NEW YORK CITY — Disclosure: I still have my comic book collection, books from the early 1970s for the most part, from what is referred to as the Silver Age of Comics, silver calling to mind the silver bullets that plagued the Werewolf By Night, calling to mind the Silver Surfer, that most cerebral and cosmic of the superheroes, calling to mind the Fantastic Four and the silver temples of their leader, Reed Richards (mine are silver, too, though my ability to stretch, as opposed to his, seems to be on the wane). My children marvel at my Marvel Comics and Classics Illustrated — now bagged and boarded in acid-free Mylar.

Full disclosure: you may well see, somewhere in this essay, a photo of attendees at the 2012 Comic Con in New York. I was there, with my family, and was in a kind of makeshift getup as the Shadow, that 1930s pulp hero — “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men…” — who was the inspiration for Batman.

Deep disclosure: the brief bio that closes my writing in Antiques and The Arts Weekly alludes to the plays, screenplays and stories I write. It doesn’t mention the graphic novel I’ve been composing for the past three years.

So I come at “Superheroes in Gotham,” the exhibition of comic book New York… Gotham City… Metropolis… at the New-York Historical Society, with little of the art historian’s scholarly detachment. I’m more of a celebrant and aspirant, which doesn’t mean I don’t think deeply about sequential art and its place in contemporary culture. “‘Nuff said,” as the letters to and from the creators and editors used to end at the back of Silver Age Marvel comics like Killraven and Kull.

Sequential art dominates modern visual culture across the globe. A bold statement? Consider this. In film, and increasingly in television, superheroes, the original creatures of sequential art — the comic strip, comic book, graphic novel — not only conquer, but proliferate. In open-ended sequels and prequels, in standalone movies and spin-offs, larger-than-life heroes make and keep the world safe — and set box office records. Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, these are the real Avengers. DC tastes the rare air they breathe, while Dark Horse, Valiant, IDW, Fantagraphics, First Second and other publishers work the edges and depths of pulp, politics, history and the vicissitudes of growing up and growing old into the form. Critics and scholars devote careers to the meaning and function of sequential art.

At first, the daily comic strip and monthly comic book were disposable diversions consumed by kids and adults in idle moments. Andrew Herman’s Bowery Restaurant, 1940, bears this out. This wonderful black and white photograph is a study in escapism. The smile on the boy’s face as he delves into this month’s Champion Comics, in contrast to the squalor around him, speaks volumes as it takes him away from the Depression and grinding urban poverty.

Later, in the 1950s, after the rise of horror titles, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham wrote the book Seduction of the Innocent, warning that comic books were degenerate and were liable to inspire children to violence. Congress held hearings and publishers created a code to police themselves. But comics that pushed the bounds of “good taste” merely went underground.

In recent years, the humble comic book has reincarnated, like some hero out of Marvel’s Thor, ascending to the Asgard of high art and culture as the graphic novel. Elsewhere, anime in Japan, martial arts films, Bollywood musicals, all these have strong affinities with sequential art. The ground rules? Good defeats evil. Spectacle is the aesthetic. Protagonists possess every imaginable sort of extraordinary power. Villains are interesting, but their egos are their own undoing.

Sequential art permeates our own lives. Consider Facebook and other social media platforms. What is Facebook, after all, but a curated sequence of words and images that present us, not as we are, but as we want to be seen and thought of? Snip the loops that are our real lives, stretch them out, snip out any unmediated boredom, dullness, despair and anger. What are the themes of the sequences that remain? Teamwork among family and friends, triumph over adversity, extraordinary, profound and inspirational moments. We are all superheroes on our Facebook Walls (wasn’t it Bertolt Brecht who said, “Make your life your work of art?” But I bet it wasn’t Facebook he was imagining when he said it).

Graphic novels, the exceptions to these rules, rise to the level of art precisely because they don’t shy away from the loop, restoring the darkness that contends with light in the core of our being and in our everyday lives. Richard McGuire’s masterful Here, for example, spans hundreds of thousands of years of human and natural experience from the vantage of the corner of a single room in a house.

