Intermedial Comics20141209

October 6, 2017 | Autor: Severi Nygård | Categoría: Media Studies, Comics Studies, Media, Theory of Comics
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Intermedial comics as basis of arts 9.12.2014 Comics are stem of all visual arts from which all printed matter and arts are exceptions.

When the early definitions of comics... Despite the historical traditions comics as we, the public, know it today, is considered to have been born either in 1827 in the eventful story of “Les amours de Monsieur Vieux-Bois” by Swiss RodolpheTöpffer, which is thus the earliest serialized work combining images and text, (although it was published in 1837). Or one can say that the birth year of comics is 1833, the year when the earliest printed comic book story, the Histoire de Monsieur Jabot, was published (which Töpffer created in 1831). Decades later it was defined that the most important characteristics of comics, picture, should be included at least twice and they should form a narrative in order to become a series (as in finnish “sarjakuvat” or in swedish “serier” or in french “Bande dessinnée”, drawn strip). Thus, one definition of comics was crystallized in phrase "comics are a serial combination of images and text”, later “sequential art”. If there were only one picture the case was not comics, but a (single) cartoon. If you had more pictures but they lacked the connection between, it was not a comics, but separate series of images. If there were no images at all, like this page, it was literature. Therefore comics were most likely its own independent art form. Claude Beylie defined comics in 1964 as the ninth art (as did Maurice de Bevere, or Morris, and Pierre Vankeer in Spirou Journal later that year) while the others were: 1. architecture, 2. sculpture, 3. painting and photography, 4. music, 5. dance and theater, 6. poetry (literature), 7. movies, 8. television (and radio). Later at least video (art) and multimedia have been among the candidates of arts (question mark equals those in the Figure 1). From the historical perspective comics should be in the list before at least TV and movies, if not on the very top of the list. That is not the case because comics were not perceived as so-called high-art before the 1960s.

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Figure 1: Comics’ traditional relationship with other arts Arts definitions have changed over time and the example of ancient comedy and tragedy are no longer counted as separate arts but they are combined in the theater arts. Of the original ancient Greek art muses closest to comics comes the muse of comedy, Thalia.

…are not enough! A series of attempts have been made to define comics on the other hand as an intermediate form of literature and painting and on the other intermediate form of cartoons (single drawings) and animation, but not having a great success in it, as comics are both read and looked at.

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Finnish language term for comics, “sarjakuva” (literally: picture series), in this context is somewhat misleading. Although the term usually does describe means well, it also gives restrictive impression, excluding comics using single images. Instead of series, it would be better to talk about a ribbon (bande) as the French do. Although the french BD term limits the expression in vain for drawings. Apparently defining comics in any language is difficult. Also, the English terms "comics" and "comic strip" are not without problems, because they give the impression that the comic book content would typically be something funny. This lead into all kinds of trouble since in the minds of people comics were something for children and they were also otherwise belittled. In order to avoid this expression Will Eisner came up with “sequential art”. The concept of "image" or “picture” is in this context is slightly narrower than the semiotic classification of WJ Mitchell. And from that only the first case, the graphic images, is used. That is images, statues and designed objects. I shall also overlook the aspect of the latter two cases. From the experiencing point of view comics require active reading comprehension and ability to interpret the images in addition to understand the symbolic language of the comics world. These requirements make the comics perhaps the most challenging art. Apparently this is also part of the reason that the definition of comics has been so difficult. In fact just before the self regulating Comics Code was adopted in USA, there were attempts to regulate comics in the state level. In most cases those were overruled partly because the regulators were not able to define comics precisely enough. In fact Comics Code applied only to a certain publication type. At its most confined form comics would probably be defined as follows: Comics contain pictures and text, it is sequential (it has more than one image) so that the images are theme linked, it is drawn, printed in a newspaper or as a separate book, using a protagonist that is a reoccurring character, uses speech bubbles, uses comics’ own form of language, it is narrative, popular, funny but rather not political and the artist is aware that he is creating comics. I call this a conservative definition as "traditional comics". The comics likeness, “comicsness”, of traditional comics can all agree on. Comics fulfilling the above criteria had they heyday in the period of twenty years following the creation of comic book publishers’ self-censorship, Comics Code, and still a large part of the printed comic books can be read within the traditional comics. But because it excludes a large number of works perceived as comics, it functions only as a basis for a broader definition of comics in the art forum. Each of the traditional comics criterion have in turn been knocked out by different definitions and, therefore, I have let comics in the diagram to communicate with other arts, because that is the case in practice. The extent to which this interaction takes place has been one of the major interests for comics researchers. Problems with the definition of comics generally come from the attempts to draw limits on what comics are not: individual images, literature, movies ... A better approach would be that comics are all them, and more, and then individual images (paintings), literature and perhaps (silent)movies are exceptions to comics - not independent arts! This statement may require some arguments. Below I shall analyze comics relationship between literature, visual arts and film. The criterias I use are the amount of text, pictures, images and reading speed. Much of the text deals with the relationship of comics and other visual arts, their similarities and differences. This is done because in order to have these other arts to be included into the new concept of comics, they

