- What is the exact definition of a comic?
- Are cartoons classified as comics?
- If not, then are they their own category?
- If so, are they in a special group of comics?
Comic Information
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By AdamG
Posted on: Jan 5th 2008 at 2:04 PM |
Replies: 1
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Posted by: Don Markstein
Posted on: 2008-01-06 at 05:14:34 AM
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Good questions! I especially like #1, which is impossibly hard to answer. I've seen so many definitions, from so many knowledgeable people, that contradict one another in so many ways, that all I can do is offer my own thoughts and hope they make sense.
The first thing to do is acknowledge that despite the history of the word, comics has (note: plural form notwithstanding, it's proper, tho not, I think, mandatory. to use "comics" as a singular) nothing necessarily to do with being funny. The best stories in all media have an element of humor, but that's not part of the definition of the word. Over the past century-plus, it's evolved far beyond that.
Comics basically means telling stories with pictures. They don't have to be pictures with words, tho that's part of a lot of definitions I've seen. There have been too many pantomime comics to make words a part of the basic definition -- one of our most enduring graphic novels is Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel Told Without Words, which has been in print more often than out, I believe, since it was first published in 1930.
But I'm not talking about illustrated prose, even if it's very heavily illustrated. Where it crosses the line into comics is where the pictures start carrying part of the narrative load. That is, if part of the story is in the pictures but not in the words, then it's comics.
A couple of decades ago, DC Comics published a series titled Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, to great critical acclaim. But since the entire story was carried in the words, and all the pictures did was make it pretty, I didn't call it comics despite the outward form of the magazine.
At roughly the same time, Renegade Press published what it billed as an "adaptation" of the Sherlock Holmes stories into comics, which consisted of the entire text of the stories (all in capital letters), with lots of pictures added. Again -- nice, but not comics.
Of course, this only pushes the question back a step. What, exactly, is a story? As an old newspaperman (my first professional writing, back in the late 1960s, consisted of feature stories -- that is, "soft" news -- for the Sunday edition of The New Orleans Times-Picayune), I understand "story" to mean more than just fiction. But let's not get into that. Suffice it to say, there are perfectly legitimate comics that take non-fiction as their subject matter.
As for the other three questions -- I'm having problems with the terms "classified", "category" and "special group", which are too rigid in some ways and too slippery in others. For example, far from cartoons being classified as comics, comics are usually (but depending on exactly how you're using the word, not always) a subset of cartoons -- another word with a complex history, which doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to all speakers or all listeners.
Maybe I should write a book on the subject. But who would buy it? For now, I'll say it's possible, depending on the skill of the artist, to get a fairly sophisticated story across in a single panel; so yes, cartoons (if, as I assume, you're talking about the single-panel kind) can be comics.
I think these questions are too big for one person to answer, even for purposes if defining the scope of my own site. Does anyone want to dispute anything here, or add more thoughts?
Quack, Don
The first thing to do is acknowledge that despite the history of the word, comics has (note: plural form notwithstanding, it's proper, tho not, I think, mandatory. to use "comics" as a singular) nothing necessarily to do with being funny. The best stories in all media have an element of humor, but that's not part of the definition of the word. Over the past century-plus, it's evolved far beyond that.
Comics basically means telling stories with pictures. They don't have to be pictures with words, tho that's part of a lot of definitions I've seen. There have been too many pantomime comics to make words a part of the basic definition -- one of our most enduring graphic novels is Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel Told Without Words, which has been in print more often than out, I believe, since it was first published in 1930.
But I'm not talking about illustrated prose, even if it's very heavily illustrated. Where it crosses the line into comics is where the pictures start carrying part of the narrative load. That is, if part of the story is in the pictures but not in the words, then it's comics.
A couple of decades ago, DC Comics published a series titled Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, to great critical acclaim. But since the entire story was carried in the words, and all the pictures did was make it pretty, I didn't call it comics despite the outward form of the magazine.
At roughly the same time, Renegade Press published what it billed as an "adaptation" of the Sherlock Holmes stories into comics, which consisted of the entire text of the stories (all in capital letters), with lots of pictures added. Again -- nice, but not comics.
Of course, this only pushes the question back a step. What, exactly, is a story? As an old newspaperman (my first professional writing, back in the late 1960s, consisted of feature stories -- that is, "soft" news -- for the Sunday edition of The New Orleans Times-Picayune), I understand "story" to mean more than just fiction. But let's not get into that. Suffice it to say, there are perfectly legitimate comics that take non-fiction as their subject matter.
As for the other three questions -- I'm having problems with the terms "classified", "category" and "special group", which are too rigid in some ways and too slippery in others. For example, far from cartoons being classified as comics, comics are usually (but depending on exactly how you're using the word, not always) a subset of cartoons -- another word with a complex history, which doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to all speakers or all listeners.
Maybe I should write a book on the subject. But who would buy it? For now, I'll say it's possible, depending on the skill of the artist, to get a fairly sophisticated story across in a single panel; so yes, cartoons (if, as I assume, you're talking about the single-panel kind) can be comics.
I think these questions are too big for one person to answer, even for purposes if defining the scope of my own site. Does anyone want to dispute anything here, or add more thoughts?
Quack, Don
