I got distracted doing other comic work tonight to find time to write an article about the benefits of being part of a webcomic collective. Here’s the next chunk of my thesis, still from Part I An Explanation of the Art of Comics:

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In order to understand where webcomics are today as an art form, it is important to know from what humble beginnings webcomics came. Before one can discuss that, one must know what comics are and how comics as art are significant. After all, without the comic, there would be no webcomic.

Comics, often more formally defined as “sequential art,” have existed since prehistoric man found he could represent his world with ochre on cave walls.  The term can be applied to the Bayeux tapestry[i]-which depicts the chronological progression of a battle-to the sequential panels of a jumping goat painted on ancient Iranian pottery over 5000 years ago.[ii][iii] Of course, unless one stops and thinks about the very large definition of “comics,” many would not consider such artifacts to be comics, not with the very negative connotation comics carry today. Many believe a comic must contain a punch-line, or is a single panel composition, of little consequence, created to amuse children or, at best, young adults who should be doing something more worthwhile (like reading a book)-and if aimed at adults, the presumption is that they are relatively illiterate and require “pictures” to read and comprehend the story. But, Scott McCloud, in his ground-breaking work Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, succinctly gets to the heart of the matter, taking Will Eisner’s definition of comics as sequential art even further. As he states, comics are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”[iv]

It is also important to, with finality and confidence, state that yes, comics are an art form. Comic creators must have a mastery of visual and literary fields, a sense of composition, and an understanding of how time flows throughout that composition. They must have strong grasp of story or idea, and have the ability to convey information in a method that can be understood and perceived by a universal audience. To be an illustrator requires years of devotion to one’s craft and to the study of one’s environment and surroundings; it also requires the ability to reproduce a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas in a fashion both aesthetically pleasing and comprehensible to an audience.  To be an author requires years of dedication to language, grammar, narrative, story-telling, character-building, diction, and craft. To be a comic creator, one must be masters of both the visual and written fields, and if being an author or an illustrator is a not only a respectable calling, but one of merit, it is a shame that being a comic creator is not held in the same esteem. Scott McCloud describes comics as “the ‘bastard child’ of words and pictures,” but goes on to say that this view point is self-perpetuated by comic creators themselves, who have yet to understand the true power that comics as a medium possess.[v] Comic critic Douglas Wolk also states in his book Reading Comics:

One numbingly common mistake in the way culture critics address them [comics] is to invoke “the comic book genre.”  As cartoonist and their longtime admirers are getting a little tired of explaining, comics are not a genre; they’re a medium [...] Prose fiction, sculpture, video: those, like comics, are media-forms of expression that have few or no rules regarding their content other than the very broad ones imposed on them by their form.[vi]

Taking into account the length of time that sequential art has existed, the enormous diversity of material comics cover-from Art Spiegelman’s tale of the Holocaust, Maus[vii] to Joe Sacco’s journey through Palestine,[viii] to Peter Parker’s adventures in Spider-Man-and the mediums through which comics are made-paper, painting, carvings, pixels and more-proves they are not only true, fine art, but also of great cultural and historical significance.  We as a species would not have been making sequential art for thousands of years if it were not an important form of art, significant to us in its representation and content.

[ii] Touted as the “first animation” in news, the four panels depicting a goat jumping are displayed side-by-side on the pottery, falling under Eisner’s definition of comics as sequential art.  Animated images are not juxtaposed, but positioned in the same space.

[iii] “CHTHO’s Cultural Blunder and Documentary, Production on World’s Oldest Animation.” The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies, Mehr News Agency,<http://www.mehrnews.com/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=649189> (March 3, 2008).

[iv] Understanding Comics, 9.

[v] Understanding Comics, 47, 18.

[vi] Douglas Wolk, Reading Comic: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, (Da Capo Press, 2007) 11.

[vii] Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1992

[viii] Winner of an American Book Award in 1996