I like reading comics. Unfortunately, there exists a lot of confusion among both hoi polloi and the elite readers of INTBiQ on what that means exactly and how anyone even goes about reading comics. Today, I hope to clear up some confusion so that anyone who’s never read a comic before will feel comfortable and capable of doing so tomorrow. In future posts I will be recommending good starter stories for new readers, but for now this blog will simply provide a primer for all comic book posts I make.
Where to Read Comics
We begin with where to find comics because if you only take away one thing from this blog, it should be where to get comics. If you start reading comics then everything else I’ll explain later in this blog you will likely come to learn naturally. Luckily, like every other medium of expression, the Internet age has provided more ways than ever to consume comics. I’ll list the major ways to access comics in order of cost to the reader.
Piracy
Comics can be pirated just like anything else that’s not a car. A pirated version of a comic requires someone to either take apart the pages of a physical comic and scan them or for someone to digitally “rip” the individual images of legally-available comics online. While pirated comics theoretically could be read in any format that’s capable of rendering images, the preferred formats for pirated comics are “.cbz” (which is just a renamed “.zip” file), “.cbr” (a renamed “.rar”), and more rarely a “.pdf.” To read pirated comics, the best software out there is either CDisplay Ex, which is a light-weight reader that simply opens associated files, or ComicRack, which is more like the iTunes of comics with library organization features and scriptable plugins. You can find pirated comics anywhere you can illegally download anything else. If you’re willing to pirate media despite the presence of IP hawks like MD around, I trust you know how to use a search engine effectively (normally searching “[comic name]” + “.cbz” will get you close).
Borrowing
Instead of being a criminal, you could consider your local library. It’s simple stuff: comics come in book form and libraries let your read books for free if you have a card. Many libraries even take suggestions on which books they should purchase, so you can suggest that your library buy more comics instead of another copy of 50 Shades of Grey. If you’re unable or unwilling to march down to your library’s physical location every time you want to read a comic, know that there’s an app for that. Hoopla and Libby by Overdrive both allow you to download e-books (including comics) with your library card info. This is my go-to way of reading comics now and is the most cost-effective way to read many classics.
Subscription Services
If you’re looking for the “Netflix of Comics,” the #1 game in town is Comixology Unlimited. Comixology Unlimited features a selection of titles from most of the major publishers and some original tiles for the price of $6/month. Individual publishers have their own publisher-specific plans that let you access all of their scanned titles for a fee. DC Comics has DC Universe, which also includes access to live-action and animated tv shows and movies, for $8/month ($6.25/mo if annual). Marvel has Marvel Unlimited, which contains a larger selection of older Marvel comics but no movies, for $10/month ($5.75/mo if annual). I would recommend trying the free trials for as long as possible to read the major classics available on each service before picking one to stick with.
Owning (Digital)
Imagine that buying digital copies of music on iTunes was still acceptable today. That’s what Comixology offers for comics, and it’s again the best game in town by far. Prices for new releases are the same for what the issues are physically (~$3.99/single issue). But, older titles have reduced prices and there’s always some great sales going on too. Comixology is also owned by Amazon and so is accessible on anything that can have a Kindle app. The reading format for Comixology (“guided view”) is also the best by far of any digital comics experience including the library apps mentioned earlier. One publisher, Dark Horse, operates its own independent digital comics store that I have no experience with, but basically everything else is available on Comixology.
Owning (Physical)
Again, comics are published in book form and so are available wherever books are sold. So check Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, et cetera. There’s a few comic-specific book stores online, but the one that has the best deals I’ve found is InStockTrades; their prices are regularly 42% off of the sticker price. If you want to buy comics from an honest-to-goodness comic book shop, visit the Comic Shop Locator to see which stores are near you.
Comics Formats
To quickly crib from comics scholar Scott McCloud (thumbnail), “comics” is a broad term that encompasses many, but not all, forms of sequential art. Comics are representational images placed in sequence throughout a given space; animation is a medium where the images are in sequence in the same space and only vary through time. I think this inherent similarity is why you see a lot of cross-fertilization between comics artists and animators (both often called “cartoonists”), especially in Japan. But back to comics…
The primary distinction among modern comics today is between the “comic strip” and the “comic book.” Comic strips are the funnies that you can read in a physical newspaper. Examples include Peanuts by Charles Schultz or Dilbert by Scott Adams. A comic strip is a series of panels of typically no more than one page that come out either every day (dailies, usually in black-and-white) or every Sunday (Sunday strips, which are often in color). Modern webcomics like Whomp! by Ronnie Filyaw or xkcd by Randall Monroe are normally just online versions of a comic strip, but the web makes much more interactive media and comics possible. (Note that xckd often consists of single-panel “comics” which are thus not sequential art and are properly not considered comics, but that’s kind of technical.)
