Comic Book

When screenwriter and director Paul Schrader criticized Star Wars (1977) for “creat[ing] the big budget comic book mentality,” there was little doubt as to the nature of his critique (quoted in Biskind 1999, 316). Since the 1940s, comic book has been used to encompass all that an observer might find puerile, simplistic, soulless, bombastic, and/or lazy in popular culture. This pejorative usage reveals a paradox: those who loathe comic books are more likely to agree upon its essential features than are those who actually read them. Indeed, even the field of comics studies cannot agree on a shared definition of one of its most vital forms. For some, comic book stands as the default for all graphic works—in periodical or book form—that are simply longer than the comic strip. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, for example, define a comic book as any “volume in which all aspects of the narrative are represented by pictorial and linguistic images encapsulated in a sequence of juxtaposed panels and pages”—essentially claiming for the comic book everything that collects multiple pages in a “volume” (Duncan and Smith 2009, 4).