comic book

occupation / innovator as

comics artist

screenwriter

nationality

Australian

illustrator

is a concept whose definition tends to get narrower as we go along, excluding different aspects of the genre based on such things as single panels, balloons, and verbal visual balance.

...the concept of what comics is gets narrower as we go along. Each writer on the subject who defines comics wants to exclude something. McCloud excludes the single panel so Family Circus and Far Side are out. Blackbeard says there must be word balloons so Prince Valiant is out. Harvey says there has to be a visual-verbal balance. Somebody else says there must be no redundancy of information with words and pictures repeating each other. This is crap. Pictures have illustrated words and words have explained pictures since the beginning of time. Somebody reads a dull comic and extrapolates rules from it. Who do they think they are? There are all these people trying to be the rule-makers and the end result is bad for the art of Comics.

is a genre where the drawing is the story; it doesn’t illustrate some story.

An illustrator is someone who takes a story and visualizes it. In a comic, the drawing is the story; it doesn’t illustrate it.

is a genre whose theorization invariably concerns time and duration; the duration of a panel's action and the duration between one panel and the next.

...all our theories about how comics are put together are invariably about time. The duration of a panel's action and the duration between one panel and the next. We haven't added very much to the Eisner-Steranko concept of "sequential art."

is problematic to define formally, for some of the best do not involve "sequential images" which is the basis of every formal definition of comics.

I don't think that we should seek to define comics on a formal basis. I think that some of the best comics do not involve "sequential images" which is the basis of every formal definition of comics.

Eddie Campbell

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Eddie Campbell