Comics Theory

Abstract

Comics theory refers to any attempt to describe the nature of “comics,” to identify it as a distinct art form, and to address the medium's formal properties. Since the 1960s comics have attracted an increasing amount of attention from scholars working in different fields. This has in part been due to wider challenges to the elitist hierarchies that once operated within academia. Popular culture, including mass entertainment such as television and film, are now studied at many universities alongside more traditional subjects. Also, from the late 1970s onward there has been increased critical activity, with publications such as The Comics Journal foregrounding what it calls “serious comics criticism.” However, even within this more open culture of research and criticism, academia has been relatively slow to embrace comics as a subject of serious study, and “comics studies” is yet to emerge fully as a field in its own right. Part of the problem has been the perception that comics are synonymous with childish or simplistic storytelling. Such ill‐founded prejudice ignores the numerous artistic achievements in the medium. In countries such as France and Japan, comics enjoy a rather higher status than in Britain or America and are very much a part of the fabric of culture as a whole. In fact, even though the medium is still largely dominated by genre entertainment, the number of “art comics” is very much on the increase, and production has moved from reliance on periodical publication to new formats, notably graphic novels and webcomics. However, even if the various residual prejudices surrounding the study of comics are set aside, there remains the issue of how comics are to be categorized. Are they primarily literary artifacts or artistic ones? Should they be studied by specialists in literature or in film, or by art historians, cultural historians, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, or semiologists? All these avenues are currently being explored and the result is a burgeoning field of study that is dynamic, innovative, and inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies.