![]() Finally, Kunzle offers a particularly strong version of the narrative condition that is, comic strips must not only tell stories, they must tell moral and topical ones. Although these are not typically thought of as especially successful comics from an artistic perspective, they are widely accepted as comics. (For example, the narrative could not be grasped without understanding the pictures, but it could be grasped-at least in part-without understanding the text.) If this is the relevant factor, then some comic book versions of classic literature (as in the Classics Illustrated series) appear to be counterexamples. Relative size is surely irrelevant to status as a comic. Kunzle does take the condition to exclude “any strip in which the captions occupy a larger space than the picture,” but this is misleading. What does “carrying the burden of the narrative” amount to? Kunzle is not especially precise about this perhaps the idea is that audience comprehension of the narrative depends primarily on a grasp of the sequence of images rather than the text. There is, of course, difficulty in determining what counts as a preponderance, but Kunzle characterizes this in terms of what “carries the burden of the narrative” and what is “primary.” 6 6 Similarly, there may be some sense in which it is right to say that comics typically involve a preponderance of image over text, but this does not seem a necessary condition for status as a comic. Why not a single-instance one-off comic? 5 5Ĭompare Hayman and Pratt, “What Are Comics?” p. For example, while the vast majority of comics or comic strips are presented in a mass medium, there seems no reason to think that they must be. Kunzle's notion of the image sequence seems on the right track-something like this core idea is central to almost all extant accounts of comics however, the other parts of his definition are patently problematic. 1450 to 1825 (University of California Press, 1973), p. In the first volume of his exhaustive history of the comic strip, David Kunzle proposes the following definition of that category: a comic strip consists of “a sequence of separate images” with “a preponderance of image over text” that appears (and was originally intended to appear) in “a mass medium” and tells “a story which is both moral and topical.” 4 4ĭavid Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. Its failures are then particularly telling. The Hayman and Pratt proposal might, therefore, be seen as a significant advance in the definitional project. In this section I discuss four recent attempts to provide a definition of comics and suggest that they all suffer from glaring difficulties. ![]() a brief history of recent attempts to define comics It includes comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, one-off comics, serials, and webcomics.Ī brief survey of past attempts to define the medium will help place the Hayman and Pratt account in context. Like Hayman and Pratt and others who have written on the topic, I will assume that the extension of the concept comic is fairly diverse. In the bulk of this article I shall explore various problems with the Hayman and Pratt definition, and then briefly suggest some lessons for thinking about the medium of comics. There are reasons to think that no such account can be successful. Hayman and Pratt attempt to provide a traditional real definition of comics in terms of independently necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the correct application of the concept comic. ![]() One obvious response to this problem would be to incorporate a historical condition into the proposed definition. ![]() This flaw is found in all other extant attempts to define comics. Most noticeably, Hayman and Pratt offer an ahistorical account of comics, which leaves their account open to plausible counterexamples from the prehistory of comics. Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985) Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993) David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (Penn State University Press, 2000). 419–424.Īlthough their definition improves on related proposals by Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, as well as the very different account David Carrier offers in his The Aesthetics of Comics, it remains unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. David Goldblatt and Lee Brown (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc., 2005), pp. Greg Hayman and Henry John Pratt, “What Are Comics?” in A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, ed. ![]() In a recent essay entitled “What Are Comics?” Greg Hayman and Henry John Pratt defend what they call a “pictorial narrative” definition of comics. ![]()
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