Comics
Comics is a medium that expresses ideas through images, usually combined with text, most often arranged as a sequence of panels. Speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia carry the dialogue, narration, and sound. Yet ask the theorists and historians who study this form for a single definition, and they cannot agree. Some insist on the marriage of image and text. Others point to sequence, or to the relationships between images. Still others reach for history itself, for mass reproduction or recurring characters. That disagreement is strange for something so familiar. How can a form read by generations of children, and dismissed for much of its life as lowbrow, resist definition so stubbornly? Why did three distant cultures invent it on separate paths, only to drift toward the same shape at the century's end? And how did a medium scolded as a threat to literacy end up studied with the tools of neuroscience? The answers begin with a Swiss schoolmaster, a cave in France, and a child in a yellow nightshirt.
Europeans trace their tradition to the francophone Swiss Rodolphe Topffer, whose comic strips date from as early as 1827, and who published theories behind the form. Americans long pointed instead to Richard F. Outcault's 1890s newspaper strip The Yellow Kid, though many have come to recognize Topffer's precedence. Wilhelm Busch shaped the American line directly. He first published Max and Moritz in 1865, and influenced Rudolph Dirks and his Katzenjammer Kids. Japan carried its own long history of satirical cartoons up to the World War II era. The ukiyo-e artist Hokusai popularized the term manga in the early 19th century. Industry, not just art, built the medium. In the 1930s, Harry "A" Chesler started a comics studio that at its height employed 40 artists working for 50 different publishers. After the war, modern Japanese comics flourished when Osamu Tezuka produced a prolific body of work. By the close of the 20th century, the three traditions converged toward book-length comics: the comic album in Europe, the tankobon in Japan, and the graphic novel in the English-speaking countries.
The Lascaux cave paintings in France hold images that some theorists read as chronological sequences, and they have been claimed as a prehistory of comics. The list of proposed ancestors runs long and surprising. It includes Egyptian hieroglyphs, Trajan's Column in Rome, and the 11th-century Norman Bayeux Tapestry. The 1370 bois Protat woodcut, the 15th-century Ars moriendi and block books, Michelangelo's The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and William Hogarth's 18th-century sequential engravings appear among them too. Scholars who reach this far back are not only chasing antiquity. They are testing what counts as comics at all, since each candidate stresses sequence, image, or narrative without the full combination. Western comic art probably originated in 17th-century Italy, a far more recent root than any cave wall.
The Glasgow Looking Glass appeared in 1825 as the earliest illustrated humour periodical in 19th-century Britain, though it was short-lived. The most popular was Punch, which gave the word cartoon to its humorous caricatures, and in 1843 used the term to describe them. The character Ally Sloper featured in the earliest serialized comic strip when he gained his own weekly magazine in 1884. American comics grew out of magazines such as Puck, Judge, and Life. Illustrated humour supplements in the New York World and later the New York American, especially Outcault's The Yellow Kid, led to newspaper comic strips. Between 1896 and 1901, cartoonists experimented with sequentiality, movement, and speech balloons. Gustave Verbeek built one of the strangest experiments. His series, The UpsideDowns of Old Man Muffaroo and Little Lady Lovekins, ran between 1903 and 1905, and could be read across six panels, then flipped over to keep reading. He made 64 such comics in total, and in 2012 Marcus Ivarsson remade a selection in the book In Uppaner med Lilla Lisen och Gamle Muppen. Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff established the shorter daily strip after its success in 1907. In Britain, the Amalgamated Press built a popular style of image sequences with text beneath, including Illustrated Chips and Comic Cuts.
Action Comics and its hero Superman succeeded in 1938, and marked the beginning of the Golden Age of Comic Books, when the superhero genre dominated. In the UK and the Commonwealth, the DC Thomson titles Dandy from 1937 and Beano from 1938 became humour favourites, 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, were read by generations of British children. After a sales peak in the early 1950s, the content of comic books, particularly crime and horror, drew scrutiny from parent groups and government agencies. Senate hearings followed, and led to the Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring body. The Code has been blamed for stunting the growth of American comics and holding the medium at low status for much of the century. Underground comix challenged both the Code and readers with adult, countercultural material in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That underground gave birth to the alternative comics movement of the 1980s, with its mature, often experimental work in non-superhero genres. The lowbrow reputation lingered, as the medium was seen as entertainment for children and illiterates.
