Gilda

"Comic(s)" is defined in various ways, but usually something like this one from Maruice Horn: "A narrative form containing text and pictures arranged in sequential order (usually chronological)".

A comic book is any bound set of comics. Originally they were reprints of newspaper comic strips that gradually morphed into the form we know today. The most common form is that of the ongoing series, with some now closing in on 70 years of continuous publication, most notably Action and Detective.

For the first couple of decades comic books were anthologies containing several six to eight page stories with a variety of characters. Stories grew longer and longer over time while page counts dropped, until in the 50's and 60's one story per issue was the norm. Modern mainstream comics typically tell their stories over a period of several issues, and method called "decompression".

A trade paperback is just a publishing format, a large format paperback book, 7" x 10", usually collecting three to twelve issues of an ongoing series, the run of a limited series, a series of stories related to a theme, or a complete original work.

Graphic novel was a term first coined by Will Eisner, one of the giants of the industry, to describe his original work A Contract With God, which was followed up by two more similar stories about the residents of a tenement in New York City.

A true graphic novel should be a complete narrative contained in a single volume. A Contract With God, Maus, and Blankets all qualify.

The complete run of a limited series is difficult to classify. Watchmen was conceived as a 12 issue limited series meant to be a complete arc. V for Vendetta was originally an ongoing series that morphed into a limited series that was collected in a single volume. I'd have no problem calling these graphic novels, given that they have a definite narrative structure that parallels the traditional novel.

A collected run from an ongoing series shouldn't be called a graphic novel in my opinion, but a collection. An anthology is just that.

The appeal of comics for me is that it is a unique blend of literature and visual art. Maus has been mentioned before. It's a personal narrative of Art Speigleman's father's experiences during the WW2. What makes it work in a way that makes it different from a traditional novel is the visual metaphor: the Jews are mice and the Germans cats. Speigleman carries this over into other groups, the Russians are pigs, and Americans are dogs, but that's really just an extension of the cat and mouse metaphor that drives much of the narrative. It's something that simply would not work in a traditional novel.

Do they limit imagination? When poorly done, they can, sure, but the same is true of any medium. Comics, particularly those depicting action, show still frames. The reader's mind has to fill in the spaces in between. Once your mind is trained in how this works, and it does take bit of training for it to be natural, this occurs without effort, subconsciously, but the bulk of what is happening is still happening in the reader's mind, not expicitly depicted on the page.

Mainstream superhero comics are just one subset of comics. There are newspaper comics (I happen to love reprints of old adventure strips like Modesty Blaise and James Bond) manga, humor, horror, war, romance, science fiction, drama, superhero fantasy, high fantasy, gangsters, etc. You name a genre, there's a comic to fit the bill.

It's easy to look at comic nerds and dismiss the medium based on on the superhero fanboy stereotype, and believe me there are more than a few who fit that stereotype. Sure there are people who can spend days debating in great detail whether Batgirl or Captain America would win in a fight when it should be patently obvious to even a casual fan that Batgirl not only embarrasses and humiliates Cap in a fight, she takes his shield, steals his lunch, and doesn't even have to break a sweat to do so. But of course those idiot Captain America fanboys refuse to see reason even after you've pointed out all of the relevant evidence a dozen times and refuted all their feeble attempts at justifying their fanwankery, no they just refuse to listen to reason. Mantis or Iron Fist would be a good match, but Cap gets his ass handed to him. Wait, what was my point here?

Oh, yeah, it's easy to look at the stereotype that gets played up by the media and miss that there is a rich, varied array of subjects and methods of presentation and storytelling techniques.

The comic is the medium, the package the story is wrapped in. There's something for almost everyone.

Even with the traditional superhero stuff, there can be more than meets the eye. Young readers can and do respond to the simle plots, colorful costumes and adolescent power fantasies (settng aside that most superhero comics today are written for adults), but there is more there to draw you in. The comics that gain the biggest readerships all have a powerful metaphor, a guiding theme to them that appeals on a basic level. Spider-Man is about responsibility. When he's written well, there's a cosntant tension between his personal life and his "professional" life as Spider-Man, both of which are constantly in need of his time and attention. The X-Men are outcasts who initially served as a metaphor for the historical treatment of Jews, which is hardly surprising given that it was written and drawn by a couple of Jewish men. It later morphed into a metphor for sexual awakening, and the same metaphor that worked earlier became more universal, something that worked for gays (the X-Men have a huge gay following, and superhero comics attract a somewhat higher proportion of gays than the general public in part, I theorize, because one of the core conventions is hiding your true self from society), or for any other quality that might make a teen feel like he/she doesn't belong. Batman's life was changed and given focus by a childhood tragedy. The Fantastic Four is a family that runs around having adventures together, and has a group of wonderful individual metaphors in three of the characters that appeal to different readers for different reasons.

The good ones, when well-written, have something else going on underneath the silly costumes and codenames and impossibly good looking well built people hitting each other that hooks into some of the basic drives and needs and self-image of the fans who hook into them.

It's cool if it isn't your thing. I don't get watching sports or collecting sports cards.

Anime, likewise, is just a format, specifically Japanese animation. The word itself is just a shortened form of the phonetic pronunciation of the Japanese form of the word. The Japanese borrowed the English word, and it was borrowed back and shortened.

There is, as with comics, a variety of subject matters. It isn't all fantasy and giant robots and action. Name a genre, and there's likely an anime to go with it. One of the best war movies ever made, Grave of the Fireflies, is anime. Perfect Blue is a nice psychological thriller. There are spy movies and superheroes and space cowboys and race car drivers with cool cars and examinations of the nature of human consiousness. It's not all big eyed girls in sailor costumes, space cowboys, transsexual martial arts soap operas, and collectible card battles.*

I can't stand poorly dubbed anime either. I much prefer a sub, but a good dub of a good movie can be a cool exerience.

If it's not your thing, that's cool, but there is a depth there that you'll never see.

Gilda

*The anime geeks know what each of those refers to without having to think about it, and can name three different examples of the last one.