British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 49

COMICS AS LITERATURE? |  227 

intended to be read within the framework of literary practice. Many comics (e.g. the award 

winners mentioned above) are highly valued by some. And so on. 

 But do comics meet the linguistic medium condition? Are comics examples of writing? 

33

  

Are they texts? Again, it does not seem to be the case that all comics meet the condition. 

Wordless comics are not texts in the robust sense which is invoked in the aforementioned 

defi nitions. Mute comics are not made in a linguistic medium. Eisner was too quick to 

claim that the images in comics are used as a language since, for example, the visual mean-

ing of comics does not seem to be compositional as it is in natural language. But the vast 

majority of comics do contain many words. So it would seem that there is some reason to 

count them as meeting the relevant condition. And the mere presence of pictorial or other 

visual elements in comics cannot be enough to exclude them from the category of litera-

ture. The illustrations in Dickens’s works by Cruikshank and others do not undercut the 

literary status of those works. 

 Yes, but perhaps the illustrations in Dickens’s novels are not essential to them. One 

would, I think, count as having had full access to  Oliver Twist  even without seeing Cruik-

shank’s illustrations. And whatever one thinks about the Dickens case, the fact that certain 

works of literature allow for many distinct illustrated editions suggests that their illustra-

tions are not essential to them. Dante’s  Inferno  is a good example of this. 

34

  While it might 

be argued that certain illustrations are essential to specifi c editions of the  Inferno , they are 

simply not essential to the literary work itself. But this seems radically different from the 

standard comic where the pictorial (and other visual) elements do seem essential to the 

work and to its appreciation. One has not had full access to  Watchmen  if one does not get to 

see Dave Gibbons’s artwork. And a differently illustrated copy of  Black Hole ,  Charles 

Burns’s disturbing graphic novel about mutating teenagers in 1970s Seattle, would count 

as a different comic. Perhaps it is the fact that the pictorial and/or visual elements of com-

ics are essential to them that precludes them from counting as literature. 

 To think so would be a mistake. The various forms of visual poetry that were mentioned 

above seem to have their visual elements essentially. (No full appreciation of  Easter Wings   with-

out seeing  Easter Wings  or, at least, having heard its shape described.) A bit closer to the case of 

comics, there are examples where pictorial or other visual elements are essentially embedded 

in the text of a literary work. For example, one cannot fully appreciate Jonathan Safran Foer’s 

 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close  or Kurt Vonnegut’s  Breakfast of Champions  without seeing the 

images that they contain. But I do not think anyone would claim that  this  is good reason to 

deny that they are literature. We do not have good reason to exclude comics from the sphere 

of literature merely because they contain pictorial or other visual elements essentially. 

 If comics were like those other great hybrid art forms opera and musical theatre, then 

we might legitimately deny that comics themselves were literature while at the same time 

admitting that they  contained  literature in them. 

35

  Works of musical theatre are not simply 

  33           Perhaps  ‘ writing ’  is not quite right since oral literature is plausibly literature. Hence my focus on whether comics are 

texts or are made in a linguistic medium.  

  34    

      See  Dominic  McIver  Lopes,   Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures  (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2005), pp. 170 – 179.  

  35    

      Much  more  on  artistic  hybridity  below.  

 at University of Athens on June 19, 2011

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 228  | AARON MESKIN

works of music, although they are partially composed of music. That is, one can extract the 

music from a work of musical theatre whole, as it were. The same is plausibly true of 

operas. And that is why concert performances and sound recordings of operas, as well as 

original cast recording of musicals, function successfully to provide the audience with a 

certain kind of artistic access. They do not provide listeners with a route to operas or mu-

sicals themselves, but they do provide them with access to the music that is part of those 

complete art works. Alas, comics are not opera, not even comic opera. There is no linguis-

tic entity that can be extracted from the standard comic which stands on its own as art in 

its own right, let alone literature. Subtract the theatre from a work of musical theatre and 

you get music. But subtract the pictures from a comic book and you get nothing more than 

the linguistic part of a comic book. 

36

  Comics do not, then, merely contain literature in 

them. 

 Do we, then, have good reason to count some comics as literature? There is at least one 

serious objection to this line of thought that is worth considering. The objection starts from 

the commonplace observation that the images in comics seem much more signifi cant than 

do the images in most of the examples of illustrated literature that were discussed above. 

Perhaps it is the signifi cance of the visual element in comics that precludes them from being 

literature. According to comics historian David Kunzle, comics involve  ‘ a preponderance of 

image over text ’ . 

37

  At fi rst glance, something like this seems right. And it might be thought 

that such an appeal to  ‘ preponderance of image ’  could enable one to exclude comics from 

the category of literature. If  x  is a comic only if it involves such a preponderance of image 

over text, then it is natural to think that  y  is literature only if it involves a preponderance of 

text over image. If such claims were correct, then no comic could be a work of literature. 

 The key to evaluating such a proposal is, of course, getting clear on what is meant by 

 ‘ preponderance ’ . Kunzle himself is ambiguous. At one point he talks about what  ‘ carries 

the burden of the narrative ’ . 

38

  At another point he talks of  ‘ relative size ’  of the images and 

the text. 

39

  But neither one of these senses of  ‘ preponderance ’  seem true to the phenomena. 

There are some clear cases of comics in which the burden of the narrative must be carried 

by the text and not the images, since the images contained in them do little or no narrative 

work. For example, some of the collaborations between Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb 

that are found in Pekar’s  American Splendor  collections consist mostly or entirely of sequenc-

es of largely similar  ‘ medium shots ’  of Harvey telling a story. 

40

  And there are cases of 

  36           Of course there are complete works that go into the making of some comic books — some comic books involve the 

original production of a complete script. Some of these scripts might be counted as works of literature. But such 

scripts are not part of the fi nal comic in any sense — they stand in roughly the same relation to the fi nal comic as a 

shooting script stands to a completed fi lm. For an example of such a script, see Grant Morrison (w) and Dave 

McKean (i),  Batman: Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary Edition  (New York: DC Comics, 2004).  

  37    

      David  Kunzle,   The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Pictures Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825  

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), p. 2.  

  38            Ibid. , p. x  

  39            Ibid.   

  40           See, for example, Harvey Pekar (w) and Robert Crumb (i),  ‘ The Harvey Pekar Name Story ’ , in Peker  et al. ,   American 

Splendor: Ordinary Life is Pretty Complex Stuff  (New York: Ballantine, 2003), n.p.  

 at University of Athens on June 19, 2011

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