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Comic book

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Comic books on display at a museum, depicting how they would have been displayed at a rail station store in the first half of the 20th century
A common comic-book cover format displays the issue number, date, price and publisher along with an illustration and cover copy which may include a story's title.

A comic book, comic-magazine, or simply comic is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are often accompanied by descriptive prose and written narrative, usually dialogue contained in word balloons, which are emblematic of the comics art form.

Comic Cuts was a British comic published from 1890 to 1953. It was preceded by Ally Sloper's Half Holiday (1884), which is notable for its use of sequential cartoons to unfold narrative. These British comics existed alongside the popular lurid "penny dreadfuls" (such as Spring-heeled Jack), boys' "story papers" and the humorous Punch magazine, which was the first to use the term "cartoon" in its modern sense of a humorous drawing.

The first modern American-style comic book, Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, was released in the US in 1933 and was a reprinting of earlier newspaper humor comic strips, which had established many of the story-telling devices used in comics.[1] The term comic book derives from American comic books once being a compilation of comic strips of a humorous tone; however, this practice was replaced by featuring stories of all genres, usually not humorous in tone.

The largest comic book market is Japan. By 1995, the manga market in Japan was valued at ¥586.4 billion ($6–7 billion),[2] with annual sales of 1.9 billion manga books (tankōbon volumes and manga magazines) in Japan, equivalent to 15 issues per person.[3] In 2020, the manga market in Japan reached a new record value of ¥612.5 billion due to a fast growth of digital manga sales as well as an increase in print sales.[4][5] The comic book market in the United States and Canada was valued at $1.09 billion in 2016.[6] As of 2017, the largest comic book publisher in the United States is manga distributor Viz Media, followed by DC Comics and Marvel Comics featuring superhero comics franchises such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the X-Men.[7] The best-selling comic book categories in the US as of 2019 are juvenile children's fiction at 41%, manga at 28% and superhero comics at 10% of the market.[8] Another major comic book market is France, where as of 2013 Franco-Belgian comics and Japanese manga each represent 40% of the market, followed by American comics at 10% market share.[9][needs update]

Structure

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Page 76 of a graphic novel adaptation of Tristram Shandy, drawn by the British cartoonist Martin Rowson

Comic books heavily rely on their organization and visual presentation. Authors focus on the frame of the page, size, orientation, and panel position in order to convey the book's content. Specific components of comic books include panels, speech bubbles (also known as balloons), text lines, and characters. Speech balloons are convex containers that hold dialogue or other information. They are generally connected to a character via a tail element, which has an origin, path, tip, and directional point. Creating a comic book involves several steps, including writing, drawing, and coloring, and must take into account directions, axes, data, and metrics.[10] In the United States, the term "comic book" is generally used for comics periodicals and