Hey chicks and dudes, check out my webcomic!

Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2009 2:20 pm

It's obviously a comic. It has graphics and text and is divided into frames.

Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 155

Um? It has text, and, um, more text. And occasionally that text is bigger or smaller, or green or something. And it's single-panel, though I don't actually care about that.

Anyway, there's not a bright-line test for what is and isn't comics. A graph created with Excel has, presumably, images and text, but it isn't comics. I know comics when I see them though, and this isn't comics.

Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2009 5:16 pm

I'm sure we can all agree that there is no clear definition of a comic. To the xkcd crowd, graphs clearly can be comics.

This comic does have graphics. They are created from typography using a technique known as 'smileys'.

And it isn't single-panel, either: lots of comics artists don't draw the panels, but they are still there.

Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2009 5:39 pm

Well Scott McCloud's definition of a comic is pictorial and other images juxtaposed in deliberate sequence, which actually would complicate this particular example even further.

But look at it this way: The =|;{O guy shows up at the top, and then a few "lines" later he shows up again, and you automatically assume that this is the same person at a later moment in time. The main differences between this and conventional comics are that there aren't clear panel borders, and there isn't a line or a bubble with a tail indicating who's saying what. If you drew bubbles in the right places and drew rectangles around the relevant sections, it would obviously be a comic. A face guy is talking to another face guy.

But those conventions are not necessary for something to be called a comic; this is just a comic that looks weird.

[NOTE that McCloud's definition does not allow for xkcd's graphs and its single-panel gags to be defined, strictly speaking, as comics; this is fine by me.]

Joined: 17 May 2008 Posts: 3060

Doesn't that definition make "single panel comic" sort of a contradiction? That doesn't seem right.

Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2009 5:51 pm

Well, for Scott McCloud the great thing about comics is the ability to create an illusion of the passage of time by arranging images spatially. So yeah, "single-panel comics" like The Far Side, numerous xkcd installments, Marmaduke, etc. are not actually comics, they are drawings with words on them.

Which is counterintuitive, but still kind of makes sense: For example, if I took this picture of Henriette Bourbon that I have on my desk for some reason and drew a little text bubble coming out of her mouth saying "OU SONT LES HOMMES???" it would be similar in structure to yesterday's Marmaduke (and funnier), but would you call that a comic? I guess maybe you would, but I wouldn't.

Joined: 25 Jul 2008 Posts: 6011

Everything/Nothing is a comic

Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2009 6:19 pm

We had very long and ultimately not very fruitful discussions about whether single-panel comics were real comics or not at another forum I used to be on.

The nearest we came to a consensus was that Family Circus (and Marmaduke as well, if we had thought of it) was a comic, whereas The Far Side was a cartoon.

I don't think I need to argue why The Far Side is a cartoon and not a comic. The argument for Family Circus being a comic was that it had recurring, named characters. This led us to see each Family Circus drawing as a single panel in an ongoing comic.

Of course we were really just trying to argue to keep the established definitions. Re Family Circus is usually classed as a comic and The Far Side as a cartoon.

Joined: 09 Feb 2006 Posts: 46

Speaking of things on the internet that may or may not be comics, I do what I refer to as a webstrip so as not to get into arguments at http://artistwanted.livejournal.com. I do it pretty much for fun, no merchandising as of yet and, obviously it being a livejournal thing so far, no advertising. Just pure, unadulterated narcissism. If anyone beyond the random girls who somehow found it and clearly have pity-crushes on me takes pleasure in it, that's really flattering. The gals are pretty flattering as well.

Joined: 03 May 2009 Posts: 11 Location: Sydney, Australia

This sounds like a 'what is art debate?' One of the arguements for this is, what was the intention of the creator when they created it? If a spreadsheet is created simply to tabulate figures, than you couldn't call it art, but if the creation of it was to challenge people's conventions, and make them look at the form in a whole new way then... maybe. The fun thing about this question is that there is no right answer, nor is there a wrong answer and no one ever, in the entire human race from now ad infinitum will ever be able to conclusively answer it. Which makes it so fun to discuss Smile

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 11:51 am

A Bear wrote:

Well, for Scott McCloud the great thing about comics is the ability to create an illusion of the passage of time by arranging images spatially. So yeah, "single-panel comics" like The Far Side, numerous xkcd installments, Marmaduke, etc. are not actually comics, they are drawings with words on them.

