The 1920s and 1930s saw further booms within the industry. In China a market was established for palm-sized picture books like Lianhuanhua,[25] while the market for comic anthologies in Britain had turned to targeting children through juvenile humor, with The Dandy and The Beano launched. In Belgium, Hergé created the Tintin newspaper strip for a comic supplement; this was successfully collected in a bound album and created a market for further such works. The same period in the United States had seen newspaper strips expand their subject matter beyond humour, with action, adventure and mystery strips launched. The collection of such material also began, with The Funnies, a reprint collection of newspaper strips, published in tabloid size in 1929.
A market for such comic books soon followed, and by 1938 publishers were printing original material in the format. It was at this point that Action Comics#1 launched, with Superman as the cover feature. The popularity of the character swiftly enshrined the superhero as the defining genre of American comics. The genre lost popularity in the 1950s, but re-established its domination of the form from the 60s until the late 20th century.
In Japan, a country with a long tradition for illustration and whose writing system evolved from pictures, comics were hugely popular. Referred to as manga, the Japanese form was established after World War II by Osamu Tezuka, who expanded the page count of a work to number in the hundreds, and who developed a filmic style, heavily influenced by the Disney animations of the time. The Japanese market expanded its range to cover works in many genres, from juvenile fantasy through romance to adult fantasies. Japanese manga is typically published in large anthologies, containing several hundred pages, and the stories told have long been used as sources for adaptation into animated film. In Japan such films are referred to as anime, and many creators work in both forms simultaneously, leading to an intrinsic linking of the two forms.
During the latter half of the 20th century comics have become a very popular item for collectors and from the 1970s American comics publishers have actively encouraged collecting and shifted a large portion of comics publishing and production to appeal directly to the collector's community.
Writing in 1972, Sir Ernst Gombrich felt Töpffer had evolved a new pictorial language, that of an abbreviated art style, which allowed the audience to fill in gaps with their imagination.[29]
The modern double use of the term comic, as an adjective describing a genre, and a noun designating an entire medium, has been criticised as confusing and misleading. In the 1960s and 1970s, underground cartoonists used the spelling comix to distinguish their work from mainstream newspaper strips and juvenile comic books. Their work was written for an adult audience, but was usually comedic, so the "comic" label was still appropriate.[30] The term graphic novel was popularised in the late 1970s, having been coined at least two decades previous, to distance the material from this confusion.[31]
In the 1980s comics scholarship started to blossom in the U.S.,[32] and a resurgence in the popularity of comics was seen, with Alan Moore and Frank Miller producing notable superhero works and Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes being syndicated.
In 2005 Robert Crumb's work was exhibited in galleries both sides of the Atlantic, and The Guardian newspaper devoted its tabloid supplement to a week long exploration of his work and idioms.[33]
Forms
Comics have been presented within a wide number of publishing and typographical formats, from the very short panel cartoon to the more lengthy graphic novel. The cartoon, traditionally containing satirical or humorous content in the manner of those seen in The New Yorker or Private Eye, originate from the mid nineteenth century. This form of comics is still popular, though the last few years has seen a reduction in the number of editorial cartoonists employed in the US media.[34] There is dispute as to whether the cartoon is a form of comics, a precursor, or a related form—but some argue that since the cartoon combines words with image and constructs a narrative, it is a form of comic.
The comic strip is simply a sequence of cartoons that unite to tell a story, and were originally known as strip cartoons. Originally the term comic strip applied to any sequence of cartoons, no matter the venue of publication or length of the sequence, but now, mainly in the United States, the term refers to the strips published in newspapers. These strips are now typically humorous or satirical strips, such as Hägar the Horrible and Doonesbury, but have often been action themed, educational or even biographical. In the United States the term "comics" is sometimes used to describe the page of a newspaper upon which comic strips are found, with the term "comic" quickly adopting through popular usage to refer to the form rather than the content.[35][36] Said pages are also referred to as the "funny pages", and comics are hence sometimes called "the funnies".[37] In the United Kingdom, the term comic strip still applies to longer stories that appear in comics, such as 2000 AD or The Beano.
