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Comics
For most readers out there, it's not a great stretch to figure out what comics are. The Sunday paper is full of comic strips, from Garfield to Zits, and there are numerous collections out there in book format, from the beloved Calvin and Hobbes collections to Peanuts. For a super-short history: comics as we recognize them started just before the turn of the 20th century. They continued to grow in scope and format until the 1938, when Superman first appeared in Action Comics and the so-called Golden Age of comics began. From that point on, comics and comic books have been circulating all over the world. For more detail on the history of comics, check out The Comic Page.

The key to comics is the format. Think about what comics look like on the page -- sequential boxes of drawing, text bubbles to represent speech, squiggly lines (called motion lines) to indicate movement.

Here is an example from Colleen Doran's sci-fi epic A Distant Soil -- note the panels, the text, the sequence of events and emphasis on emotion:

For the best description of comic art I've found, check out Scott McCloud's excellent book, Understanding Comics. His rather academic definition of comics is this:

juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.

Huh? The keys here are images in sequence on the page designed to tell a story. That story might be a three panel joke and it might be a three hundred page epic.

For those of you who don't want to wait to get the book, here, on his website, is a short desription of where comics fall in between fine art and text.

From my subjective point of view, comics represent something between traditional art, screenplays, and films -- they're visual like art and film, but they are full of dialogue and short description like screenplays. The difference between film and comics is what indicates the separation -- in film, the images are displayed in order in the same space, while in comics the images are displayed in order side by side. As Mr. McCloud puts it, space does for comics what time does for film.

Comics include the short strips you see in the newspaper -- maybe 3 or 4 panels long, usually telling a very short plot or joke. Comics tend to be either black and white or in solid colors. Comic books are longer -- usually around 20 pages long, but are told in that familiar format of panels and text bubbles. Comic book art tends to be more complex than that of the newspaper comics -- it often contains vivid colors and subtle shading, although every comic is unique to the artists involved.

Graphic Novels
Graphic novels, the focus of this site, take the whole storytelling format one step further. The shortest definition of a graphic novel is this:

a book-length comic

It's that simple. Artists and writers create longer plots, ranging from 100 to over 300 pages worth of work, all in the comic art format. As with comic books, they are often quite complex in terms of artwork and the layouts get more adventurous.

Another term you might hear tossed around is trade paperback, or TPB. This refers to a selection of comic books bound into one, sturdier paperback book. They tend to be the same size as graphic novels and often draw together one plotline from a comic book series. In order not to confuse too many people, I have included some trade paperbacks with the one-shot graphic novels.

Now, comics take some practice for new readers. What do I mean? Many readers confronted with comics longer than a comic strip have difficulty knowing how to read the format -- do I read the text? do I look at the picture? Basically, do both. Divide your time between reading the text and observing the visuals. Both are necessary to understand the story, and together they become something entirely different than plain text. The best writers and artists work together to create text and images which work seamlessly and which lead the reader through the page.

This page comes from Brian Michael Bendis' and Mike Oeming's wonderful book, Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl?. Take a look.

See how the text bubbles link to tell you who's speaking? Notice how the frame spreads across the page and repeats, giving you a sense of time and space? That's how the best comics work.

Manga
Manga refers to Japanese print comics -- examples include Ranma 1/2 and Adolf. Japan produces an impressive about of comics and graphic novels for everyone from children to adults. There are many subgenres of manga aimed at specific audiences or for partiuclar age groups. There is a general style to manga -- exaggerated eyes and simplified features, simple outlines -- but manga also can vary the same way that American comics do.

Anime
Anime is the term for Japanese animated films, often related to manga. The two art forms feed off of each other, so I've included the term for anime here to clarify the distinction between the two.

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