Spiegelman recalled his motivations for creating graphic art that diverged from the comics mainstream, including his regular installments for the anthology Raw, which were eventually published as Maus. 1 He says: “In the 1970s I was reading Marshall McLuhan. He pointed out that when something is no longer a mass medium, it has to become art or it dies . . . I fgured it was necessary for comics to fnd their way into libraries, book stores, universities, and museums” (21). Spiegelman’s efforts contributed to the growth of artisan production in a business dominated by large publishers that saw itself confronted with a historical crisis of falling sales, self-censorship, and a lack of generic diversity. From the 1980s onward, artisan production went hand in hand with the elevation of the graphic artist to the status of auteur and the rise of so-called graphic novels. In the conversation with Mitchell, Spiegelman reacted succinctly to a question from an audience member, which began by stating that comics had no dominant format in the West: “Well, what