R6s Comic
Twyla Plack
Comics are a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically takes the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia can indicate dialogue, narration, sound effects, or other information. There is no consensus among theorists and historians on a definition of comics; some emphasize the combination of images and text, some sequentiality or other image relations, and others historical aspects such as mass reproduction or the use of recurring characters. Cartooning and other forms of illustration are the most common means of image-making in comics. Photo comics is a form that uses photographic images. Common forms include comic strips, editorial and gag cartoons, and comic books. Since the late 20th century, bound volumes such as graphic novels, comic albums, and tankōbon have become increasingly common, along with webcomics as well as scientific/medical comics.[1]
The European, American, and Japanese comics traditions have followed different paths.[7] Europeans have seen their tradition as beginning with the Swiss Rodolphe Tpffer from as early as 1827 and Americans have seen the origin of theirs in Richard F. Outcault's 1890s newspaper strip The Yellow Kid, though many Americans have come to recognize Tpffer's precedence. Wilhelm Busch directly influenced Rudolph Dirks and his Katzenjammer Kids.[8][9][10][11][12] Japan has a long history of satirical cartoons and comics leading up to the World War II era. The ukiyo-e artist Hokusai popularized the Japanese term for comics and cartooning, manga, in the early 19th century.[13] In the 1930s Harry "A" Chesler started a comics studio, which eventually at its height employed 40 artists working for 50 different publishers who helped make the comics medium flourish in "the Golden Age of Comics" after World War II.[14] In the post-war era modern Japanese comics began to flourish when Osamu Tezuka produced a prolific body of work.[15] Towards the close of the 20th century, these three traditions converged in a trend towards book-length comics: the comic album in Europe, the tankōbon[a] in Japan, and the graphic novel in the English-speaking countries.[7]
Outside of these genealogies, comics theorists and historians have seen precedents for comics in the Lascaux cave paintings[16] in France (some of which appear to be chronological sequences of images), Egyptian hieroglyphs, Trajan's Column in Rome,[17] the 11th-century Norman Bayeux Tapestry,[18] the 1370 bois Protat woodcut, the 15th-century Ars moriendi and block books, Michelangelo's The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel,[17] and William Hogarth's 18th-century sequential engravings,[19] amongst others.[17][b]
Illustrated humour periodicals were popular in 19th-century Britain, the earliest of which was the short-lived The Glasgow Looking Glass in 1825.[21] The most popular was Punch,[22] which popularized the term cartoon for its humorous caricatures.[23] On occasion the cartoons in these magazines appeared in sequences;[22] the character Ally Sloper featured in the earliest serialized comic strip when the character began to feature in its own weekly magazine in 1884.[24]
Shorter, black-and-white daily strips began to appear early in the 20th century, and became established in newspapers after the success in 1907 of Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff.[27] In Britain, the Amalgamated Press established a popular style of a sequence of images with text beneath them, including Illustrated Chips and Comic Cuts.[28] Humour strips predominated at first, and in the 1920s and 1930s strips with continuing stories in genres such as adventure and drama also became popular.[27]
Thin periodicals called comic books appeared in the 1930s, at first reprinting newspaper comic strips; by the end of the decade, original content began to dominate.[29] The success in 1938 of Action Comics and its lead hero Superman marked the beginning of the Golden Age of Comic Books, in which the superhero genre was prominent.[30] In the UK and the Commonwealth, the DC Thomson-created Dandy (1937) and Beano (1938) became successful humor-based titles, with a combined circulation of over 2 million copies by the 1950s. Their characters, including "Dennis the Menace", "Desperate Dan" and "The Bash Street Kids" have been read by generations of British children.[31] The comics originally experimented with superheroes and action stories before settling on humorous strips featuring a mix of the Amalgamated Press and US comic book styles.[32]
