What Is a Comic Book? Pictures in Sequence, and the Gap Between Them

Several devices do the specific work of the medium and have no exact equivalent elsewhere:

• •Closure, the reader's construction of what happens between panels, which means the medium requires active participation to function at all and which is why a comic can cross a century between two frames
• •Panel size and shape controlling perceived duration, so that a wide panel reads as slower and a sequence of narrow ones as faster
• •The page as a unit, since a reader takes in the whole layout before reading it, which lets a creator withhold a reveal until a page turn
• •Word balloons, whose tails, shapes and lettering carry volume, tone and who is speaking, and whose reading order interacts with the image
• •Sound effects rendered as drawn words, integrated into the image rather than added to it
• •Motion lines, impact stars, sweat drops and the other conventions of a visual grammar that readers acquire without instruction and that varies between traditions

The medium developed differently in three places and the differences are structural rather than stylistic. American comics grew from newspaper strips into cheap monthly pamphlets, with the superhero genre arriving in 1938 and coming to dominate the format so completely that the medium and the genre became confused in the public mind; the industry's work-for-hire arrangements meant creators generally did not own what they made, which produced decades of disputes including the one over the creation of Superman. Franco-Belgian comics, called bande dessinee, are published as substantial hardback albums, treated as a legitimate art form with state support, cover every genre and are read by adults without comment. Japanese manga is published in enormous weekly anthologies, serialised at a punishing pace, aimed at demographic segments from young children to adult men and women, and dominates its domestic publishing industry; its visual grammar developed partly separately, with more panels per page, more use of silent sequences and different conventions for motion and emotion.

The American industry nearly destroyed itself in the 1950s. A psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, published Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 arguing that comics caused juvenile delinquency, based on clinical impressions from troubled young patients; his data were examined decades later and found to have been substantially misrepresented. A Senate subcommittee held televised hearings, and the industry responded with self-censorship, establishing the Comics Code Authority, whose seal was required by distributors and whose rules prohibited horror, crime that appeared attractive, disrespect for authority and much else. The effect was to eliminate the crime and horror publishers, leaving superheroes and funny animals, and to fix the perception of comics as children's material for a generation. The code weakened from the 1970s and was abandoned entirely by 2011. The episode is a standard case study in media panics and follows the same pattern later applied to video games.

The reassessment came from a handful of works in the 1980s and after. Art Spiegelman's Maus, serialised from 1980 and completed in 1991, tells his father's survival of Auschwitz with Jews as mice and Germans as cats, and it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, which forced institutions to take the medium seriously. Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, both 1986, rebuilt the superhero as a subject for adult argument. Since then the medium has produced memoir in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, reportage in Joe Sacco's work from Palestine and Bosnia, and a large body of literary and autobiographical work. Graphic medicine uses comics to convey patient experience, and educational and technical comics exploit the fact that a sequence of images explains a procedure better than prose. Libraries and universities collect them, and the term graphic novel, coined partly as a marketing device to get comics into bookshops, is disliked by a good number of practitioners who see no reason to be embarrassed by the older word.

The economics have shifted twice in twenty years. Manga's international success has made it the dominant form by volume in many Western markets, particularly among younger readers, and has pulled reading habits toward the tall-format collected volume rather than the pamphlet. Webcomics removed the distribution gatekeepers entirely, allowing creators to publish directly and monetise through subscription platforms, and produced formats native to a screen, most significantly the vertical-scrolling webtoon developed in South Korea, which abandons the page as a unit and uses scroll length itself as pacing, and which has become an enormous industry supplying source material for television. Meanwhile the American superhero publishers have become primarily intellectual property libraries for film studios, with the comics themselves a small business relative to the licensing. What has not changed is the mechanism, which is that a reader looking at two pictures in sequence does the work of connecting them, and that this participation is what the medium is.

Comics are a medium rather than a genre, defined as images in deliberate sequence, and their distinctive mechanism is closure, the reader's construction of what happens in the gap between panels. The American, Franco-Belgian and Japanese traditions differ structurally in format, audience and creator rights, not merely in style. A 1954 panic based on misrepresented evidence produced an industry censorship code that fixed the medium's reputation as children's material for a generation, and the literary reassessment ran through Maus, which won a Pulitzer in 1992.