Comics is a unique artistic medium that combines words and images. It tells stories through sequential panels that build upon each other. Understanding comics requires literacy in both words and images, as well as how they are combined and relate across panels. Key elements that make up the form of comics include panels, page layouts, transitions between panels, and the use of gestures to convey meaning visually. Comics is a hybrid art form that transcends categories like literature, art, and film.

1. Comics & Graphic Novels
Characteristics of the Medium

2. What is Comics?
The word comics refers to the medium itself. Comics is
a medium like print or film.
Comics is a medium used to express narratives or
ideas through images, usually combined with text
Comics have been used to express various content and
messages: fictional, nonfictional, political,
philosophical, etc.
Only in the past few decades has the medium of
comics received critical attention

3. Comics and comic books generally appeared in periodicals (newspapers,
magazines, and other serialized formats). Graphic novels published as
books.
Graphic novels are long form storytelling with artistic intentions—
they feature more mature adult themes and emotional undertones

4. What is comics?
What are the unique aesthetic characteristics of comics?
What concepts are needed to understand comics?
What are the formal elements that go into making comics?
Why and how are comics a unique form of artistic expression?

5. Words and Pictures
Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Comics is a hybrid medium
that features words and
images, but also the
juxtaposition of words
and images.
Thus, understanding
comics requires multiple
different literacies.
Traditional Literacy
Visual Literacy
Multimedia Literacy

6. Words and Pictures
Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Language
Literature
Rhetoric
Poetry
Images
Art History
Film
Advertising
By combining words and pictures, comics
breakdown this binary

7. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

8. Word specific – where pictures illustrate words, but don’t really add to
the words
Picture specific – where words are a soundtrack to a visually told
sequence
Additive combination – where words amplify an image or vice versa
Interdependent – words and images go hand in hand to convey an idea
that neither one alone would accomplish
Parallel combinations – words and pictures follow different courses
without intersecting; create meaning through juxtaposition
Montage – where words are treated as integral part of the picture
Different ways of combining
words and pictures
Terms from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

9. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Comics: Sequential Art
Will Eisner’s concept of sequential
art: individually, pictures are just
pictures; when part of a sequence,
images are transformed into comics.
Scott McCloud’s definition of comics:
Juxtaposed pictorial and other
images in deliberate sequence,
intended to convey information
and/or produce an aesthetic
response in the viewer.
In short, comics are sequential art.
They are sequential in time and
space.

10. Panels
Panel: A box which contains a given scene.

11. The Narrative
Grammar of Comics
In comics, the grammar of the
narrative consists of panels, panel
arrangement, the shape and design
of panels, the rendering of elements
within panels, the transitions
between panels, the perspective of
panels, and the association of images
between and across panels

12. Frames in Cinema
vs.
Frames in Comics
Images from Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art
“Space does for comics what
time does for film”
-Scott McCloud

13. Images from Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art
Panels Freeze the “Flow of Action”

14. Panels & Borders
Images from Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art
Border: The outline of the panel.

15. “the creation of the frame begins with the
selection of the elements necessary to the
narration, the choice of a perspective from
which the reader is allowed to see them, and
the determination of the portion of each
symbol or element to be included in the frame”
Will Eisner, Comics & Sequential Art (1985)
Creating panel begins with choice of object,
perspective, scale, focus, etc.
Panel
Composition

16. Perspective
Images from Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art

17. Panels and Page-Frames
Images from Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art

18. Panel-To-Panel
Transitions
Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
1) Moment-to-Moment
2) Action-to-Action

19. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Panel-To-Panel
Transitions
3) Subject-to-Subject
4) Scene-to-Scene

20. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Panel-To-Panel
Transitions
5) Aspect-to-Aspect
6) Non-Sequitur

21. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

23. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Six Elements of Art

24. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

25. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

26. Images from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

27. The Meaning of Gestures
Gestures are typically
subtle movements that
convey significance and
meaning.
Gesture include facial
expressions, body
posture, and other
meaningful movements
that intentionally
express meaning.