British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 49

COMICS AS LITERATURE? |  235 

 Here is what Chute and DeKoven say about the way in which words and images combine 

in comics:

  In comics, the images are not illustrative of the text, but comprise a separate narrative 

thread that moves forward in time in a different way than the prose text, which also 

moves the reader forward in time. The medium of comics is cross-discursive because 

it is composed of verbal and visual narratives that do not simply blend together, creat-

ing a unifi ed whole, but rather remain distinct. 

62

   

There is something close to right about this. The images in comics do not  typically   function 

simply as illustrations since they determine narrative content in a way that paradigmatic 

illustrations of literary works do not. 

63

  But for this very reason it is a mistake to treat the 

images and text as comprising  separate  narrative threads. If the images and text in a standard 

commercial comic are prised apart one typically does not get two narrative threads even 

though it may look that way — instead one gets a mere temporally ordered picture se-

quence and a temporally ordered text sequence. And as I have already mentioned, not all 

comics are narrative and not all comics have text, so there is another reason to reject the 

Chute – DeKoven account of hybridity. Nor, to be precise, need narrative in comics move 

forward in time. More signifi cantly, it is a mistake to characterize standard narrative comics 

as containing separate narrative threads that  remain distinct . Image and text determine nar-

rative content in standard comics by working together (i.e. by  ‘ blending ’  in some impor-

tant sense) rather than remaining distinct as do text and pictures in traditional illustrated 

literature. Words and pictures in comics do then typically combine to create a unifi ed, al-

beit complex, whole. 

 So in what sense are comics a hybrid art form? Perhaps the most sophisticated account 

of hybridity in the aesthetic sphere has been put forward by Jerrold Levinson in his paper 

 ‘ Hybrid  Art  Forms ’ . 

64

  Levinson offers a purely historical notion of artistic hybridity:  ‘ Hy-

brid art forms are art forms arising from the  actual  combination or interpenetration of 

earlier art forms. ’  

65

  That is, an art form is a hybrid only if it is actually descended from two 

or more distinct art forms (or, as Levinson suggests, an art form and some other technol-

ogy or practice). 

66

  Moreover, attributions of hybridity are, according to Levinson, typi-

cally  ‘ relative ’  or context-sensitive; that is, we typically count an art form as a hybrid only 

if its artistic ancestors belong to the not-too-distant past. 

67

  So it is plausible that at any 

particular juncture in history there will be at least some art forms that we appropriately 

  62    

      Chute  and  DeKoven,   ‘ Introduction ’ ,  p.  769.  

  63           Cruickshank’s illustrations do not determine the content of Dickens’s novels. But note that the pictures in many 

works of children’s literature do not function solely in an illustrative fashion either since the narrative is forwarded 

both by words and pictures working together. See, for example, Maurice Sendak’s  Where the Wild Things Are   (London: 

Harper Collins, 1963).  

  64    

      Jerrold  Levinson,   ‘ Hybrid  Art  Forms’,  in   Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics  (Ithaca, NY and 

London: Cornell U.P., 1990), pp. 26 – 36.  

  65            Ibid ., p. 27.  

  66            Ibid.,  p. 29, footnote 2.  

  67            Ibid ., p. 30.  

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 236  | AARON MESKIN

count as non-hybrid. (Levinson talks of  ‘ thoroughbred ’  or  ‘ pure ’  art forms, but this may 

be misleading as some will no doubt infer from this language that an evaluative hierarchy is 

implied by these terms. To do so would be mistaken, but it is safer simply to distinguish the 

hybrid from the non-hybrid.) 

 On this historical conception of hybridity, the question of whether the art form of com-

ics is a hybrid is not a question about the relationship between the words and images in 

them (which, after all, can vary widely), but rather a question about genealogy. That is, the 

question of hybridity becomes a largely historical question: when and how did the art form 

of comics develop? Did it develop independently, or is it a product of the coming together 

of distinct art forms? 

