Chris Ware and Charles Burns will be appearing at the Brattle Theatre on Monday, October 24 at 6 p.m. Tickets are available for $3 from the Harvard Book Store.

Comic books are for losers. The consumption of comic books should only be done ironically, like hoarding Pez dispensers. While watching movies is accepted, reading about superheroes is hopelessly square. The self-important Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” comes to mind.

And then there are graphic novels.

In the last few years, graphic novels have become the acceptably trendy cousin of comic books. The film version of Daniel Clowes’ nastily funny suburban epic “Ghost World” charmed the beautiful people and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2000. Graphic novels have gradually eked out their own section in every Barnes and Noble, a corner that is filled to bursting with intrigued readers of every age.

Last year, so-hip-it-hurts literary journal “McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern” (with Dave Eggers as editor) published an “all-comics issue” featuring graphic novel artists. The contents included contributors as diverse as bawdy comic legend R. Crumb, the understated Canadian Seth, and existentialist horror artists Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine. Chris Ware, fresh from the impressive critical success with “Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth,” served as editor.

Burns, who will be appearing this Monday at the Brattle Theatre along with Ware, has finally completed his magnum opus, “Black Hole,” serialized over a decade and now available in a single tome. “Black Hole” is not for the faint of heart. Like Clowes and Crumb, Burns explores the mediocrity of the suburbs and the disappointment and isolation of the teenaged years.

But whereas Clowes stops at depicting all the people you hate, Burns takes it one step farther, adding monsters and phantasmagoric twists. Burns’ work is best encapsulated in his hilariously disturbing “McSweeney’s” issue title page cover: A silver screen starlet embraces a creature covered in sores while a nuclear mushroom cloud explodes in the background. His work borrows heavily from the pulpy comics of the 1950s but combines the familiar elements with overwhelmingly vivid ink drawings.

“Black Hole” is Burns’ most chilling work to date. This is no small achievement for a man who produced “Skin Deep: Tales of Doomed Romance,” the collection which included “Dog Days,” the tale of a teenaged boy who receives a canine heart transplant. Another Burns favorite is “Big Baby,” an uglier version of “Desperate Housewives” with more violence, told from the point of view of a strange child.

Burns’ latest follows the fates of a group of teenagers in mid-seventies Seattle as they fall victim to a mysterious sexually transmitted disease known as “the Bug.” The origins of the disease are never revealed, but that omission is unimportant amidst the grotesque developments and explicit violence presented in perfect detail. As Burns has remarked, “It was extremely fucking labor-intensive.”

While comparisons to AIDS are obvious, the disease is a metaphor for the worst parts of adolescence. Those who are afflicted show symptoms of varying degrees, which range from total disfigurement, including the growth of a second mouth, to growing a short—even adorable—tail.

In the hands of a less skilled artist, “Black Hole”’s nightmarish vision would have more closely resembled those in George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” The storytelling in “Black Hole” is not the focus, a characteristic which would be a weakness were it not for the immersive atmosphere.

Burns does, however, understand the campiness of the ’50s-horror atmosphere. The front cover of the book has yearbook photos of healthy teenagers, and the back cover shows them unimaginably deformed: sores, horns, goiter-like growths and molting skin. Burns also includes his own transformation, but by something far worse than the bug: age.

Ware, still fresh from his success with “Jimmy Corrigan,” is a foil to Burns. Ware has just released a collection of his serial “ACME Novelty Library,” unknown to most of us but beloved by those in the know.

The beautifully decorated volume, designed to look like a vintage ledger complete with an intricate gold patterned cover, is Ware’s most upbeat work to date. This will be a relief to those who were all certain of dying alone after reading “Jimmy Corrigan,” the story of a lonely office drone with an abusive and fragmented family. While The New Yorker praised that “Jimmy Corrigan” was “viciously depressing” in the best sense of art, a friend of mine put it best: “Reading ‘Jimmy Corrigan’ made me want to lock myself in and gain 30 pounds.”

Ware’s spare artistic style, on the other hand, echoes the newspaper’s Sunday funnies. The simplicity of boldly outlined and brightly inked drawings emphasizes the characters’ messy lives.

Schematic diagrams in “Jimmy Corrigan” present ideas that might otherwise be too complex to appear in graphic form, such as characters’ internal monologues or a tangled family tree. Entire panels are often devoid of dialogue, an unusual technique that reflects the isolation of urban life.

The new “ACME Novelty Library” volume is a departure from what attracted so many readers to “Jimmy Corrigan.” “ACME” contains despicably wonderful losers such as Rusty Brown, a more realistic and thus more disgusting version of Comic Book Guy; the hapless future citizen in “Tales of Tomorrow;” Chalky White, the good-hearted Midwestern father willfully blinded to his teenaged daughter’s unfocused rage; and Quimby the Mouse, the obscene and ill-tempered doppleganger of the 1920s Mickey Mouse.

Unlike Ware’s last book “Quimby the Mouse,” this edition is fully colored, complete with paper cut-out instructions for building a bookcase for the Novelty Library, a flipbook, and even two glow-in-the-dark pages with Art Deco-style zodiac constellations.

Ware perfectly captures the improve-your-life sentiments of all material consumption, the most painful being the “ACME Seed Company” offer of seeds to distract the consumer from the horrific mistake of having had children. (Ware himself only recently had a child.) My personal favorite is the “Happy Family Appliqués,” window-coverings designed to conceal dysfunctional or crime-ridden homes from the outside world.

Graphic novels have a long way to go before reaching the bestseller lists. Yet Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” series about the Holocaust, for instance, won a Pulitzer Prize. It is unlikely that the lack of widespread acceptance of graphic novels is due to inferior writing—indeed, it seems unlikely that readers of ludicrously popular “The Da Vinci Code” were drawn in by its prose or character development.

Rather, writers like Burns and Ware are prime examples of the major weakness of graphic novels: they are emotionally difficult and even hateful to readers. They demand you to be engaged, they demand you to look and absorb every sweat-inducing detail, and worst of all, they mock happy endings.

Sometimes they are a little too close to home.