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naturally should be closely related to it. As result there is conclusion about how the other visual arts are part of a larger entity, the super-class of arts, intermedial comics.

Comics defined by the amount of text Until now comics has been considered as a kind of intermediate form of image and text in which there must be a certain number of images in order to meet its definition. But if comics is a combination of images and text, surely the kind of story that has only one image is also comics. Single image comics (cartoon) is an exception among the multi image comics group.

Figure 2: Does a picture frame define comics? Does it define picture of comics? How about the contents of a frame? Instead, if the amount of text in relation to the pictures is gradually diminished, starting from a novel it will first approach prosaic picture books, then the traditional comics, action comics, and ultimately, of course, completely wordless comics. At the same time reading speed of comics increases, provided pictures are not too complex. An example of a hybrid of traditional comics and literature, is Brian Selznick's Hugo Cabret, a book where both few paragraphs of text and images take the story forward. Without either element the story would not be complete.

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Figure 3: If the image is a diagram, is it a (single) cartoon, comics or neither? A typical (traditional) comic book, such as Jo, Zette and Jocko, contains about 80 words on a page. This amount corresponds to about two paragraphs of text of a novel. However, this amount of text can not be thought as a watershed since there are comic books containing more text, and books which have less text than this. There is dispersion of quantities of words per a page of a comic book and translations into various languages naturally contain different amounts of words. In general, speech bubbles and explanatory text boxes contain only some text. This is due to the fact that a large part of the

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message has already been said via images and rich text frame would take up too much space from images. Comics’ text space scarcity has also forced to consider what to say, and how. Speech bubbles do not tolerate repetition (repetition of words catches eye more easily in a small amount of text), which means that the dialogue often play with synonyms. The resulting richness of the language has given rise to the phenomenon in which Finland's rewarded, leading language care magazine is… Donald Duck. Similar use of more weight words, one can also see in poetry, which has traditionally had less words than novels. Poetry and comics also use rhythm as narrative element, though in comic books it is used more in visual form. Completely wordless comics are of course the oldest form of comics, comics whose origin is the cave paintings, before the invention of actual writing. The same story telling method was used in medieval church paintings where the events of Bible were illustrated for non Latin speakers. Trajan's column again introduces epigraphic Roman sculpture as one form of comics’ expression. As an example of modern wordless comics one could mention for example the Nordic classic Mr. Adamson by Oscar Jacobsson, Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy by Antonio Prohías and even Barbe’s erotic metamorphoses. They are not only nonverbal but also reduced narrative, focusing on delivering the message only by means of visual arts. Perhaps silent comics are also the purest form of comics.

