| Posted: 21 May 2015 at 3:33am | IP Logged | 6
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Dr. Seuss, Sherlock Holmes with the original Sidney Paget illustrations, collections of Bloom County, a photo album I arranged with captions to tell a funny story--just looking around my place, I see a number of things that appeal to the comic book fan in me, but that I wonder if they could be defined as such.
I've seen Denny O'Neil and Marshall Rogers do a Batman story closer to the way children's books or the original Sherlock Holmes stories were done, but it was definitely a comic book. I've seen comics done without captions or balloons, others done all in splash pages, and others still in landscape format rather than portrait (all three of these done by JB at some point!).
I think a comic book needs to have MOST of these traits, but maybe not ALL of them at one time--
1. Story told in words 2. --and illustrations 3. In portrait format 4. With panels 5. Stapled or perfect-bound (not single page or folded brochure format)
I think if something has 3 out of the first 4 of the above (#5 is mandatory for the "book" part), it can be considered a comic book. JB's photonovels" substitutes photos for #2, but does the others; the latest collection of GARFIELD does 3, 4, and 5, but I'm not sure it covers 1 and 2 ("story" wise), so I would say no to that one; a collection of PRINCE VALIANT Sunday story strips does all 5, so yes to that one; any Steve Gerber "all-text" fill-in issue might have skipped #4, but did the rest, so OK; and any sideways, silent, storybook-style, all-splash, etc. experiment still would fit most of the requirements above.
(#2 must be replaced with SOMETHING, like photos. But I would argue that even a page with blank panels with only word balloons could still tell a story. Again, refer to JB's "snowstorm" scene.)
If something does NOT adhere to #5--like online comics or newspaper strips--they might still be COMICS, but I don't think you can call them comic BOOKS.
Edited by Eric Jansen on 21 May 2015 at 3:38am
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Topic Closed)
