Comic Books

Comic strips like Winsor McKay’s “Little Nemo” started to develop what became a comic book with it’s idea of a continued narrative. This week I read the superhero comic FlyMan, one of the Crime Illustrated comics, a DuckTales comic, and some of Herge’s Tintin. These began to have a bigger narrative to them than a comic strip would. A comic strip usually has a set up and payoff and does it in a few panels. In a comic book, our main characters start going through arcs and follow a more film narrative. Tintin especially shows this. Herge’s Tintin comics were longer and had more plot and character development in it. Usually we see Tintin encountering a villain and overcoming that conflict, but like in Tintin in Tibet, we see him grow as a character as his conflict is internal. It has a much deeper message and meaning. Tintin also has time for several characters to really develop, like Captain Haddock. Comic books like Tintin and DuckTales also reached out to a wide audience. They weren’t specifically for kids or adults and they were and still are just as entertaining for either party. Besides the text narrative, comic books had to expand the visual narrative. There’s much more complex environments and more sequences to show what’s going on.