Let me preface by pointing out a couple of things that make me cringe whenever I see them attached to a review of comics.

First there is the penchant for clueing in the reader that this particular release is "not your father's comic books," which is to write off comics as entertainment for toddlers and half-wits.

Second, and this is the worst, is when a review is headlined "Comics Grows Up," again suggesting an arrested state of adolescence.

I don't think the reviewers who toss these cliches around understand how patronizing it is to the practitioners of one of the truly great contributions America has made to world culture.

Comics has reached a point in its relatively brief history that we can identify a pantheon (pun unintended but revealing) of masters of the art form, some of whom worked exclusively in the superhero and daily strip genres.

Pantheon Books has just reissued a deluxe hardcover of Art Spiegelman's "Breakdowns" (Pantheon, $27.50), a collection of youthful stories and experiments originally published in 1977.

In Spiegelman's early work, we can clearly identify the two major streams of what we've come to know as indie comics -- painfully revealing autobiographical stories and formally experimental anti-narratives.

Highlights from the former include "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," an angry examination of his emotional response to his mother's suicide and the first published incarnation of his most famous work, "Maus," in which he relates his father's experiences in Auschwitz.

Throughout "Breakdowns," Spiegelman's excitement regarding the possibilities of form and content in comics is a palpable thing. His book is a veritable textbook on modern cartooning, but unlike most textbooks, this is actually pretty thrilling stuff.

Surveying the two major year-end anthologies, "The Best American Comics 2008" (Houghton Mifflin, $22) and the second volume of Ivan Brunetti's "Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories" (Yale University Press, $28), the influence of Spiegelman's work is clear.

Editor Lynda Barry, a legendary cartoonist in her own right, skews her anthology toward works of straight narrative, such as Jaime Hernandez's "Gold Diggers of 1969," an excerpt from Jason Lutes' ambitious ongoing "Berlin" and Rick Geary's historical crime journalism, "The Saga of the Bloody Benders."

More formally experimental works from Chris Ware and Seth keep things from getting predictable.

Brunetti's series offers a much more expansive though no less personal take on modern cartooning. He writes in his introduction, "I have tried to represent a variety of approaches while retaining a sense of wholeness and inter connectedness among the stories."

Nowhere is this inter connectedness better illustrated than in the nine pages devoted to Harvey Kurtzman, writer/artist at the notorious E.C. Comics and creator of Mad Magazine.

Brunetti moves quite gracefully from a Bill Holman "Smokey Stover" Sunday strip of the 1940s to one of Kurtzman's early strips from later in the decade.

In only a couple of quick panels Kurtzman smoothly moves from clever pastiches of Li'l Abner, Dick Tracy and Blondie, the overall gag dependent upon visual juxtaposition rather than written joke.

This vision of what the form was capable of is next commented on by R. Crumb in his "Ode to Harvey Kurtzman," then we're presented with two strips about Kurtzman from Spiegelman, followed by Spiegelman's own "The Malpractice Suite," a comic so inventive in its use of the panel it must be seen.

In these few pages, Brunetti manages a history of comics from the gag strip to the autobiography of Crumb's work, to the mind-blowing Spiegelman strip. Very elegant.

I mentioned earlier that critics often condescend to, or willfully omit, the superhero and daily strip genres from their discussions of "serious" comics. It's refreshing to see that both Barry and Brunetti, cartoonists themselves, refuse to play that game.

In her moving introduction Barry discusses her own relationship with Bill Keane's "The Family Circus" and her intention of including Paul Pope's "Batman: Year 100" (unfortunately, DC Comics refused permission at the last minute).

Brunetti's inclusion of Fletcher Hanks' downright bizarre superhero, "Stardust, The Super Wizard" came as a very pleasant surprise.

To exclude such works in any true examination of comics is akin to denying that Dashiell Hammett had any role in developing the language of modern American crime literature.

Picasso loved "The Katzenjammer Kids" and T. S. Eliot couldn't get enough of "Krazy Kat." Surely those guys knew something critics are missing.