Comic books are longer-form comics that are originally published in a magazine/periodical format. Those individual comic books are called single issues or informally floppies. One issue of a typical mainstream comic book consists of about 23 pages (excluding ads) and costs $3.99.In the United States, most comic book issues are serial installments of ongoing series like The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) or The Walking Dead (2009). New issues of these series typically come out monthly, and always on a Wednesday. For Franco-Belgian comics, the equivalent of ongoings are called bandes-dessinées (BDs) as represented by well-known works like The Smurfs by Peyo and The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé. Ongoings are contrasted with Limited Series or miniseries which, unlike ongoings, began with a known ending issue. For example, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller was always going to be published as #1 through #4; it didn’t get cancelled after the fourth issue. Both limited series and ongoings are contrasted with various one-shots, like annuals and specials, which contain a (usually) stand-alone story told in the one issue.
Just like how a TV show with serial episodes are repackaged together and sold in boxsets, both comics books and comic strips are gathered and sold as Collected Editions. The most common form is the Trade Paperback (TPB), which is a softcover book typically containing between 4 to 12 issues. Obviously, Hardcovers (HCs) exist too, typically for more in-demand works. Japanese comics (i.e. “manga”) are collected in very similar formats but I don’t know them well-enough to confidently list the equivalent terms here. Franco-Belgian comics are typically collected in albums. Every comics publisher though has various lines of collected editions that need extra-special terms. One noteworthy type of extra-special collected edition is the omnibus, which attempts to collect a whole series in as few physical as possible; the Franco-Belgian equivalent is the intégrales.
Similar to a collected edition is the Graphic Novel, with the only difference being that a graphic novel tells a stand-alone story that was never previously released or serialized. Examples include The Death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin and Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner. Over time, however, the term “graphic novel” has been diluted to cover any format of comic that comes out in a book-form, including collected editions. The cause of this shift has been assigned to book publishers, who desire to distance themselves from negative connotations of the word “comic book” (namely, the superhero genre) when promoting works such as Maus by Art Spiegelman (one of the first works to be classified as a graphic novel per Wikipedia). The best story encapsulating the snobbish attitude of using the term “graphic novel” this way comes from Neil Gaiman:
“I remember once at a party running into the editor of the literary page of a major newspaper.” You can already tell that, pushing back in his chair behind the desk of his office, he really likes telling this story. “And he was asking me what I did, and I said, ‘I write comics.’ And I could see him turn off–it was like, This is somebody beneath my nose. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘which comics do you write?’ and I told him this and that, and then I said, ‘I also do this thing called ‘Sandman,’ and he went, ‘Wait, hang on, you’re Neil Gaiman!’ He said, ‘My God, man, you don’t write comics, you write graphic novels .’ And I suddenly felt like someone who had been informed that she wasn’t a hooker, that in fact she was a lady of the evening.
Steve Erickson, Dreamland : When Neil Gaiman Writes the Last Chapter of ‘The Sandman’ This Fall, the Greatest Epic in the History of Comic Books–Seven Years and 2,000 Pages–Will Come to a Close, LA Times, 1995-09-03
Truly there is a lot of ignorance as to what “comics” are.
Understanding Comics as a Medium
While anyone can read a comic, understanding and appreciating the decisions that the comic creator(s) made along the way is another thing entirely. I recognize that when I watch movies, I am missing the subtleties of scene composition, sound mixing, editing, and whatever else that film buffs would recognize instantly. The same thing applies to comics. If comics were evaluated on their own MD scale, I say the categories would be Penciling, Inking, Coloring, Lettering, Scripting & Plotting, and Overall Look. Like movies, excellence in comics is recognized with awards, with the equivalent of the Oscars being the Eisners (although the Harvey Awards are also prestigious).
If I could do so, I would now describe the key considerations in what separates good comics from bad comics as it comes to penciling, inking, panel design, etc. By I am not capable of doing that and it would take up far too much of your time that would be better used for reading comics and getting a feel for them yourself. If you’re interested in the theory of such things, the place to begin is definitely Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. If you like that, then Will Eisner’s earlier Comics and Sequential Art is something to look into. If you’re more interested in real-world breakdowns of these elements in comics, there’s an excellent youtube channel Strip Panel Naked by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou that has videos examining things like “Isolation and the 9-Panel Grid” and “The Power of the Double Splash [Page].”
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Hopefully you now have a better understanding of comics and won’t immediately dismiss the comics-related posts that I’ll make in the future as childish capeshit. If that’s not the case, then take it up with INTBiQ Meta. In the meantime, I’ll be enjoying my little picture books.