Comic fans want to save comics. While yesterday’s commentary stated that comics aren’t dead they are in a huge decline and there are worries that comics as we know them may disappear. For some that’s actually a good thing, and I don’t mean the anti-comics or anti-superhero folks. I mean comic fans themselves are starting to argue in favor of changing the nature of comics. I’ll get to digital comics another time and you can probably find an old commentary that at least mentions them somewhere on this site. I’ve been doing this long enough that topics do come up multiple times. It’s when I do nothing but repeat myself that it may be time to close shop once I’m out of review material.
Call them single issues, call them floppies, call them periodicals, I’ll just be calling them comic books or comics, even though the other categories we’ll be discussing are technically still comics. So we’re all on the same page then, “comic books” or “single issues” will refer to the single issues you buy every week or every month if there are only one or two titles you get regularly. “Graphic novel” refers to comics that are released in a big novel-like form, a rather large comic. “Trades” (and I don’t know where the full term, “trade paperback” originated) refers to collections of comic books or comic strips from the newspaper into one book, usually following one storyline from the comic book. “Digest” is a smaller graphic novel, like you used to see on the stands at K-Mart type stores with Archie, which is also the size used for “manga”, comics from Japan sometimes released in this format and sometimes a trade collection of stories from an anthology comic magazine, with a lot more pages than the digest. We all using the same terms here? Good. Note that the video I’m basing this commentary off of is using “single issue” for comic books and we’re good.
Said video comes from Comic Drake, a YouTube creator that does commentaries and history on comics and comic characters. In a recent video he dropped an anti-single issue commentary talking about how the practice should be ended and they should just make graphic novels. I understand his frustration but as I would later write in his comments I think he’s tackling the problem from the wrong side.
Continue reading →
Tell others about the Spotlight:
