For: Comedian For: Comic book For: Sequential Art (webcomic)

In the late 20th and early 21st century there has been a movement to rehabilitate the medium. Critical discussions of the form appeared as early as the 1920s, but serious studies were rare until the late 20th century.

Although practitioners can eschew any formal constraints, they often use particular forms and conventions to convey narration and speech, or to evoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as speech balloons and boxes are used to indicate dialogue and impart establishing information, while panels, layout, gutters and zip ribbons can help indicate the flow of the story. Comics use of text, ambiguity, symbolism, design, iconography, literary technique, mixed media and stylistic elements of art help build a subtext of meanings. Different conventions were developed around the globe, from the manhua of China to the manga of Japan, the comic books of the United States, and the anthology comic magazines in Europe.

Early narratives in art

Rome's Trajan's Column, dedicated in 113 AD, is an early surviving examples of a narrative told through the use of sequential pictures, while Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek friezes, mediaeval tapestries such as the Bayeaux Tapestry and illustrated manuscripts also demonstrate the use of sequential images and words combined to convey a narrative. However, these works lack the ability to travel to the reader; it needed the invention of modern printing techniques to allow the form to capture a wide audience and become a mass medium.Perry & Aldridge, 1989. p.11McCloud, 1993. pp.11-14Sabin, 1993. pp.13-14

The 15th–18th centuries and printing advances

image:The Rake's Progress 8.jpg

The invention of the printing press, allowing movable type, established a separation between images and words, the two requiring different methods in order to be reproduced. Early printed material concentrated on religious subjects, but through the 17th and 18th centuries they began to tackle aspects of political and social life, and also started to satirise and caricature. It was also during this period that the speech bubble was developed as a means of attributing dialogue.

William Hogarth is often identified in histories of the comics form. His work, A Rake's Progress, was composed of a number of canvases, each reproduced as a print, and the eight prints together created a narrative. As printing techniques developed, due to the technological advances of the industrial revolution, magazines and newspapers were established. These publications utilised illustrations as a means of commenting on political and social issues, such illustrations becoming known as cartoons in the 1840s. Soon, artists were experimenting with establishing a sequence of images to create a narrative.