I've read comics most of my life. Some of my earliest reading matter consisted of Pogo and the original Mad comic books in their first paperback reprints. I remember how vivid and strange the first issues of "Fantastic Four" and "Spider Man" seemed when I was 9 years old. I haunted my local newsstand for the oddball, non-superhero comics that DC published in the early 1960s: "Sea Devils," "Cave Carson" and "Rip Hunter, Time Master."

In the late '80s, I helped revive Rip Hunter (guest starring Cave Carson) in the DC miniseries "Time Masters." I went on to write "The Hacker Files" for DC and help adapt the Wild Cards alternate universe stories for Marvel.

Now, I get the chance to host this ongoing discussion of comics for grown-ups. I've been reviewing graphic novels here at The N&O for several years, but the debut of this column gives me a chance to go back to basics and talk about definitions, standards of quality and issues of taste -- to have an origin story, if you will.

As far as definitions go, if you love hair-splitting, the gold standard in comics criticism is Scott McCloud's perennial "Understanding Comics" (Harper paperback, $22.95, 224 pages), first published in 1993. McCloud is an able cartoonist, has an easy sense of humor and gets good mileage from his decision to use the comics medium to define and describe comics themselves.

For a more relaxed overview that concentrates on reviews of specific works, you can't do better than a new book called "Reading Comics" by Douglas Wolk (Da Capo, $22.95, 352 pages). Wolk quotes McCloud extensively, but he remains more of a critic than a theoretician.

McCloud nitpicks and refines his definition of comics in the course of his first chapter, finally settling on: "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer." McCloud is deliberately inclusive so he can backdate the origins of comics to Mayan glyphs, France's Bayeux Tapestry, even to 3,000-year-old Egyptian tomb paintings. That lineage is important to McCloud, who is still fighting for the legitimacy of comics as an art form.

For those who don't need any more credentials than their own taste, a simpler definition will do. Mine is: "Sequential images, often including words, that tell a story." Note that, like McCloud's definition, it excludes single-panel gag strips like the odious "Family Circus." It also excludes works where you can take away the pictures and still make sense of the story. Harvey Pekar's "The Quitter," like most of his work, can't pass this test.

Another area of contention is what to call this medium. "Graphic novel" has become a code phrase for "comics, but not the kid stuff," but the word "novel" is often a misnomer. "A Contract with God," Will Eisner's 1978 claim to the first graphic novel, is actually a collection of short stories, as are most of the books by the Hernandez brothers. Much acclaimed work in the field is autobiography, from Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" to Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home." Some critics (like Eisner) use the term "sequential art," and some prefer the pretension of the French term "bandes desinees."

Neither Wolk nor McCloud has a problem with the word comics. People using software to do "typesetting" are not actually setting type, and most "comic" books aren't funny. Words often outgrow their origins. Rather than struggle to find new words to fool people into reading the stuff, better to invest our energies in pushing for better comics. Note that I'll be talking here about comics that appear in book form, rather than the monthly "pamphlets" (to use Wolk's term).

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.)