No, this is wrong. That definition you cited does not say panels in sequence, it says images. I'd say that should (and arguably already does) include text as well but the important words in the definition are really deliberate and sequence. A single panel comic like The Far Side still has a sequence. E.g. you see a cow running out of a barn in the single panel and then you read the caption and that's where the joke comes from. The sequence is important. And that's just the most basic way it can work. There is or can be sequence within the panel, with different character speaking or different kinds of actions happening or whatever.

A chart is not a comic (in most cases) because you don't have that second (or third or fourth or whatever) beat where the punchline happens. The images are simply meant to illustrate the numbers and text. In the same way, a photo with a caption describing what is in the photo or just saying who took the photo is also not a comic. There's arguably sequence but it's not deliberate in the same way. In an xkcd chart comic, there's going to be a tension between the numbers and the labels or the title or the different things being graphed, which is understood in a deliberate sequence.

Also, what are you talking about Archbaker, re: cartoons vs. comics? As far as I know they are synonymous, except of course when they mean completely different things like stand-up comedians and animated drawings. People who make comics are called cartoonists because comics are the same thing as cartoons.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 2:57 pm

Miles, you're probably right. Sometimes I'm stupid and foreign.

Just wanted to point out that Fermatprime doesn't know very much about the medium. But I guess I don't either.

Joined: 14 Aug 2008 Posts: 1786 Location: The fine land

I thought McCloud explicitly left single panel stuff like the Far Side out of his definition of "sequential art"?

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:32 pm

Archbaker you're not stupid! I'm just not aware of such a distinction or what purpose it would really serve. In any case Fermatprime is totally wrong and that thing was a comic (albeit quite a bad one).

Olli, he might. I don't know (I haven't read Understanding Comics, just Making Comics), but if so that seems pretty dumb since single panel comics are clearly comics and even fit in his definition without too much trouble.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:33 pm

When I said "this is wrong" before, I meant that there's definitely a difference between single panel comics and drawings with words on them and the difference is articulated in McCloud's definition, not that A Bear's interpretation of McCloud was wrong.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:36 pm

Well image googling 'cartoon' yields a lot of pictures with words and googling 'comic' yields a lot of actual comic strips, so I think there is at least an informal difference in use between the two words.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:41 pm

Thinking about it, I guess cartoon refers to stylized humor comics particularly. Like you wouldn't refer to a superhero comic book as a cartoon, though sometimes such books have a "cartoony" art style. But you could refer to a 4 panel gag strip as a comic or a cartoon. You could also refer to a goofy doodle as a cartoon, maybe, but probably not as a comic. So they seem like overlapping terms rather than contrasting ones.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:43 pm

Yes, that sounds right.

Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 155

Archbaker wrote:

Just wanted to point out that Fermatprime doesn't know very much about the medium. But I guess I don't either.

I know plenty about the medium; I've read McCloud, and I've read a pretty good chunk of the scholarly work that exists on comics (which there's, uh, not much of.) I'm just loud and have unpopular opinions.

Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 155

Basically Scott McCloud's definition is not the end-all and be-all of how to define a comic you guys.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:53 pm

It's more "end-all be-all" than "I'll know it when I see it" though.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:54 pm

Oh shoot Miles is talking about me!

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that The Far Side does constitute a comic under McCloud's definition, because the text is not a part of the picture, it is its own "panel," its own thing going on.

Whereas on the other hand, Marmaduke and The Family Circus, if I understand you correctly (or maybe I am just reading this into it), are still not comics because the quote at the bottom is part of the image in a way that isn't dependent on juxtaposition; it could be part of the same image if there was room for another speech bubble.

This all makes sense but I think that if you say The Far Side is a comic for this reason, then any given painting in an art museum is a comic (or a panel in a comic) under the same criteria: There is an image, and then there is another "panel," the card which notes the title, artist, medium, year, whatever.

It is really almost exactly the same thing as the little block of text reading "Cow Tools;" it is almost as similar to the text explaining that the kid who keeps pushing on the door marked "PULL" is trying to get inside the gifted school.

You could say that the relationship between a Far Side caption and its image is different from that between a painting and an author-card (what do they call those?), but I'd argue that the first relationship is what makes the caption part of the image and thus not a comic. Or you could say that a painting and its card are a comic in the same way that The Far Side is a comic, and I guess that may or may not be a problem for McCloud's definition, I don't know.

But if I know you, Miles, you will say something else, and it will be more interesting than either of those things!

Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 155

Miles: Fair enough, but the medium's sufficiently slippery (especially when it comes to webcomics) that "I know it when I see it" makes more sense.