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Figure 4: André-François Barbe. Silent comics’ metamorphoses, or a movie storyboard? Pictures that have been used for modeling the surrounding world have evolved over thousands of years into characters, letters. For example, a big letter "A”, is inverted bovine head, with horns and all. So first there were pictures and picture writing which turned more and more symbolic until it was so abstract that it already had a life of its own. Thus, we can say that all literature owe to painting of which the earliest examples are the cave paintings. Words are an agreement of each language on what each word means. The word "hippopotamus" means a specific animal, but equally well we could have agreed to another word to represent the animal, for instance the word "moomin".

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Dividing individual words does not make sense because: "the huamn mnid deos not raed nidiivdaul letetrs but whoel wrods”. So words are kind of symbolic entities (ie, mental images?) where the structure does not care of individual symbols (letters), or their precise order. Andrei Molotiu showed in the book he edited, a form of a symbol writing at its most abstract. The difference between those strings and an abstract painting or comics is not great. Literature (writing) is a symbolic form of comics.

Comics defined by the number of images A variety of comics styles are numerous. In the traditional European comics the number of images is relatively economic, while on those comics that emphasize action the number of images is greater. Manga is a good example of the latter. In principle the number of images in comics is limitless. If the number of images, and at the same time the serial nature, is gradually reduced we shall first meet the minimum of the definition of traditional comics: comics consisting two images. Halving this number of images takes us beyond the definition of traditional comics, into the single image cartoons. In most definitions these are not considered as comics.

Figure 5: Pertti Jarla. Single frame Fingerpori strip (2008). Isn’t this comics? [Adult Education: Draw a cartoon about your own life] But there are many examples which prove this definition wrong. Many humor comic strips are using single images, some more often than others. Still, most readers will consider these as comics and not as cartoons which are perceived single images commenting daily political events. However, Gary Larson's essentially single picture series The Far Side is accepted into comics anthologies and magazines publish it in the comics pages. Also Finnish political cartoon artist Kari Suomalainen was granted a comics award by the Finnish Comics society, which was justified by the fact that cartoons are actually comics. Perhaps the problem is the Finnish word "sarjakuvat" (or the Swedish "serier" for that matter), which suggests that the cartoon should be serialized in order to fulfill the definition. This don’t have to be the case as comics don’t have to be funny as the comics English term suggests, and comics don’t have to be drawn like the French "Bande dessinée" suggests, nor does it need to be in speech bubbles, as the Italian "fumetto" suggests. So it is easier to count in the single image (frame) comics to the general definition than to exclude them from the definition. Traditional comics, the nucleus of intermedial comics, may be defined by the above mentioned linguistic limitations.

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Also, a blank frame is included into definition of comics, as well as Malevichian black frame. Black-frame (image) is used in a number of comic books, such as Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.

Figure 6: Kasimir Malevich. Black Square (1915). Comics or a painting? Painting is typically displaying a single image at time. For a reader, or rather for the person who experiences art, it is perhaps easiest to perceive a painting as comics by looking at Roy Lichtenstein's enlarged frames. Otherwise, the size of a frame does not seem to be relevant. City of Brussels has published world's largest comic book frame, a square size frame from the Tintin adventure Destination moon, and in more than one place there are houses with wall sized comics. And the other extreme is probably nano sized comics, provided that one is able to read it by using a electron microscope. Regardless the size each one of them are equally as much comics. Or how it is, if comics really are so small that they cannot be read? Most comics artists, however, use more than one image in their works, because single picture is static and it is often important to utilize montage and put multiple images side by side. And in comics there happens a lot between the images; paradoxically, it is often that what is not shown which takes the story forward. But not even story is necessary for comics. From abstract comics all figurativeness has been cut off, as one can see by judging Abstract Comics anthology edited by Molotiu. There are no recognizable figures, landscapes, objects or stories. However, the serial order of images give the reader an experience of reading comics. This equals Andy Warhol's serial paintings and obviously they should be counted in comics. On the other hand, as already stated above, a single image comics is still among the definition of comics. So comics are perfectly capable to accept any painting between figurative (performing) and abstract forms. And if the content does not matter then comics are all possible images: paintings, drawings, photographs, diagrams, graphs ...

