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Topic Name: R084 - Storytelling With a Comic Strip - LO1

1: Comic Strips 2: Genres 3: Target Audience

Comic Strips have been around for decades and contain some of the most popular characters you know such as Superman, Batman and Captain America.

A comic strip is essentially a series of images that is sometimes accompanied with text to form a story.

There are many genres in Comic Strips just as there are in films, some of the most popular genres are listed below:

● Science Fiction - Often set in the future, usually has blue, grey and silver colour schemes with a metallic appearance and futuristic fonts.

● Superhero - Usually contains one main character that represents good or evil, the characters usually have distinctive costumes.

● Manga - Japanese style comics with bold character designs and alternative story flow.

● Horror - Usually contains a colour scheme of black, red and green with typical horror style fonts.

Comic Strips can appeal to all ages but due to the image based storytelling they relate more to children and young adults.

However when thinking about the target audience for a comic you should always consider the amount of text used, the complexity of the text, how many pages are in the comic and is the content suitable.

4: Origins 6: Software

Comic strips date back to when the Egyptians were using hieroglyphics to tell stories. They have also been used in the past to spread messages between each other.

It is too difficult to pinpoint when the origins of Comic Strips definitely started however the first comic strip produced that resembles what we read now was “The Yellow Kid” which appeared in a New York Newspaper in 1896.

Comics were originally hand drawn and then duplicated thousands of times. Now we have software that can assist in the creation of Comics and tools that can support us, some examples are:Comic Life, Pixton, Publisher, iStudio Publisher, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator

All of these examples are capable of creating Comic Strips however some are better than others.

Examples of tools that may help with comic creation are pre made templates, panel placement, built in fonts, built in characters etc.

5: History

The history of Comic Strips as we read them today really took off around 1930 with the Superhero genre. From 1930 - 1950 we saw characters such as Superman, Batman, Tarzan and Flash Gordon appear.

Cleary there are two very powerful publishers in the Comic Strip industry, they are DC and Marvel. They were both launched in the 1930s in the golden age of comics.

Golden Age - 1938-1954 - This was the introduction of Superman and the archetype of the superhero in general. We also see the introduction of Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Flash, Captain America etc.

Silver Age - 1956-1969 - This is when Comics became mainstream sources of entertainment in America. The content of comic books began to be more closely regulated in fear of spurring more juvenile delinquents from questionable content found in horror and mystery genres. This is where Fantastic Four #1 began as well as Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962.

Bronze Age - 1970-1985 - Bronze Age saw a continuation of the popular characters but with a return to darker plots regarding real-life issues such as drug use, poverty and pollution.

Modern Age - 1985-now - The Modern Age, which began in the mid-1980s and continued to present day, is identified by a number of trends: the commercialization of comic book publishers, more psychologically-complex characters and twisting plots.This era showed the rise in the so-called “anti-hero” as seen in Elektra and Wolverine, and the rise in the X-Men overall.

7: Panels and Flow

When reading a Comic you may have noticed they are usually laid out in a similar way. They tend to use something called a “panel” for each shot. A scene may be made up of a number of panels. A longer panel may represent a large amount of time and slow down the story where as a shorter panel represents a shorter amount of time.

Comics are often read in a very similar way, experienced readers know which panel to move onto next. They are usually read in a Z like pattern. However Manga works slightly differently, this is read from right to left.

5: Characteristics

Comic book characters usually have distinctive physical and non physical features:

Physical characteristics are what they look like & what their special powers might be.

Non-physical characteristics are what they are wearing, why they might be wearing it, their personality, their special props/weapons, the colours they wear, any symbols they has.

Example of Captain America:Physical: Strength, Endurance, Agility, Speed, Reflexes, Durability, Speed.

Non Physical: Clothing made to represent the US flag, Tolerant of others, patient, patriotic, uses a shield as a weapon, inspirational, clothing is bulletproof, fireproof and lightweight.