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Comics (from the Greek κωμικός , kōmikos "of or pertaining to comedy" from κῶμος - kōmos "revel, komos", via the Latin cōmicus ) is a graphic medium in which images are utilized in order to convey a sequential narrative; the term, derived from massive early use to convey comic themes, came to be applied to all uses of this medium including those which are far from comic. It is the sequential nature of the pictures, and the predominance of pictures over words, that distinguish comics from picture books, though there is some overlap between the two media. Most comics combine words with images, often indicating speech in the form of word balloons, but pantomime strips, such as The Little King , are not uncommon. Words other than dialogue, captions for example, usually expand upon the pictures, but sometimes act in counterpoint.

Early precursors of comics as they are known today include Trajan's Column and the work of William Hogarth. By the 19th century, the medium as we know it today began to take form among European and American artists. Comics as a real mass medium started to emerge in the United States in the early 20th century with the newspaper comic strip, where its form began to be standardized (image-driven, speech balloons etc). The combination of words and pictures proved popular, and quickly spread throughout the world.

Comic strips were soon gathered into cheap booklets and reprint comic books. Original comic books soon followed. Today, comics are found in newspapers, magazines, comic books, graphic novels and on the web. Although historically the form dealt with humorous subject matter, its scope has expanded to encompass the full range of literary genres. Also see: Comic strip and cartoon. In the anglo-Saxon world, comics are still typically seen as a low art, although there are a few exceptions, such as Krazy Kat and Barnaby . However, such an elitist "low art/high art" distinction doesn't exist in the French-speaking world (and, to some extent, continental Europe), where the bandes dessinées medium as a whole is commonly accepted as "the Ninth Art", is usually dedicated a non-negligible space in bookshops and libraries, and is regularly celebrated in international events such as the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

In the late 20th and early 21st century there has been a movement to rehabilitate the medium. Critical discussions of the form appeared as early as the 1920s, but serious studies were rare until the late 20th century.

Although practitioners can eschew any formal constraints, they often use particular forms and conventions to convey narration and speech, or to evoke emotional or sensuous responses. Devices such as speech balloons and boxes are used to indicate dialogue and impart establishing information, while panels, layout, gutters and zip ribbons can help indicate the flow of the story. Comics use of text, ambiguity, symbolism, design, iconography, literary technique, mixed media and stylistic elements of art help build a subtext of meanings. Although comics are non-linear structures and can be hard to read sometimes, it is simply presented. However, it depends of the reader's "frame of mind" to read and understand the comic. Different conventions were developed around the globe, from the manga of Japan to the manhua of China and the manhwa of Korea, the comic books of the United States, and the larger hardcover albums in Europe.

History

Early narratives in art

Comics as an art form established itself in the late 19th and early 20th century, alongside the similar forms of film and animation. The three forms share certain conventions, most noticeably the mixing of words and pictures, and all three owe parts of their conventions to the technological leaps made through the industrial revolution. Although the comics form was established and popularized in the pages of newspapers and magazines in the late 1890s, narrative illustration has existed for many centuries.

Rome's Trajan's Column, dedicated in 113 AD, is an early surviving examples of a narrative told through the use of sequential pictures, while Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek friezes, medieval tapestries such as the Bayeux Tapestry and illustrated manuscripts also demonstrate the use of sequential images and words combined to convey a narrative. In medieval paintings, many sequential scenes of the same story (usually a Biblical one) are simultaneously shown in the same painting (see illustration on the left).

However, these works lack the ability to travel to the reader; it needed the invention of modern printing techniques to allow the form to capture a wide audience and become a mass medium.

The 15th–18th centuries and printing advances

The invention of the printing press, allowing movable type, established a separation between images and words, the two requiring different methods in order to be reproduced. Early printed material concentrated on religious subjects, but through the 17th and 18th centuries they began to tackle aspects of political and social life, and also started to satirize and caricature. It was also during this period that the speech bubble was developed as a means of attributing dialogue.

William Hogarth is often identified in histories of the comics form. His work, A Rake's Progress , was composed of a number of canvases, each reproduced as a print, and the eight prints together created a narrative. As printing techniques developed, due to the technological advances of the industrial revolution, magazines and newspapers were established. These publications utilized illustrations as a means of commenting on political and social issues, such illustrations becoming known as cartoons in the 1840s. Soon, artists were experimenting with establishing a sequence of images to create a narrative.

While surviving works of these periods such as Francis Barlow's A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot (c.1682) as well as The Punishments of Lemuel Gulliver and A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth (1726), can be seen to establish a narrative over a number of images, it wasn't until the 19th century that the elements of such works began to crystallise into the comic strip.

The speech balloon also evolved during this period, from the medieval origins of the phylacter , a label, usually in the form of a scroll, which identified a character either through naming them or using a short text to explain their purpose. Artists such as George Cruikshank helped codify such phylacters as balloons rather than as scrolls, although at this time they were still referred to as labels. Although they were now used to represent dialogue, this dialogue was still used for identification purposes rather than to create a dialogue within the work, and artists soon discarded them in favour of running dialogue underneath the panels. The speech balloons weren't reintroduced to the form until Richard F. Outcault utilized them as a means of establishing dialogue within his works.

The 19th century: a form established

Rodolphe Töpffer, a Francophone Swiss artist, is seen as the key figure of the early part of the 19th century. Although speech balloons had fallen from favour during the middle part of the 19th century, Töpffer's sequentially illustrated stories, with the text compartmentalised below the images, were reprinted throughout Europe and the United States. The lack of copyright laws at this time allowed such pirated editions, and these translated versions created a market on both continents for similar works.

In 1843 Töpffer formalised his thoughts on the picture story in his Essay on Physiognomics : "To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material — often down to the dregs! It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense."

In 1845 the satirical drawings which had regularly been appearing in newspapers and magazines gained a name: cartoons. The British magazine Punch , launched in 1841, referred to its 'humorous pencilings' as cartoons in a satirical reference to the Parliament of the day, who were themselves organising an exhibition of cartoons, or preparatory drawings, at the time. This usage became common parlance, lasting into the prese

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