I've been lucky enough to travel the world a bit for work, and it's always a priority in my travels to learn a bit about the local comics culture and of course to visit the best comics spots wherever I find myself.

In Italy, comics are "fumetti" (referring to the smoky appearance of speech bubbles);

in Spain, "TBO" [tay-bay-oh] (referring to a classic comics anthology magazine of the same name, and also a pun on the phrase "te veo" ["I see you"]);

in Japan, comics are "manga" (literally "whimsical/impromptu pictures");

in France/Belgium, "bandes dessinées" (literally "drawn strips");

in Germany, "comics" are—wait for it—"comics" (which does feel appropriately German);

and here in the States, comics are either "comics"/"cartoons," most likely referring to newspaper strips, political cartoons, or comic book shop "floppies" (superheroes and the like) or "graphic novels" as in this subreddit or as in "please take me and my hobbies seriously, these picture books aren't just for kids" (that's how I interpret it, at least).

So tell me fellow global comics fans:

What does your culture call comics, and what does that tell us about your culture and its relationship to the medium?

Edit 1: for grammar

On a discord chat, someone posted this.

Going of the tangent into another topic, Watchmen today is often seen as the comic book that turned comics into darker grittier stories worthy of at worst good quality movie screenwriting and often praised as being the first comic book that is a genuine work of literature. It made it into Times' 100 Greatest Books of all time (a big deal for its time when comics were seen as Childish) and even snobby novel review publications such as Neon Books rate it as a good story. Basically people credit Watchmen for the shift in the 80s from generic cartoony superheroes to serious story involving very mature matters like rape and war. However diehard comic book fans argue that Watchmen's pioneering status is waaaay overrated. For starters they point out while it sold well, it was at most a typical bestselling series and lagged behind the big names such as Superman and Spiderman. In addition Batman stories and other stuff already began to explore stuff like human trafficking and suicidal versions of Peter Parker in deep depression during the same period independent of Watchmen. Most of the very dark 90s stuff came from authors who grew up with the original 60s and 70s superheroes thus not being primarily looking up to Moore for ideas. This isn't even counting foreign comics in particular Manga which have been doing adult stuff like warcrimes in historical genres, abusive relationships in romance, and other genres and non-English European comics where many works were political satire. Stuff American comics had long forgotten about before the 80s (and technically this isn't true per say-even the 70s "kiddy stuff" already had complex consequential themes and plotlines such as Gwen Stacy's death in the first incarnation of Spiderman). So basically Watchmen's impact on the comicbook medium is waaaaay over the top than it actually did despite it being one of the timeless classics.

I also seen these two discussions a while back.

https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/4cruui/why_the_watchmen_graphic_novel_is_overrated/

https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/4cruui/why_the_watchmen_graphic_novel_is_overrated/

Now before anyone accuses me of being a hater, I love love love Watchman. Its the work that got me into Western comics.

However as a manga reader for much of my life and someone who consumes more non-English European stuff as is available in translation, I really doubt not just Watchmen but Alan Moore was the "Tolkien" or more accurately the "George Martin" of comics. Hell even as a big LOTR fan and someone who tried out ASOIAF recently, I already call out on claims like epic fantasy not existing without Tolkien or gritty fantasy being kicked off by George Martin (which is an argument for another subreddit).

I will comment specifically on foreign comics though. I read over 500 manga titles from various eras and genres from Sailor Moon to obscure stuff even people in Japan never outside of hardcore genre fans and otakus read such as Aces of Diamond (a baseball manga). Going back to work as far as the 60s and 70s manga was already subverting, averting, and deconstructing tropes many Westerners typically criticize such as the "determined hero who always win because he has heart" and "love conquers all" as seen in Cyborg 009, Ashita No Joe, Violence Jack, and so many more. Even as far as the grandfather of manga Osamu Tezuka you had stuff like civilian casualties in bombing in the Vietnam War, attempted rapes, and other very dark stuff most Westerners would not believe is in manga. Now non-English European comics from the limited selection I read already went into political satire, international world events, philosophy, the Holocaust, and other mature topics as early as the 1950s. So this alone proves Watchmen and Alan Moore in general gets waaay to overcredited for making comics mature.

But for sake of argument, lets leave it to American comics. I haven't followed the superhero genre much but comic historians state the stuff I quoted earlier above and so do some hardcore comic geeks I chatted with. I was pretty surprised the first run of Spiderman already had something as serious as Gwen Stacy's death which I learned days ago so I'm very curious about Watchman and Alan Moore's supposed genre turning point in American and British comics.

Was he basically equivalent to say Leonardo Da Vinci or Tolkien flanderized role a pioneering their mediums and genres? Or is he basically another case of say Doom getting all the credit like a unique FPS only created by a bunch of geniuses that solely created the genre but in reality the gaming industry was advancing and we'd eventually have gotten realistic stuff like Medal of Honor and later bloody First Person Shooters shooters like the later Call of Duty games and Dead Island? That without Alan Moore and Watchmen, the comic industry would have gotten the serious stuff comics now have reached too?

Obviously this is not the case with foreign stuff especially manga but how is the case with the North American comics industry?

