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Wolk's book should help with the quest for quality. Though he gets off to a slow and chatty start, he gradually and steadily wins points for his erudition, taste and willingness to judge art on its own terms. It doesn't hurt that his "favorite comic book ever" is also mine: Grant Morrison's seven-volume epic "The Invisibles." More telling is his chapter on Chris Ware, an artist whose work leaves me cold. Wolk is a big fan of Ware's, yet I agree with virtually everything he has to say about Ware's oeuvre: the "compressed frostiness" of its art, and the "emotional brutality" of the story. Wolk's evisceration of DC's recent "Identity Crisis" miniseries -- which he calls "the most egregiously terrible comic book of all time" -- is spot on.

One of Wolk's great strengths is that he is as comfortable with mainstream commercial comics (including superheroes) as he is with "art comics" of the sort published by Pantheon and Fantagraphics (featuring the likes of Spiegelman, Ware and underground legend R. Crumb). The structure of his book reflects the breadth of his taste. The first third is devoted to theory and background, and the remaining critical essays cover everything from Chester Brown's idiosyncratic visions to Steve Ditko's work on "The Amazing Spider-Man."

McCloud's book offers history lessons on both fine art and comics, rigorous analysis of how comics shorthand functions, and a clever pyramid-shaped graph where you can plot the iconic aspects of art on one axis and levels of abstraction on another. All these categories are useful for critics and helpful for people who don't "get" comics. Those who have already accepted the validity of comics as a medium may want to skip McCloud and go straight to Wolk, who can quote Emmanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin with real understanding on one page and wax ecstatic over the body language in "Daredevil" on the next.

(Raleigh resident Lewis Shiner's five novels include "Glimpses" and "Say Goodbye." He created and wrote "The Hacker Files" for DC Comics and wrote "Wild Cards" for Marvel Comics.)

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