Zig et Puce succeeded in 1925 and popularized speech balloons in European comics, after which Franco-Belgian comics began to dominate. The Adventures of Tintin, with its clear line style, was first serialized in newspaper supplements beginning in 1929, and became an icon of the tradition. Dedicated magazines followed Le Journal de Mickey, established in 1934, among them Spirou from 1938 and Tintin from 1946 to 1993, with full-colour comic albums as the main outlet. Commentators at the time dismissed the form, stating that none bear up to the slightest serious analysis, and calling comics the sabotage of all art and all literature. The 1960s reversed the verdict. The term bandes dessinees, meaning drawn strips, came into wide French use, and the phrase Ninth Art was coined as comics drew public and academic attention. Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo helped found the magazine Pilote in 1959, where their Asterix went on to become the best-selling French-language comics series. From 1960, the satirical Hara-Kiri defied censorship laws in the spirit that led to the May 1968 events. Frustrated Pilote cartoonists founded the adults-only L'Echo des savanes in 1972. Experimental work flourished, such as the science fiction of Moebius and others in Metal hurlant.
The Choju-jinbutsu-giga, a picture scroll of the 12th and 13th centuries, holds anthropomorphic characters that some trace as a root of Japanese comics. Later came 17th-century toba-e and kibyoshi picture books, the latter containing sequential images, movement lines, and sound effects. The Jiji Manga debuted in the Jiji Shinpo newspaper in 1900, the first use of the word manga in its modern sense, and in 1902 Rakuten Kitazawa began the first modern Japanese comic strip there. By the 1930s, comic strips were serialized in large-circulation monthly girls' and boys' magazines and collected into hardback volumes. After World War II, the modern era arrived, propelled by the serialized work of Osamu Tezuka and the comic strip Sazae-san. Stories were first serialized in magazines often hundreds of pages thick, then compiled in tankobon books. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, nearly a quarter of all printed material in Japan was comics, and translations sometimes equaled or surpassed domestic sales abroad. Korea developed a parallel form, manhwa, written with characters that, like the Chinese manhua, derive from those used to write manga. It emerged under Japanese influence during the occupation of Korea, then balanced its neighbours' styles with traditional Korean aesthetics. Modern manhwa gained global popularity partly through webtoons, digitally formatted comics designed for scrolling on mobile devices.
Will Eisner popularized the term graphic novel with his book A Contract with God in 1978, and described what he called sequential art as the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea. The term reached the wider public after the mid-1980s success of Maus, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns. Scott McCloud offered a strictly formal alternative, defining comics as juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer. R. C. Harvey countered that the essential characteristic of comics is the incorporation of verbal content, and saw McCloud's definition as wrongly excluding single-panel cartoons. Aaron Meskin viewed McCloud's theories as an artificial attempt to legitimize comics in art history. The scholarship grew in every tradition. Coulton Waugh attempted the first comprehensive American history with The Comics in 1947, and Seiki Hosokibara wrote the first overview of Japanese comics, Nihon Manga-Shi, in 1924. Frederik L. Schodt's Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics in 1983 spread the word manga outside Japan. In the mid-2000s, Neil Cohn began analyzing comics with tools from cognitive science, arguing that the brain comprehends them much as it does language and music. The Japan Society for Studies in Cartoon and Comics, established in 2001, now promotes the scholarship of a form that, for so long, no one could agree how to name.
Common questions
What is the definition of comics?
Comics is a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information, typically taking the form of a sequence of panels. There is no consensus among theorists and historians on a single definition, with some emphasizing the combination of images and text, some sequentiality, and others historical aspects such as mass reproduction or recurring characters.
Who is credited with the origins of European and American comics?
Europeans trace their tradition to the francophone Swiss Rodolphe Topffer, who produced comic strips as early as 1827, while Americans long pointed to Richard F. Outcault's 1890s newspaper strip The Yellow Kid. Many Americans have come to recognize Topffer's precedence.
When did the Golden Age of Comic Books begin?
The Golden Age of Comic Books began with the success in 1938 of Action Comics and its lead hero Superman, a period in which the superhero genre was prominent. The popularity of superhero comic books later declined in the years following World War II.
What is manga and where does Japanese comics history begin?
Manga is the Japanese term for comics, cartooning, and caricature, popularized by the ukiyo-e artist Hokusai in the early 19th century. Histories of manga trace roots as far back as the Choju-jinbutsu-giga picture scroll of the 12th and 13th centuries, with the modern era flourishing after World War II through cartoonists such as Osamu Tezuka.
What was the Comics Code Authority?
The Comics Code Authority was a self-censoring body established after Senate hearings that scrutinized the content of comic books, particularly crime and horror, following a sales peak in the early 1950s. The Code has been blamed for stunting the growth of American comics and maintaining the medium's low status for much of the century.
What is the difference between manhwa, manga, and manhua?
Manhwa refers to Korean comics and print cartoons, manga refers to Japanese comics, and manhua refers to Chinese comics. The Chinese term manhua and the Korean manhwa both derive from the Chinese characters with which the Japanese term manga is written, and manhwa emerged under the influence of Japanese manga during the Japanese occupation of Korea.
When did the term graphic novel become widely known?
Will Eisner popularized the term graphic novel with his book A Contract with God in 1978, and it became widely known to the public after the commercial success of Maus, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns in the mid-1980s. In the 21st century graphic novels became established in mainstream bookstores and libraries.