There's really a continuum between text and images; you could have someone who just writes a short story in 12pt TNR, or someone (like Doug Hofstadter) who painstakingly designs the fonts and typesets the book for aesthetic purposes, all the way up to like medieval illustrated manuscripts. You could look at it as "sequential art," with the words as the "panels," but that would be stupid (though less so as you move on up, and there are other considerations too -- IIRC the last few panels of The Invisibles were all text, but it didn't suddenly stop being a comic because of it.) The issue is, of course, that you don't actually lose much by converting it to plain 12pt. TNR.

My assertion was essentially that the chat-log "comic" fell somewhere between Hofstadter and the medieval monks, in that it would work almost as well (or, in that case, not-so-well) in just plain text format. As such, I didn't feel that it deserved the label of a comic. But, again, my theory is not exactly a popular or simple one. Maybe I'll move to France and write a book.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 4:22 pm

A Bear wrote:

Oh shoot Miles is talking about me!

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that The Far Side does constitute a comic under McCloud's definition, because the text is not a part of the picture, it is its own "panel," its own thing going on.

Whereas on the other hand, Marmaduke and The Family Circus, if I understand you correctly (or maybe I am just reading this into it), are still not comics because the quote at the bottom is part of the image in a way that isn't dependent on juxtaposition; it could be part of the same image if there was room for another speech bubble.

This all makes sense but I think that if you say The Far Side is a comic for this reason, then any given painting in an art museum is a comic (or a panel in a comic) under the same criteria: There is an image, and then there is another "panel," the card which notes the title, artist, medium, year, whatever.

It is really almost exactly the same thing as the little block of text reading "Cow Tools;" it is almost as similar to the text explaining that the kid who keeps pushing on the door marked "PULL" is trying to get inside the gifted school.

You could say that the relationship between a Far Side caption and its image is different from that between a painting and an author-card (what do they call those?), but I'd argue that the first relationship is what makes the caption part of the image and thus not a comic. Or you could say that a painting and its card are a comic in the same way that The Far Side is a comic, and I guess that may or may not be a problem for McCloud's definition, I don't know.

But if I know you, Miles, you will say something else, and it will be more interesting than either of those things!

That's not quite what I'm saying. I'm saying that panels are not the only way to establish sequence -- we shouldn't get hung up on what counts as a panel or whatever. And the other thing is that it has to be deliberate. Like art, what counts as a comic comes down largely to intent.

Part of McCloud's point is that timing is an important part of comics that isn't part of, say, most paintings. A comic uses images and words combined with timing to create some effect, or actually it might be better to say some affect. Family Circus, in theory, is usually combining some image of children with a caption to try to create a sense of cuteness. This differs from, say, a picture of cute duckies in that it's important that you see the drawing (which, depending on how the artist has rendered it, take a certain amount of time to take in) and then the caption.

Comics have at least one beat between two things. But those things don't have to be panels per se. They don't have to be a panel and a caption either. It could be two characters in one panel each with their own line of dialogue.

In the case of a painting and its corresponding title card, again as the definition says, it has to be a deliberate sequence. In most cases, what's written on the card isn't meant as a twist or any kind of juxtaposition to the painting which requires the timing of looking at the painting and then at the caption. It's more like what I was saying with a photo that has a caption stating the name of the photographer. But it's not inconceivable (and probably happens reasonably often) that an artist would put a joke or some other emotional punchline as the title on the card, and I don't think a formal experimenter like McCloud would be opposed to classifying such as a comic.

Thinking about that previous paragraph a little bit more, another important distinction between a single panel comic with a caption and a painting and title card or photo and attributive caption is that the comic's caption is meant as a part of the work itself, whereas in the other cases it's not.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 4:29 pm

Fermatprime wrote:

Miles: Fair enough, but the medium's sufficiently slippery (especially when it comes to webcomics) that "I know it when I see it" makes more sense.

There's really a continuum between text and images; you could have someone who just writes a short story in 12pt TNR, or someone (like Doug Hofstadter) who painstakingly designs the fonts and typesets the book for aesthetic purposes, all the way up to like medieval illustrated manuscripts. You could look at it as "sequential art," with the words as the "panels," but that would be stupid (though less so as you move on up, and there are other considerations too -- IIRC the last few panels of The Invisibles were all text, but it didn't suddenly stop being a comic because of it.) The issue is, of course, that you don't actually lose much by converting it to plain 12pt. TNR.

