Art & Creativity Quote by Michael Chabon

Comic books weren t the destination for Chabon; they were the contraband route. The line is a quiet rebuke to the way culture polices its borders, treating certain forms as juvenile packaging and others as legitimate literature. Chabon, a novelist who has spent real prestige on pulp-adjacent obsessions, frames comics not as a genre to be defended but as a toolset: panel-to-panel rhythm, visual compression, cliffhanger propulsion, mythic archetypes delivered with street-level speed. Calling them "just the means" sounds modest, even dismissive, but the subtext is insurgent. If the same story can travel through inked frames, then the hierarchy that says it must arrive as a "proper" novel starts to look like pure gatekeeping.

Context matters: Chabon came of age when comics were still widely written off as disposable, before the current era where graphic novels sit comfortably on syllabi and streaming services strip-mine them for IP. His work (and advocacy) helped build that bridge, but he refuses to pretend the bridge is the point. Story remains the sovereign value, medium the vehicle. That stance also sidesteps the fetishization of format that can creep into both fandom and literary culture: comics aren t sacred objects, nor are they guilty pleasures. They re a language.

The sentence works because it s both self-justifying and quietly confrontational: it invites the mainstream reader in on familiar terms (story first), then makes them complicit in admitting the delivery system never should have disqualified the message.