Figure 7: An intelligence test or an abstract comic? It should be noted that in the Abstract Comics anthology the comics do have a stylistic continuity. Each individual artist of the anthology have his own presentation style, which with the traditional comics format and frames along with book format bound the images together. The border of how

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big deviations between successive images can have, in order to be still considered as comics, is not tested. Finally if all images are excluded, nor there is text, then we don’t have comics. All we have is just a blank page. Or would it too be an abstract, minimalist / Dadaist comics? If, however, the number of images is increased and the amount of information between the images is reduced, i.e. the images are similar to each other, then will their reading speed also increase. Number of images may well approach the image volumes of movies.

Comics defined by the reading speed Comics’ special feature compared to performing arts or for instance to television, is that the reader (experiencing party) sets the pace. The reader can use desired amount of time for a single frame analysis, even one’s whole life. And at the same time reader can proceed in the work in whatever way one chooses, even backwards. By the way, the same can be done in literature, the exception of comics. If the reader selects one frame and never continues to the next frame, shall this experience not diminish the feeling of comics, “comicsness”, of that one frame. So also from this perspective single frame / image cartoons are actually comics. The fact that the frames are very much alike, like in Matt Groening’s Life is hell, does not make them less comics. If we have a considerable amount of images that are alike, thousands if not even millions of them, and we increase reading speed into flipbook speed, we shall find that a large number of successive images with small differences turns into a movie by increasing the reading speed. In fact, animated film is based on just that, a high speed show of pictures. Movies’ ancestor, the flipbook, was patented in 1868, and is thus between births of comics and movies. For a cinematic experience, the limit is probably about 16 frames per second (fps), the same presentation speed which was in the early silent films. Today movies are presented at 24 fps. On computer and console games there is often a prerequisite for speeds more than 30 fps. Written text reading speed in normal range is 250 - 350 words per minute. If we compare film speed to the speed of reading we shall notice that reading comics (frames) at the speed of movies, let alone to understand them, is impossible - unless also the text is copied, like it is done in silent movies. In order to replace this reading experience and to imitate real life movies use recorded sound. However, presumably no one argues that the black and white silent films with their interim texts are somehow less cinematic than talkies. And neither are 3D movies somehow more cinematic when compared to color films, although the experience is different. There are also examples of the opposite, slowing down the viewing. Both Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol have experimental movies that are actually filmed still images. But this is precisely the reason why movies do not fit perfectly into category of comics: viewer-experiencer is not free to determine “reading” speed. The same of course applies to all other performing arts, where the role of art experiencer, audience, is passive. Arts can be divided into two sections, spatial (ie, graphical) and temporal (ie, transient). Spatial arts are painting, photography, architecture, sculpture, literature, poetry and comics. Temporal arts are theater, television, movies, radio, music and dance. Temporal arts are performing arts, even though there have been attempts to count poetry as one of them. Temporal arts are created (performed) over and over again and consumed during that process, while spatial arts are created only once and consumed after they are made. Comics have also had works of art where sound is combined with traditional comic book, for example with a bundled CD (such as Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese album “Tango” which was