Sequential art is also business. Big business. In 2011, a mint copy of Action Comics #1, published in 1938 and featuring the debut of Superman, brought $2.16 million at auction. Original comic book art, especially cover art, is widely collected and brings hefty sums. For us mere mortals, a walk down the Artists’ Alleys at any of the many Cons will allow the faithful to meet artists, purchase sketches and have our favorite issues signed.

As we have done with film, we now revere certain names in the comic arts: Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Frank Frazetta, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Bob Kane. These are the auteurs of the form.

But a look at the original comic art in the “Superheroes in Gotham” exhibition tells another story, an origin story, if you will. Look at the 1941 Wonder Woman drawing, the ink for the first issue of Iron Man in 1968 or the 1966 storyboard conception, Submarine with the Joker. Look at the marks, editors’ marks, notes on color and placement, hand lettering, titles. Far from the brainchildren of auteurs, comic books — like films, when you really think about them — are the products of and industrial division of labor, of collaboration, of workers: artists, writers and editors (not to speak of printers) who specialize in story, penciling, inking, coloring, lettering, manufacturing new issues every month, balancing readers’ expectations while trying to keep the material fresh.

In my day job, I represent one of the old-time illustrators (he recently revealed, offhand, that he did several issues of Sub-Mariner for Marvel in the late 1950s) who made the leap to easel painting decades ago. To this day, he refers to his paintings as “jobs,” and is always open to the kinds of ideas and revisions that filled his days in a world of paperbacks, magazines and comics.

In an art form as popular, in the sense of “of the people,” and art form as close to daily life as the comic book, the zeitgeist is bound to seep in. A big reason for the continued popularity of superheroes is that each generation projects its preoccupations onto them and they seem to evolve to suit their times, becoming societal bellwethers and barometers. Batman, for example, begins in the 1940s as a gritty, urban Lone Ranger, mysterious but ultimately ethical, a helpmeet for law and order. By the 1960s, especially in the television show, Batman is a camp, square character in a psychedelic world, spouting moral bromides between onscreen projections of “Oof,” “Pow,” and “Zowie.” Yet this Batman was, and is, cherished and beloved, and “Superheroes” scores quite a coup with the Batmobile from the series.

Then, in the late 1980s, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight takes the stage, moves through the three most recent films and into the prequel television series Gotham, telling morality tales of hard choices necessitated by the harsh cynicism of the world; their dystopic dis-ease reflects American and global un-ease.

In “Superheroes in Gotham,” Wonder Woman, brought to life and marshaled in the propaganda war in World War II — as Captain America, Superman, the Sub-Mariner and so many others were — splashes across the cover of Ms. Magazine in 1972 as a feminist entry into the male-dominated race for president. Artist Philip Pearlstein’s bulging, perhaps clumsy Superman seems to crush Metropolis rather than save it and the hip-hop hero in DMC rides the roof of a subway car, avenging the poor, the downtrodden, the forgotten.

In the history of the comic book, New York is the city, the stage on which good battles evil, whatever name it hides behind. The architecture on the pages is New York’s writ large, Art Deco Modernism morphing into futuristic visions, all of it slashed with sharp triangles of shadow.

My son, walking past the Chrysler Building after a trip to Midtown Comics, articulated a coded visual hierarchy in comic books that determines which superheroes can brood on which of the building’s Art Deco eagles that jut out from the corners. Only the big guys, he says — Spider-Man, Batman, guys like that — can sit on the highest eagles. Lesser heroes, like Nightwing (who is, I think, Batman’s Robin all grown up and on his own), have to sit on the lower carvings. It’s a master’s thesis in embryo. It’s funny and smart. I have to post that on my Facebook Wall. But I need a picture of a superhero brooding on one of the Chrysler Building’s eagles to post with it. I’ll Google it.

“Superheroes in Gotham” runs until February 21 at the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library, 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street). For information, 212-873-3400 or www.nyhistory.org.