Publication formats
Over time a number of formats have become closely associated with the form, from the comic book to the webcomic. The American comic book originated in the early part of the twentieth century, and grew from magazines that repackaged newspaper comic strips. Eventually, publishers commissioned original work, and the material developed from its humorous origins to encompass adventure stories, romance, war, and superheroes, with the latter genre dominating comic book publishing by the late twentieth century. Though called comic books, these publications are more like magazines, having soft covers printed on glossy paper, with interiors of newsprint or higher grade paper. In Europe, magazines were always a venue for original material in the form, and such comic magazines or comic books soon grew into anthologies that serialized a number of stories. In continental Europe a market soon established itself to support collections of these strips. All of these publications are generally referred to as "comics" for short, with typical American and British comic books or magazines running 32 pages, including advertisements and letter column. (These are sometimes known as 36-page books, counting the covers.) European comic magazines have wildly varying page numbers, currently ranging mostly between 52 and 120 pages, while European comic albums traditionally had between 32 and 62 pages.
In the United States, when a publisher collects previously serialised stories, such a collection is commonly referred to as either a trade paperback or as a graphic novel. These are books, typically squarebound and published with a card cover, containing no adverts. They generally collect a single story, which has been broken into a number of chapters previously serialised in comic books, with the issues collectively known as a story arc. Such trade paperbacks can contain anywhere from four issues (for example, there is Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross) to as many as twenty (The Death of Superman). In continental Europe, especially Belgium and France, such collections are usually somewhat larger in size and published with a hardback cover, a format established by the Tintin' series in the 1930s. These are referred to as comic albums,[38] a term that in the United States refers to anthology books. The United Kingdom has no great tradition of such collections, though during the 1980s Titan publishing launched a line collecting stories previously published in 2000 AD.
The graphic novel format is similar to typical book publishing, with works being published in both hardback and paperback editions. The term has proved a difficult one to fully define, and refers not only to fiction but also factual works, and is also used to describe collections of previously serialised works as well as original material. Some publishers distinguish between such material, using the term "original graphic novel" for work commissioned especially for the form.
Newspaper strips also get collected, both in Europe and in the United States. In the US, the selection of strips to be reprinted in books has often been somewhat haphazard, but there have been several recent efforts to produce complete collections of the more popular newspaper strips.
In the UK it is traditional for the children's comics market to release comic annuals, which are hardback books containing strips, as well as text stories and puzzles and games.[39][40][41] In the United States, the comic annual was a summer publication, typically an extended comic book, with storylines often linked across a publisher's line of comics.
In Japan, comics are usually first serialized in manga magazines and latter compiled in tankōbon format.
In South Africa, Supa Strikas, a weekly comic book reaching more than a million readers worldwide, uses advertising embedded in each frame of the comic strip to generate revenue, rather than charging its readers.
Webcomics, also known as online comics and web comics, are comics that are available on the Internet. Many webcomics are exclusively published online, while some are published in print but maintain a web archive for either commercial or artistic reasons. With the Internet's easy access to an audience, webcomics run the gamut from traditional comic strips to graphic novels and beyond.
Webcomics are similar to self-published print comics in that almost anyone can create their own webcomic and publish it on the Web. Currently, there are thousands of webcomics available online, with some achieving popular, critical, or commercial success. The Perry Bible Fellowship is syndicated in print, while Brian Fies' Mom's Cancer won the inaugural Eisner Award for digital comics in 2005 and was subsequently collected and published in hardback.
The comics form can also be utilized to convey information in mixed media. For example, strips designed for educative or informative purposes, notably the instructions upon an airplane's safety card. These strips are generally referred to as instructional comics. The comics form is also utilized in the film and animation industry, through storyboarding. Storyboards are illustrations displayed in sequence for the purpose of visualizing an animated or live-action film. A storyboard is essentially a large comic of the film or some section of the film produced beforehand to help the directors and cinematographers visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. Often storyboards include arrows or instructions that indicate movement.
Like many other media, comics can also be self-published. One typical format for self-publishers and aspiring professionals is the minicomic, typically small, often photocopied and stapled or with a handmade binding. These are a common inexpensive way for those who want to make their own comics on a very small budget, with mostly informal means of distribution. A number of cartoonists have started this way and gone on to more traditional types of publishing, while other more established artists continue to produce minicomics on the side.
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