And please I don't want a simplistic lazy answer such as "America is a Puritan country" that doesn't bother exploring the actual circumstances that led to Japanese comics from not facing the same angry parents leading to something like the Comics Code that was passed in America.

Why did Japan's comic industry get away with blood and gore and very sanitized sex scenes in comics aimed at audience below 18? Did Manga's early wide demographs division regarding age and gender groups play a core role into this?

Hello,

I am hoping this subreddit will be able to help me! I am looking for participants for an anonymous, online study on health comics as part of my PhD: Comics & Health: Informing and Evaluating the Design of Public Health Information Comics.

The study is looking at how comic design can impact the recall of health information. It takes between 15-40 minutes to complete (depending on the depth of responses you want to/can give). Anyone and everyone is welcome to participate as long as they are over the age of 18 and the study must be completed on a PC or laptop.

I would be really grateful to anyone who takes the time to do my study. It is a unique health comics PhD project which will give empirical research to advance comics theory!

The link to participate is below - feel free to share with others too! https://research.sc/participant/login/dynamic/6397CB68-31DB-4B9D-B9D2-693A54A67072

Thank you to anyone who participates and if you have any questions about my research, just let me know!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/books/art-spiegelman-maus-breakdowns.html?smid=url-share

I'm an American living in East Asia, and I know that people here read American comics and watch movies based on them, but I'm not sure about their broader views on the original source material. Have there ever been any academic studies on Asian perceptions of American comics? If not, it sounds like a great topic for a thesis.

Here is a link to the text we will be reading for this month's book club.

Throughout June, r/Comics_Studies will have a “book club” on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, one of the most influential (and accessible) primers on the study of comics. Our reading group will focus on “Chapter 3. Blood in the Gutter.” The chapter centers on McCloud’s theory of how readers fill in information from panel to panel. For example, though you may not see the hatchet of a madman go into the back of a terrified passerby in one panel, the screamed “eeyaa!” and “shot” (to abuse filmic language) of a darkened city in the next panel allows your brain to realize that the hatchet likely went into the terrified man’s back. The space between panels is the “gutter” in which your imagination sees movement.

For this book month’s club, we would like you to talk about the chapter in the comment section of this post. Summarizing the chapter is individually helpful, but playing with the chapter—arguing with or postulating its effects beyond the chapter’s confines—will probably be more interesting for you and others.

Comic scholars frequently reference Understanding Comics. Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society called for papers looking back at McCloud’s text for Understanding Comics’ 30th anniversary. Hillary Chute, one of the biggest exponents of comics studies in the 2010s, references McCloud’s work throughout her various texts on alternative comics of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And More Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods—a critical theory book about comics released in 2019—includes a chapter that analyzes Understanding Comics as a philosophical argument about the comic form.

However, McCloud’s view of the importance of the panel-to-panel gutter and his “metacomic” on the whole are not universally appreciated. For example, Thierry Groensteen, a comics scholar from Belgium, views the movement from page to page as more important for a reader’s experience of a comic than the movement from panel to panel ^[see ^The ^System ^of ^Comics]. In an interview snippet with the Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society ^[“Comics ^Professionals ^on ^Comics ^Studies”], the comic artist David Walker argues that Understanding Comics takes up far too much of the academy’s view of comics, removing space for Will Eisner’s thoughts on the form in Comics and Sequential Art. Moreover, Walker notes that McCloud’s work is problematic due to its pervasiveness in academia: Understanding Comics, like Maus, Watchmen, and Persepolis, might be so canonical that it leads to academics new to the comics studies field having a pretentious, incorrect conception of what comics are.

This brings me to the questions that I have for our reading group:

1. Can you come up with any examples of the “gutter” beyond the examples given by McCloud?
2. In what ways does the gutter limit the medium? In what ways does the gutter benefit it?
3. What are the limits to McCloud’s view of the gutter? In the chapter, McCloud hypothesizes that people use all of their senses to fill in what occurs within the gutter (88-90). Does this seem true, or is “seeing” what is in the gutter similar to seeing a word on a page rather than the individual letters making up that word?
4. Do you agree with McCloud that realism stops people from filling in the gutter as easily as they otherwise could?
5. Do you think that McCloud practices Orientalism when he postulates that the “East”’s prodigious use aspect-to-aspect transitions is a product of a non-goal-oriented culture?

u/stixvoll wanted me to add an argument against McCloud, so here is the link: http://www.hicksville.co.nz/Inventing%20Comics.htm

Each month from June we will select a short article/text to be read and pin the post to the top of the sub. There will be no physical or video meeting, instead we will discuss the text in the comments section of said post.

We welcome input from people of all ages and abilities and hope you will join us in creating a thriving community.

The Solstice Lit Mag annual contest is open for submissions from now until June 1, 2022. The Graphic Lit (Comic) Judge this year is Xeric Award winner Josh Neufeld, author of A.D: New Orleans After the Deluge.  Read more about the contest this year here https://solsticelitmag.org/contest/ Please share

Hey all!

I was wondering if we could put together a reading list for people looking to get into things. Or if there are any handy links to such lists, if we could collate those.

Thanks!