A comic book is a publication in which a story is told through drawings and accompanying text, and is at the intersection of literature and the visual arts. This is also the common name for all stories in pictures, where the story is told primarily through illustrations rather than text. Large comics, where illustrations tell a full-fledged work of fiction, are called graphic novels, and short comics of a few drawings are called strips. Comics also include Japanese manga, Korean manhwa, and Chinese manhua.
Comics do not necessarily contain text, there are also “silent” comics with an intuitive plot. But more often than not, direct speech in a comic is conveyed by a phylactery, a “word bubble” that is “blown” out of the character’s mouth. The author’s words are usually placed above or below the frames of the comic. Comics can be of any literary genre and drawing style. Even the works of classics of literature are adapted in the form of comics. But historically, the most common genres of comics have been adventure and cartooning. This stereotype has long marred the reputation of comics. The style of drawing in a comic book has a certain amount of conventionality. It is simplified for speed of drawing and ease of perception.
Comics are firmly intertwined with film and animation. Scott McCloud, famous for writing “The Essence of Comics,” said that movies are comics, only extremely slow and detailed. We can also see this connection in the fact that the English word “cartoon” is also used to refer to a cartoon or comic book. Or take Japanese comics-“manga” often repeat the plots of traditional anime. But just as movies can interpret comics, comics can also be drawn to books, so often, in order to find the continuation of a comic book that has not yet been finished, people look for the corresponding book. It turns out that the claim that comic books discourage reading real books is incorrectly worded.
At first glance it seems that reading comics is easier than reading classic literature, because there is much less text. This is both true and not: there are indeed fewer words on the pages, and sometimes none at all. But text in comics is not just letters. Comics tell stories in a special language: sometimes it’s like the language of thick novels, sometimes it’s like the language of theater or film, and sometimes it’s like nothing at all. Not all people can take stories in comic book form so easily. It’s a well-known fact that children and teenagers find pictures easier to read than solid text, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones who can read comic books. There are situations when it simply becomes impossible to describe something in simple words. At such moments, illustrations come to the rescue. They help make it easier to understand the meaning, to present the picture and all the colors of the event being described.