Good for Zadie Smith. She once used her Waterstones ‘An Author Recommends’ spot to highlight the works of Joe Stacco and David B with the tag ‘Graphic novels take so much time and work to make. The least we can do is read them’. Can’t really argue with that.

The Book Of Other People, which she’s edited, is a recent anthology of specially commissioned short stories from various bookish notables: Mr Eggars, Ms July, Ms Kennedy, Mr Toibin, Mr Litt, Mr Safran Foer. But she’s also included comic strip tales from Mr Ware and Mr Clowes, and a Posy Simmonds-illustrated piece by Mr Hornby.

I suspect many readers of White Teeth and more than a few literary critics who rate Ms Smith would never touch a comic book with a Booker-nominated bargepole. So I like to think her unabashed nod to comics helps to shake them up just that little bit. Perhaps it even confuses them. ‘A Whitbread Prize winner who likes comics? Does. Not. Compute.’

The only problem is, new anthologies of prose short stories also suffer from a similarly baffling across-the-board dismissal by the mainstream book buyers. It’s so strange how British readers in particular like their printed fiction to be in novel form only. Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader is either a long short story or a novella, depending on your taste in word counts, but what’s more important according to the publishing market is that it’s been packaged like a short novel. Include it in a collection, and it just wouldn’t sell so well. UK readers have this ‘thing’ about fiction anthologies, just as they do graphic novels.

I once heard a radio interview with Stephen King, where the next guest was the Booker winner DBC Pierre. They turned out to be fans of each other’s work, and it was lovely to hear these two authors from different corners of the bookshop meet and exchange compliments Romeo & Juliet-like, while those on both sides gnashed their teeth.

I understand WHY there are genres, why graphic novels aren’t filed alongside the prose fiction, why Terry Pratchett is filed away from Martin Amis. What aggrieves me is the assumption that readers are meant to stick to one thing or the other. A varied diet is healthier – literary novels can get into unimaginative and predictable ruts too. When they talk about ‘the death of the novel’, they really mean the dearth of the reader’s scope. One should go for the best of all possible worlds, as Mr Voltaire said. And indeed, Penguin have put out an edition of Candide with comic strips by Chris Ware on the cover.

It’s not the publishers or writers, it’s the UK reading market that’s the problem. Funny how bookworms can sometimes be more narrow-minded than TV or movie addicts. There can be prejudice among those who claim to eschew prejudice.

The very British hypocritical connection between liberal snobbery and fake open-mindedness never fails to astonish me. The more people boast about how free from intolerance they are, the more you realise how much they’ve deliberately shut out from their lives.

The whole point of being a writer is opening up minds and showing people new worlds, rather than keeping them in their comfort zones. Enlightenment as entertainment, and vice versa.

And so to Mike Russell on Persepolis. Mr Russell is a film journalist who transforms his interviews into comic strips. Not content with being an interviewer per se, he also manages to render the strip’s artistic style to fit the subject.

Here he is talking to director Richard Linklater about A Scanner Darkly, using that film’s unique Rotoscoping look (tracing over live action with a pen) to depict the interview in comic form.

For an interview with Jerry Seinfeld for Bee Movie, he gives the strip the same form of anecdotal, meandering, observational comedy feel typical of Seinfeld’s own trademark routines. I particularly love the detail of the officious PR lady with a clipboard, gently nudging him away from the ‘talent’, as if the journalist were nothing more than an autograph hunter.

Best of all is his conversation with Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis, the comic book about a life of growing up in Iran, which is now an animated movie. Getting Ms Satrapi’s own drawing style right for his interview is impressive enough (her black and white, faux-naif manner may seem simple, but it is disarmingly difficult to mimic accurately), but I’m most impressed by Mr Russell’s noting of her chain-smoking, and the boiling down of a long interview into a series of aphorisms and insights:

‘The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.’

‘Culture and instruction are really weapons of mass construction.’

‘I was brought up on the idea that American people were the most evil in the world.’

‘The second I have a friend in one country, that country cannot be my enemy’

And a credo after my own heart:

‘If we don’t consider people as individuals, we go to hell.’