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released with a tango music CD). Similarly, there are some comic books dramatized into audio plays for various media formats (like the adventures of Tintin by Hergé were turned into audio books which were published also in Finnish as C-cassettes in the late 1980s) and also on the radio (as the radio show acting out the daily Rip Kirby strip from major newspaper). First mentioned case above, is a quite rare examples of such works where comics and other arts are combined. On the other hand they can be taken as early multimedia works. While the latter are, in fact adaptation to another art form (performing), audio book form, which is why they are discussed some other time. Attached audio or transfer into audio format turn comics into temporal art, which requires hearing, and therefore they are not comics anymore. Split-screen cinema bears some external resemblance to comics. In these films the normal movie screen is divided into several smaller frames. Typically the action in sub-frames is simultaneous; however it is in either different locations or at different angles. But usually these events appear on the screen only briefly, since absence of viewer control makes the following of the concurrent events a laborious process. Also the soundtrack, which would otherwise become general background noise, is often replaced with background music. Movies which are split- screen films only are for these reasons probably quite rare. However, also this art form is temporal, without user control and often requires hearing, and therefore not comics. One of the acknowledged comics’ subspecies, or an exception to rule if so desired, is photo novels. Photo novels are stories told by photographs which also often have speech bubbles. Photo novels exist both as independent works and as stories which are synopses of movies. Generally for photo novels based on movies, there is a picture selected from each scene of a film into which the lines or related text has been added. The same has also been done on animations. So, the long series of frames in movies has been condensed into traditional comics. In fact, the (animated) films are very often comics in the first place or at least drawn sketches before they are released as movies. Originally many movies begin as storyboards where scenes, lines and shooting angles have been outlined. Therefore, we could define silent movies as a subset of comics in which the watching / reading speed of an experiencer (reader) is predetermined. However, while on flipbook reader is still in control of reading speed, on movies, where sound address an organ that comics do not, the user control is lost. Therefore we can exclude movies from the concept of comics and consider it as a separate form of art. If photo novels are accepted as subspecies of comics then so is a single photograph. A photograph is a realistic, non-verbal, one image comics frame. The reading speed of a single photograph can be infinite, but still in control of the reader.

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Figure 8: Juho Juntunen. Paholaisen morsian [Bride of Devil] (2009). A photo novel. Photographs or comics?

Arts and senses Humans have five basic interfaces to receive information and experiences from the surrounding world. The experience, interpretation, itself is done in the brain but the information is received through our senses. The five basic senses we have are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Sight Hearing Touch Taste Smell

Various arts address these senses in many ways. Some arts cover more senses than others. The audience experiencing art, react to these impulses on their senses in their individual ways. But this is not enough; each person has also their own free will. If the experiencing person does not have the possibility to decide how to receive the art, how to experience it, how much time to spend studying the work, the experience may in the worst case turn into suffering. Yet in most cases the experiencing party, audience, is quite willing to give up their free will in order to experience something new. In such occasions the active experiencer becomes a passive receiver. However, when the experiencer has the control he can direct his interest, his art experience, towards preferred direction and enjoy it even more. And of course the experiencer has always one control possibility, if the art experience is not gratifying: close the media or leave the place. (That is, if the message of the artist is not commending.) In the following list theater also includes opera, dance, musical performances etc., and arts include painting, drawing, photographing etc. How much theater corresponds the senses of touch, taste or smell varies case by case. Usually theater does not utilize those senses and therefore they are here listed in brackets. There are movie theaters that likewise spray water on the audience and have shaking chairs or where individuals can scratch “odorama” cards. But also these are exceptions of the genre and therefore in the table below they are in brackets.

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Below there are listed various arts, their corresponding senses and control opportunity and relation to time.

Art

Senses

Comics Arts (painting etc) Literature Radio Music Television Sculpture Architecture Games Multimedia Movies Theater (opera etc.) ?

1 1 1 2 2 1, 2 1, 3 1, 3 1, 2, 3 1, 2, (3) 1, 2, (3, 5) 1, 2, (3, 4, 5) ?

Experiencer control yes yes yes no no no yes yes yes yes no no ?

Spatial / Temporal spatial spatial spatial temporal temporal temporal spatial spatial spatial / temporal temporal temporal temporal ?

