Text - Rhodes University

2. DEFINITIONS AND TERMINOLOGY
The term comics today covers almost any composition of sequential pictures and words
in a print medium, usually with a narrative element, "[a] narrative work [being] any
artistic work that relates by its style and composition to a figurative representation in
time, without necessarily being in all cases a 'narrative'''. (Couperie, 1968, p.231)
The direct ancestors of comics were European newspaper cartoons of the 1880s; each
cartoon had an accompanying caption that rendered the image more comprehensible, a
device also used in book illustration of the time. The pictures were simply illustrations
of the text, copying as closely as possible the devices of realism used in 19th century
painting, espially literary or historical painting. Because illustration was a commercial art,
intended for consumption by a broad spectrum of society, conservatism in drawing styles
was a prerequisite for any artist working in this field. Formal innovation in comics
dev.eloped along a different route from that in fine art.
An economy of drawing, that could explain a situation or an interaction swiftly and
clearly without words, was the first step towards a style distinctive to comics. Strips like
The Katzenjammer Kids owed much of their success to cleaner, simpler drawings.
Most of the conventions of comics developed alongside those of film, so that methods of
depicting space, time, mood, and so on, are similar. In effect, comics originated as a
hybrid of film and the classical arts such as painting and literature, as "[t]he comic
frame ... condenses time within its still image ..." (Barker, 1989, p.8). Put another way, a
young comics reader says: " television programs are really comics that move." (Werth am,
1955, p.381)
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