In this unrepentantly subjective feature Carl Doherty looks at the evolution of Western comic books, the present state of sequential art, the medium’s digital potential and what publishers must do to ensure future interest.

Depending on whom you ask, the comic book is dying, enjoying a creative renaissance, or slowly being integrated into largely non-profitable webcomics and e-books. These opinions are all correct to a certain degree. Sequential art, as Will Eisner coined it, is a medium so flimsily defined that it’s impossible to pinpoint its origins, or to even say precisely what a comic book is, and what is purely an illustrated novel or picture book.

The comic book, so-called because its contents were traditionally exclusively humorous, is arguably not so much dying as it is evolving. Sales of American comics have consistently dropped since the collector’s boom of the 1990s, and many publishers continue to churn out monthly material in the hope of scoring a lucrative movie deal than for the sake of producing entertaining and thought-provoking stories in a comic book format.

Please note: the following brief retrospective is not intended to be extensive, but rather a concise summary of some of the key points in the last century of the medium.

Funny books

While the blending of image and caption can be traced back to, amongst many other sources, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Japanese art and the satirical cartoons of William Hogarth, the comic book only hit the level of narrative sophistication resembling its modern descendent in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, when comic strips were included in American and European newspapers. These strips soon became so popular that they would be complied into cheap paperback collections, essentially forming the first graphic novels; though that term that would come much later.