According to this table one can group arts into various classes. Those arts corresponding only to sense of sight, (that is comics, arts and literature) are clearly a separate group. If the experiencer closes his eyes he cannot enjoy the arts in this class at all. Also radio and music rely only on sound thus corresponding hearing, and without hearing there is no art experience in this class. Inside these classes one can do further categorizing, such as comics is super class of arts and literature. From the table one could hastily draw a conclusion that the more senses an art form covers, the more effective it is and the higher class art it is. And the highest of them all is the art that covers most senses. To certain point his may be true, but the case is not quite that simple. If we had an art form called “toutasme” which would cover touch, taste and smell it still couldn’t tell the same abstract things that literature can, even though toutasme would cover more senses than literature. Toutasme equals everything that a person puts in his mouth. Toutasme could for instance be a biscuit (prefarably consumed in complete silence and darkness), however biscuits are not considered as art, unless culinarism is considered as an art. All senses are constantly present but artforms do have their primary senses through which they should be experienced.

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Figure 9: The arts corresponding only to sense of sight can be distinguished as a separate group.

Comics combine various medias Literature and poetry, painting and photography and comics are in general all narrative art, which is read and interpreted only by gaze. In addition to this common distinguishing feature of these arts is the reading control of experiencer. On those works one can proceed in whatever direction one wishes and use desired amount of time for their analysis. Thus, they form a group of their own. But these three arts have differences too.

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It has been suggested that because comics use visual and textual means of art it for that reason would be a "bastard" intersection of these two. And yet the definition of comics would be that neither of these other arts do not use all the means that comics does. The case is just the opposite. These other arts are missing one of comics’ features, and they do not add anything what comics don’t already have. In a way, they are deficient comics. Comics is an union of literature and fine arts. In practice, this is reflected in the fact that only remarkably few comics have been turned into books, novelized. Symbols, letters and words can not exhaustively explain images; in particular, a description of motion in writing is unsatisfactory. The opposite does occur at large extent. Good and bad comic book adaptations of novels are numerous, such as Tarzan and the Classics Illustrated. If so desired, by comics one can interpret any written or visual work. Based on the above comics is an intermedial instrument which all printed arts, as well as traditional painting inherit from. Similarly, at least to some extent sculpture and movies more conspicuously owe to comics. To see that one only needs a little wider perspective.

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Figure 10: The new concept of comics includes the subordinate arts and interacts with others. Perhaps one could also talk about pan- or omnimedial comics, but because it could be particularly difficult task to include performing arts into a all-embracing concept of comics, intermedial comics is enough and the best term out of these. It has been argued that the conscious creative process of comics should somehow be an integral part of the definition of comics. The artist knows that she is creating comics and comics is comics because the author says so. Of course this can’t be so, because there is a whole bunch of people who did not know that they were creating comics for the sole reason that the whole concept had not yet been invented, including for example Töpffer. On the same principle a whole range of arts would be no longer arts because they were not originally defined in ancient Greece.

