The New Yorker College Tour stop at the University of Iowa came to a close Wednesday night with an interesting event focused on graphic novels. It was the lone part of the evening program, as the session with New Yorker Cartoon Editor Robert Mankoff was cancelled.

The graphic novel session featured a conversation with cartoonists Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware, moderated by Owen Phillips, illustration editor at the New Yorker. As with Monday's conversation featuring Lorrie Moore and Vijay Seshadri, the presence of two artists on stage greatly enhanced the event. Ware, in particular, is clearly not comfortable talking in front of people, but he seemed more at ease commenting on Tomine's work in a way that allowed him to talk about his own as well.

Once they had warmed up by showing examples of their work -- Ware from his Acme Novelty Library/Jimmy Corrigan books as well as the new "Building Stories" feature for the New York Times Magazine's new "Funny Pages" section; Tomine from his Optic Nerve and subsequent longer-form collections -- the two had a lively conversation about influences, the importance of place in their work and the limitations and liberties of the standard strip format.

The magazine provided it's own strange context for the event, having just published an interesting yet somewhat defeatist look at graphic novels from art critic Peter Schjeldahl. "A certain theoretical frenzy about comics today is understandable, as it has been in other art forms in periods of their rapid development -- think of the debates about painting that roiled Renaissance Italy," he writes. "But such intellectual arousal rarely precedes creative glory. On the contrary, it commonly indicates that an artistic breakthrough, having been made and recognized, is over, and that a process of increasingly strained emulation and diminishing returns has set in."

An odd sentiment at a time when graphic novels are breaking through at a rate that would seem to indicate a broadening and evolution of the genre, not its slow demise. Ware and Tomine seemed excited about the possibilities of their own future work, as well as that of others, and that excitement seems fitting and well-placed. Each also is taking a look back. Tomine has shepherded the work of Japanese artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi back into print, while Ware edited a new collection of Gasoline Alley strips, Walt and Skeezix.

Ware said he sees comics as "a living language," and that the evolution of comics involves becoming "an ever more accurate representation of what it is to be alive." Rather than assume the best has come and gone it would seem more apt, given the mix of historical awareness and the desire to find new ways to tell stories within that context that is shared by these and other artists, to think that the best is yet to come.