My assertion was essentially that the chat-log "comic" fell somewhere between Hofstadter and the medieval monks, in that it would work almost as well (or, in that case, not-so-well) in just plain text format. As such, I didn't feel that it deserved the label of a comic. But, again, my theory is not exactly a popular or simple one. Maybe I'll move to France and write a book.

But images can be created with plain text. Emoticons are a simple example, but people do all kinds of fancy stuff with ascii art. I think Ascii Art Farts is pretty clearly a comic. And as I was saying, you don't really need panels for sequential art -- you just need art and sequence. If stick figures can count as comic art, I don't see why emoticons can't.

I think people took issue with your post mostly because it rings of dismissing something as "not even comics" the way experimental artists might be dismissed as "not even art" or the way old people dismiss hip-hop as "not even music." It's an intellectually lazy kind of criticism.

Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 155

Intellectually lazy? Maybe, maybe not; after all, I think I have a reasonably sound defense for it. Whatever; I think it's fair to say that at the very least such things lie near the border between comics and not-comics. Unfortunately that was the only interesting thing about the "comic" in question

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 4:49 pm

I think you're right about The Family Circus relying on timing, and actually I think that if McCloud took that under consideration he wouldn't have singled it out as an example of "comics" that don't fit his description (though we cannot fault McCloud for deciding not to devote a lot of his time to thinking about The Family Circus).

A museum worker putting up a painting and a title card next to it certainly expects for the viewer to look at the painting and then look at the title card (or just ignore it). I have some difficulty imagining that the person could do this without having this order of events in mind on some level, so as far as I'm concerned it is a deliberate sequence.

The painting definitely doesn't constitute a comic in itself, but the combination of painting and card does, under these criteria. And the creator of the comic isn't the painter, it is the guy who works in the museum. They don't intend to make a comic, but they definitely do intend for the entire set-up to have the qualities which we are saying define a comic. (I think McCloud has said that things like stick-figure airplane safety instructions are comics even if their authors don't have that in mind.)

Fermatprime wrote:

the last few panels of The Invisibles were all text, but it didn't suddenly stop being a comic because of it.

Not having read The Invisibles, it sounds to me like it did suddenly stop being a comic.

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 4:50 pm

THAT LAST PART IS A JOKE PLEASE DON'T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 4:58 pm

If Miles is writing a reply right now then I'm sorry to bring this in because if he wants to respond then he'll have to post again and it messes up the flow of discussion but this occurred to me as I was reviewing the thread and now I'm going to add it, right now, here it comes:

A reliance on timing such as Miles has proven is part of The Family Circus, Marmaduke, and The Far Side is a type of deliberate sequence. It is by virtue of their sequence, not their timing, that they can be considered comics. (Obviously it is also my position that the title card next to the painting constitutes a type of deliberate sequence as well.)

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 5:21 pm

But you can read the title card before or after looking at the painting -- or not at all -- and it (generally) makes no difference. Or to avoid needless back-and-forth let's stipulate that it might make some difference what order you read it in, but nothing close to the amount of difference it makes if you read a comic backwards.

The curator (I don't know who really hangs paintings or whatever, so let's just refer to him as the curator) who hangs a painting and its title card is doing it deliberately but he is not creating a deliberate sequence. In some cases you might be able to read certain kinds of titles as a humorous caption to a painting when it wasn't intended, but in that case YOU are the author of... well a joke at least and arguably a comic.

A Bear wrote:

The painting definitely doesn't constitute a comic in itself, but the combination of painting and card does, under these criteria. And the creator of the comic isn't the painter, it is the guy who works in the museum. They don't intend to make a comic, but they definitely do intend for the entire set-up to have the qualities which we are saying define a comic. (I think McCloud has said that things like stick-figure airplane safety instructions are comics even if their authors don't have that in mind.)

I think there is nuance here you're missing. I would tend to agree with McCloud (if I understand the kind of thing you're referring to) in that a sequence of drawings showing how to put together a model airplane could be something pretty close to a comic, but not that the painting and title card constitute such. Sequence and timing are both essential to making a comic, and the two are intricately intertwined. The curator is NOT intending to set up timing and sequence with the painting and card in anything like the way a cartoonist does or even the way the person making the assembly instructions for the airplane does. The currator is merely adding a label for attribution. Again, it's the same as a photgraph with an attributive caption beneath. Do you consider that a comic? Someone laid out this magazine page and didn't want to get sued for using a photograph without attribution -- do you consider him a cartoonist?