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In 1825 Töpffer defined the nature of his works as follows: "The pictures, without this text, would have only an obscure meaning; the text, without the pictures, would mean nothing. Together they form a sort of novel, all the more original in that it does not resemble a novel more than any other thing." In other words, literature lacks pictures and pictures lack text. Only comics is a complete art form. Amy Kiste Nyberg says in the book “Seal of Approval, history of the Comics Code” that “Lawmakers were never able to describe comic books in such a way that laws intended to restrict them didn’t also apply to magazines and other illustrated material.” (p. 50). The reason for this is obvious. They couldn’t do it because magazines and other illustrated material are sub classes of comics. The task was impossible and (constitutional) laws never materialized, or if they (locally) did they were later overruled in higher courts, since they were contradicting constitution and freedom of speech. Kai Mikkonen notes that "You can not ever completely describe a picture by language, and not all issues that are linguistically expressed can be turned into images." By words it is difficult to define even comics as a phenomenon. One can of course ask whether one should make a distinction between the intermedial comics and the other arts not yet defined. Of course, differences can be sought, but since the history of comics theory has so far not dealt with these differences, it is perhaps not necessary here either. In addition, the distinction has already been done when the other arts have been defined, such as how movies differ from theater. Music, dance and theater, television, and architecture are so distant from what perceive as comics that confusion is unlikely to occur. Sculpture is a borderline case in which Trajan's column is clearly comics, but should then all statues to be included in as three dimensional comics? No, in fact Trajan’s column is a sculpture as long as someone takes a picture of it and thus turns it into two dimensional picture form. Then it becomes comics. For the five basic senses man has "sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste" intermedial comics corresponds only on sight. Sculpture and architecture are addressing sight too, but they also have the opportunity to create feelings of touch. The performing arts, dance and theater and television and why not music (performers) too, are corresponding to sight and hearing. Especially in dance and theater there can also be physical art, corresponding to sense of touch. Also, movies are an illusion of movement and they also include sound, so for the comics’ point of view movies must be included in borderline cases. Other arts are thus clearly responding to the needs of other senses and are therefore not comics. Notably, from the point of art history, arts of smell and taste don’t seem to exist, unless gastronomy is counted as such. Therefore, it could be said that the need for sight is one of the definitions for the intermedial comics. Books and magazines have physical forms, but the intermedial comics doesn’t need them, because it also acts in virtual state. Naturally the visually impaired can enjoy pictures and storytelling if the images are three-dimensional (sculptures or reliefs) and the story is written in Braille, but hese are not comics though some comics’ courses teach to do three-dimensional comics boxes. Sculpture has therefore a lot of untapped potential in the field of comics. One can also argue that if user watches a movie from a dvd, user would have control over the film, such as pausing it, and therefore movies should be included into Intermedial Comics. While this is partially true movies are not included because at the very moment user pauses the film it becomes a single frame freezed picture without sound, ergo comics. User shifts the movie from temporal arts into the field of spatial arts. A single image, regardless of its origin is a story, a message, to which you can combine words. One can add images (and text) and by increasing the reading speed the reader's experience expands to territory which used to be called moving pictures, movies nowadays. The seventh art merges with the ninth in such a way that it is difficult to tell which one has been more influenced by another. And this merge may still continue.

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The requirement of the traditional comics format, namely books and magazines, should be renounced and not to be included into the definition of comics. In the past, this requirement unnecessarily excluded the prehistoric comics from the definition of comics, and now we are at a crossroad where a large part of comics also appear on the Internet in electronic form. It is not just transferring comic strips to another media, such as “Fingerpori” from the pages of newspaper to the Internet, for there are also comics which started as webcomics and after success they have had their printed form, such as “Kiroileva siili” (The Cursing Hedgehog) and there are other comics that will not ever end up in printed form. Sure, printed comics remain as the most important core of the traditional comics, but comics are a lot more. In the near future we will probably see the breakthrough of comics that people have been waiting for a decade or so. For example webcomics where the experiencer / reader can choose their own plot, be one of the characters in the virtual world, etc., all on virtual 3D and in an e-book. In any case as comics and the game world are merging we have to reconsider if comics should be redefined, expanding the definition. As long as experiencer keeps the active role on the art work, possible new element could be time. Or maybe it is better to limit the conception of comics strictly to visual sense and call new art forms with other names. Earlier conception of art was that comics was an independent island among the other arts, barely touching others. This resulted in many borderline cases, needless vagueness and speculation about into which group (painting / drawing / photography, comics, literature, movies) each work of art belonged to. It is better to accept all these other arts under the protective umbrella of comics. Intermedial comics is in dialogue with temporal arts and also with arts of architecture and sculpture. At the same time the concept of intermedial comics accepts art, painting, literature, photography, photo novels, caricatures, storyboards and perhaps silent movies as special cases of the definition. For all of them one can find a legitimate connection. And they're all comics.

Severi Nygård

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SOURCES http://www.zompist.com/bob25.html

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Author: Mr. Severi Nygård, Espoo, Finland, EU [email protected] Shorter version of this article was originally published in Finnish in magazine “Synteesi” 4 / 2010. Word count: 6278

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