Comics as an Art Form, or Why Your Kids Love Stan Lee
It’s likely that your kids love The Avengers or compare their dad to Superman to see who’s stronger. Parents clutch their heads, lamenting that we have an unpatriotic generation, but can you blame kids who have fallen in love with the world’s most successful superhero film?
For starters, let’s remember that adults themselves don’t mind watching comic book movies, playing themed slot machines at CasinoChan Canada, discussing over a beer that is cooler than Tony Stark or Doctor Strange. It’s interesting, unusual, and addictive, so it’s no wonder our kids are so fanatical about it.
Beautiful graphics, amazing special effects, plots that are becoming more and more complex, twisted and multifaceted – all this makes schoolchildren from a young age closely follow the novelties in the world of comics, choose their favorite brand there (as a rule, two giants – Marvel and DC are fighting for the audience’s attention) and understand all these universes a hundred percent better than many adults. Comic book universes are like Santa Barbara for teens and millennials, so let’s get it right from the start.
What Are Comics and When Did They Come Into Being?
There are many definitions, but in the end, they all more or less boil down to one thing: comics are an art form in which text and illustrations have equal rights and carry the same meaning. Roughly speaking, it is a story in pictures with few explanatory remarks. Today comics are studied within the framework of sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology.
Why so? Because in principle it was common in many ancient cultures to depict scenes on various topics (from everyday life to mythology and history), accompanied by literally a few lines of text that were supposed to make certain points clearer. Even bas-reliefs in temples or some frescoes are also considered to be distant forebears of comics. In the Middle Ages and the New Age such “comics”, or more precisely still, just all sorts of stories in pictures, were very popular. The explanation is quite prosaic: it was necessary to somehow get religion into the heads of everyone, from small to large, but to do it in such a way that most of the uneducated population could understand it.
So, if it were not for these biblical “comics”, widespread in Europe, the story could have been different. And not only Europe, in fact, religious plots and pictures, in one way or another, have been present in all human cultures.
In any event, the formula of “colorful pictures plus a little uncomplicated text” proved its efficacy hundreds of years ago. But in the twentieth century, something very special began.
Conventional art was rapidly becoming boring, there was modernism – the crisis of traditionalism, and after him the avant-garde – the crisis of modernism. Artists of that time experimented in every way imaginable. And although the origins of comics were lost somewhere in Europe, it was in America, where they began to acquire an art form.
Comics in their essence are a cross between literature and art. Not only did they borrow certain elements from their elders, but they became the embodiment of a new, intuitive means of expression and an incredibly fluid tool for creating works of art. This fusion enriched both art forms, adding dynamism and clarity to literature and teaching illustrations to be lively, fast, or slow.
What Did Comics Borrow From Literature?
First, the plot. More specifically, narrativity. That is, comics, contrary to what many parents think, make sense, have a certain plot, a plot, and everything inherent in a literary work – the plot, the development, the climax, and the denouement.
Why this point is important: pictures used to be just a static representation of some event in the story – we all know how it is: the picture at the end of the book with the caption “Mute Scene” where all the characters are frozen in the same position as the words described on the adjacent page. In comics, on the other hand, the pictures replace each other, as sentences or paragraphs usually do, thus becoming part of something big and weighty. After all, it’s essentially a storyboard. “Show, not tell,” is the motto of comics.
Second, comics use expressive language. There is a widespread belief that comics are just simplified literature, but such a belief is just that – a simplification.
The language of comics uses all the same means of expression as conventional literature. Plus slang and sound imitation. The explanation is quite simple: comics are meant to be gripping, written in a language that will keep its reader riveted to the magazine, so the dynamics are evoked (in addition to the successive pictures) by the narrative style itself.
Sound imitation is needed not just to imagine what’s going on in the picture, but to try to hear it. And much of the text, if present, most often describes dialogue, so it mimics the way a real person would speak, again without the long, slick monologues.
Thirdly, comics are related to literature by their division into genres. Many comic book genres in one way or another repeat existing genres of literature.
If we talk specifically about superhero culture, they are very much like fairy tales. There is a positive character, a negative character, and there is a struggle between them. The positive character, as a rule, illustrates intelligence, strength, righteousness, and faith in humanity, while the negative character, accordingly, uses his bad example to show how bad it is to be greedy, evil, and at the same time to strive for world domination. Good old archetypes reign supreme here as well. So even in the absence of text, the cautionary part remains.
What Have Comics Borrowed From the Visual Arts?
Pictures in comics are the key to success. To depict a story, it is not enough to simply sketch it out (unless that sketchiness is an important part of the idea, of course). Illustrations in comics make children look at them for a long time, try to draw their own, and discuss among themselves the styles of different artists. By the way, that’s why the name of the comic book artist or artist is often the most powerful part of the budget for work.
As a rule, superhero comics use visual means of expression in every available way. Speaking of character archetypes, accordingly, bad characters are painted an uncomfortable color for the eyes, monsters have fangs, spikes, slime – anything that would make them unappealing to the reader.
Positive heroes, on the other hand, have great posture, a muscular body, everything that is characteristic of the ideal of righteous strength. The superheroines are portrayed as feminine as possible, which immediately conveys to young readers an alignment of certain values. Whether this is good or not depends on one’s perspective.
Color is a completely separate type of visual means of expression. Color not only creates the mood of a comic book (as in black and white noir stories) but also conveys the story. Gotham’s dark colors are a symbol of the city’s rottenness. And the bright and contrasting combinations of blue, red, and white colors always accompany Superman or Captain America, so they are meant to foster patriotism and a desire to become that same protector through admiration for the hero.
The text itself is also always designed graphically, that is, depending on how, what color, what font, and what size the line is written, we can understand whether the hero is calm or he shouts. If, for example, the borders of the letters are not sharp, but as if shaking, we understand without explanation that the character is worried, frightened, or stammering. In general, the text from the picture is often inseparable, which helps, in fact, read the picture literally.
And another thing: more often than not, comics are animated. It seems to me that this requires the unlimited imagination of the author and the potential reader. After all, most often comics are mythological or fantastical, it would be strange to draw them in realism. By the way, such drawing itself became popular in the twenties of the last century, and it became a symbol of mass culture, a phrase that ceased to be abusive with the light hand of Andy Warhol.
Why Can Comics Be Good for Children?
Adults might wonder why kids need all those pictures when there are so many good regular books. Well, most importantly, comics don’t encroach on the book throne. The fact that there are good comics does not devalue books.
- First, for younger students, reading comics can be about freedom of choice. That is, reading is usually imposed on them by teachers, parents, and grandparents, while comic books are something they can read solely on a whim. It is an activity in their own space, completely voluntary.
- Second, comics are developmental. In movies and cartoons, the imagination is hardly involved, a child sees the whole picture at once. In comics, in between shots some gaps are filled by the kid himself. Looking at comics, children can interpret the pictures themselves, for example, facial expressions, or other external characteristics of the characters.
Children recognize who is who, what situation in the picture – tense, relaxed or dynamic – solely by poses, lines, and fonts. They make up how all these frames sound in their heads, what voice the characters have. All the pictures are put together in a child’s head in a continuous narrative, if the first picture shows the characters running, and the next frame they are already lying in a cloud of dust, the picture of the fall completely restores the child in his head. In essence, the comic book is a kind of shorthand that children learn to decipher. Making up the story, the child enriches the vocabulary.
Third, comics help motivate children to read. We are talking about preschoolers: if they like looking at pictures, they might be interested in comics, but without reading the pictures alone it will be hard to understand, so we have to add a little, but still put the letters into words, if the story is interesting.
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