The popularity of superhero comic books declined in the years following World War II,[33] while comic book sales continued to increase as other genres proliferated, such as romance, westerns, crime, horror, and humour.[34] Following a sales peak in the early 1950s, the content of comic books (particularly crime and horror) was subjected to scrutiny from parent groups and government agencies, which culminated in Senate hearings that led to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority self-censoring body.[35] The Code has been blamed for stunting the growth of American comics and maintaining its low status in American society for much of the remainder of the century.[36] Superheroes re-established themselves as the most prominent comic book genre by the early 1960s.[37] Underground comix challenged the Code and readers with adult, countercultural content in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[38] The underground gave birth to the alternative comics movement in the 1980s and its mature, often experimental content in non-superhero genres.[39]
Comics in the US has had a lowbrow reputation stemming from its roots in mass culture; cultural elites sometimes saw popular culture as threatening culture and society. In the latter half of the 20th century, popular culture won greater acceptance, and the lines between high and low culture began to blur. Comics nevertheless continued to be stigmatized, as the medium was seen as entertainment for children and illiterates.[40]
The francophone Swiss Rodolphe Tpffer produced comic strips beginning in 1827,[17] and published theories behind the form.[46] Wilhelm Busch first published his Max and Moritz in 1865.[47] Cartoons appeared widely in newspapers and magazines from the 19th century.[48] The success of Zig et Puce in 1925 popularized the use of speech balloons in European comics, after which Franco-Belgian comics began to dominate.[49] The Adventures of Tintin, with its signature clear line style,[50] was first serialized in newspaper comics supplements beginning in 1929,[51] and became an icon of Franco-Belgian comics.[52]
In the 1960s, the term bandes dessines ("drawn strips") came into wide use in French to denote the medium.[58] Cartoonists began creating comics for mature audiences,[59] and the term "Ninth Art"[e] was coined, as comics began to attract public and academic attention as an artform.[60] A group including Ren Goscinny and Albert Uderzo founded the magazine Pilote in 1959 to give artists greater freedom over their work. Goscinny and Uderzo's The Adventures of Asterix appeared in it[61] and went on to become the best-selling French-language comics series.[62] From 1960, the satirical and taboo-breaking Hara-Kiri defied censorship laws in the countercultural spirit that led to the May 1968 events.[63]
Frustration with censorship and editorial interference led to a group of Pilote cartoonists to found the adults-only L'cho des savanes in 1972. Adult-oriented and experimental comics flourished in the 1970s, such as in the experimental science fiction of Mœbius and others in Mtal hurlant, even mainstream publishers took to publishing prestige-format adult comics.[64]
From the 1980s, mainstream sensibilities were reasserted and serialization became less common as the number of comics magazines decreased and many comics began to be published directly as albums.[65] Smaller publishers such as L'Association[66] that published longer works[67] in non-traditional formats[68] by auteur-istic creators also became common. Since the 1990s, mergers resulted in fewer large publishers, while smaller publishers proliferated. Sales overall continued to grow despite the trend towards a shrinking print market.[69]
Comic strips are generally short, multipanel comics that have, since the early 20th century, most commonly appeared in newspapers. In the US, daily strips have normally occupied a single tier, while Sunday strips have been given multiple tiers. Since the early 20th century, daily newspaper comic strips have typically been printed in black-and-white and Sunday comics have usually been printed in colour and have often occupied a full newspaper page.[85]
Gag and editorial cartoons usually consist of a single panel, often incorporating a caption or speech balloon. Definitions of comics which emphasize sequence usually exclude gag, editorial, and other single-panel cartoons; they can be included in definitions that emphasize the combination of word and image.[93] Gag cartoons first began to proliferate in broadsheets published in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the term "cartoon"[h] was first used to describe them in 1843 in the British humour magazine Punch.[23]
Webcomics are comics that are available on the internet, first being published the 1980s. They are able to potentially reach large audiences, and new readers can often access archives of previous installments.[94] Webcomics can make use of an infinite canvas, meaning they are not constrained by the size or dimensions of a printed comics page.[95]
Some consider storyboards[96] and wordless novels to be comics.[97] Film studios, especially in animation, often use sequences of images as guides for film sequences. These storyboards are not intended as an end product and are rarely seen by the public.[96] Wordless novels are books which use sequences of captionless images to deliver a narrative.[98]