Comic Books and Indian Literature

The word 'Comics' is derived from the word greek word Komikos, and is used with reference to images which are used in a sequential narrative to manifest into a form of graphic literature. It is this sequence of narration that helps distinguish a comic book from a picture book. Comics as a form of art established itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It saw its way through the industrial revolution, and it can be safely said that although comics were popularised in newspapers and magazines not before the late 1890s, narrative illustration had seen an existence of many centuries.

Thereby, it is not a modern phenomenon that comic books are looked to as a form of literature. Many works such as the 'Heroes of American History' and 'Fax from Sarajevo' are refererred to as graphic nonfiction; Comic strips illustrating periods or events from history, especially the times of the World Wars. On the other hand, graphic novels such as A.D: New Orleans After the Deluge, tells us the stories of various real life New Orleans residents and their experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina. A revised and edited, hard cover version of A.D was published by Pantheon Graphic Novels in the summer of 2009.

Traditionally, comics have long since been regarded as alternative forms of literature because of the factual knowledge that they provide. They have also, in an era of televisions and video games, maintained a culture of reading, even if metric patterns and conventional styles have had to be compromised for the sake of speech bubbles. Comic books have also been esteemed as treasure houses of cultural content as they speak, graphically of course, of myths and legends across the globe. An example of this sort educational comic lies in the popular series The Adventures of TinTin by Herge, where the protagonist, TinTin, a young Belgian reporter, travels to different parts of the world (and in one instance, the moon) to cover important events, and then of... [continues]

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