The McKean covers use sculpture, installations, full-scaled paintings, calligraphy, photography and computer graphics to create an image for The Sandman every month that proclaimed its sophistication and status as art and that refused to stay within the traditional confines of the comic book industry. True, groundbreaking art has a way of making people nervous, of unsettling them. One need only look to Manet's painting Olympia or to Rodin's sculpture Torso and the way these now acknowledged masterpieces were derided when they were first produced to see the truth of this claim. It is often the fear of the new that leads us to try to reject the new or the unknown. In the same way that we now think of Socrates' call to banish art from society as unfounded and unthinkable, perhaps we will come, in time, to realise that comic books are not as dangerous as some would think.
Comics are essentially only a medium, much like painting, film or prose is.
It is not the medium that makes any masterpiece in each of these fields worthy of being called art, but the work itself. Nor can a medium be in itself harmful or good. It is, after all, the content that the medium carries that makes the difference. Works Cited Bender, Hy. The Sandman Companion.