1. Defining Comics
Pinning Down the Invisible Art

2. What are comics?

3. How comics are "done"
How comics are "read"
What comics should be
Why define comics?

4. Comics is not
literature (or is it?)
a genre
text with pictures added (or
vice versa)
a prose version of film

5. A medium
Comics is

6. 9. Comics
Comics may be
The 9th art

7. According to Scott McCloud

8. Horrocks on McCloud
Politically-
motivated
revisionist

9. The 9th Art

10. Is this a comic?

11. Is this a comic?

12. Is this a comic?

13. "Pup" Ponders the Heat-Death of the Universe
Is this a comic?

14. What about this?
“Do the Evolution”

15. Does a comic have to be a sequence?

16. Delaney on McCloud
• empty gesture
• applying science
to art

17. Gardner on McCloud
Comics, in the end, is
defined less by its formal
properties . . . than by its
invitation to the reader to
project herself into the
narrative and to project the
narrative beyond the page.

18. Motion/Stasis

19. Sound/Silence

20. Passage of time/Time is fluid

21. Continous narrative/Discreet moments

22. Impressions/Blank spaces

23. Comics resist definition

24. Comics
(In order of appearance)
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
xkcd, "Hypotheticals"
Dave Sim, Cerebus
Drew Weing, "Pup" Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe
Pearl Jam, ”Do the Evolution” (dir. Kevin Altieri & Todd
MacFarlane)
Chris Ware, Quimby Mouse
Rebecca Dart, Rabbithead
IDrawGirls, motion
Tezuka Osamu, Ode to Kirihito
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, A Drifting Life
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Jim Woodring, The Frank Book
Alan Moore, From Hell