ABSTRACT
What is comics? This question has no conclusive answer; scholars are divided on the most appropriate way to define the formal properties of the comics form. To quote Scott McCloud’s introduction to the form (1994: 9), comics is ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer’; this definition is often pared down to ‘sequential art’ (most notably in the work of Will Eisner). McCloud’s definition is careful to cover all the potential iterations of the form but it does not necessarily tell us ‘what’ comics is. Scholars and practitioners disagree on the finer points, but to my mind comics is any narrative in which the information is transmitted primarily via image. The primacy of the image differentiates comics from illustrated books – it is a visual form. I would also like to add here that the plural of comic is typically used as a singular (as ‘politics’ is) to refer to the entire form or industry. Hence, I talk about ‘the comics industry’ or ‘comics creators’. That said, individual texts may be referred to as a ‘comic’: the ‘s’ distinguishes between the form on the whole and the individual texts. Furthermore, there is much discussion over the various terms used for the ‘thing’ itself. It is my preference to use the term ‘comics’ for all texts, rather than favouring the potentially elitist ‘graphic novel’ or any of the other variants that have been put forward by artists and authors, including ‘comic strip novel’ (Daniel Clowes 2001) and ‘illustrated novel’ (Craig Thompson 2003). For the most part, ‘graphic novel’ is a marketing term, rather than a marker of quality or legitimacy; Art Spiegelman (2011) claims that graphic novels are ‘long comic books that require a bookmark’. There is no definitive response to the terminology debate but it remains a key part of the discourse on the position and the status of the contemporary comic.