 These are historical questions. But determining whether or not the art form is the prod-

uct of the combination or interpenetration of other art forms looks as if it may require 

answering a broadly conceptual question fi rst. To determine when and how comics devel-

oped it appears that we may need to have some way of determining whether certain con-

tested cases are or are not members of the category. It is likely to make all the difference in 

the world if comics are seen as a largely contemporary art form — born in the nineteenth 

century as David Carrier and Roger Sabin argue — or they have been around for millennia 

as Scott McCloud claims. 

68

  In fact, one might interpret McCloud’s resistance to the idea 

that comics are a hybrid as a refl ection of his view that comics have been with us for many 

centuries. If we only judge an art form to be a hybrid if its ancestors are in the not-too-

distant past, then McCloud’s view of comics would seem to imply that they could not 

count as a hybrid no matter how the text and images relate. 

 I believe there are good reasons for treating comics as a modern invention. While the 

inclusion of pre-Columbian painting and the Bayeux Tapestry appears to endow comics 

with a long and signifi cant history, such a strategy runs the risk of so eviscerating the cate-

gory that it becomes critically uninteresting. 

69

  If this is right, then we are better off follow-

ing Sabin and others and treating comics as having developed in the nineteenth century as 

a product of the intermarriage of a range of art forms and technologies including litera-

ture, the art of caricature, popular printmaking (especially satirical printmaking), and pic-

torial narrative. And if  this  is right, then the art form is a hybrid among whose ancestors are 

literature and print-making. 

 Of course, their development in the nineteenth century does not entail that comics are a 

hybrid descended from literature. In the fi rst place, one could accept that comics are a rela-

tively modern invention but deny that they are the product of the joining together of distinct 

art forms; that is, deny that they are a hybrid at all. Perhaps comics are the product of inter-

nal development or evolution within an art form (pictorial narrative? printmaking? carica-

ture? graphic satire?) rather than the offspring of the two or more distinct art forms. 

70

  In the 

second place, comics might be a hybrid but one that is not descended from literature. 

  68           Carrier,  The Aesthetics of Comics , p. 4; Roger Sabin,  Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art   (London: 

Phaidon Press, 1996), p. 11; McCloud,  Understanding Comics ,  pp.  14 – 15.  

  69    

      See  Meskin,   ‘ Defi ning  Comics ’ ,  p.  374.  

  70    

      Jonathan  Friday  suggested  this  to  me  in  discussion.  

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COMICS AS LITERATURE? |  237 

 Both forms of this challenge can be met if it can be established that literature is one of 

the ancestors of comics. For if comics are descended from literature, then they are surely 

not the product of purely internal artistic development since a picture-making medium of 

some sort or other must be in their background too. And if we abstract away from the de-

tails of which particular objects count as the fi rst comics (for that is beside the point), then 

it looks to me as if it was the combination of literature (or, at a minimum, verbal story-

telling) with pictorial narrative and printmaking that distinguishes the work of comics pio-

neer Rodolphe Töpffer (and, arguably some of the work of Hogarth and other English 

satirical printmakers) from the long prior history of pictorial narrative. 

71

  

 Furthermore, a weaker but still signifi cant form of the hybridity claim looks as if it is on 

even stronger ground. Suppose comics in general are not a hybrid art form — it would 

nevertheless be plausible that the contemporary graphic novel (or perhaps a genre within 

that category) is a hybrid that involves the grafting together of the art form of comics with 

literary genres such as the novel and the autobiography or memoir. That is, there are real 

differences in subject matters addressed and themes dealt with between certain contempo-

rary graphic novels (largely but not entirely post- Maus ) and the comics that came before it, 

and this is best explained by understanding a new artistic hybrid to have arisen from the 

interbreeding of comics and certain literary genres. 

72

  In fact, I believe that  ‘ true ’  graphic 

novels (as opposed to mere sequences of comic books that are packaged in graphic novel 

form) are, in fact, a product of double hybridization (i.e. the cross-breeding of comics —

 itself a hybrid — with literary genres). But even if the graphic novel is just a single hybrid, 

this would be enough to underwrite the claims I make regarding hybridity and its signifi -

cance for the  ‘ comics as literature ’  thesis. 

 What is that signifi cance? I suggest that the hybrid nature of comics (and/or graphic 

novels) explains the categorial confl ict that I have sketched above. (For the sake of argu-

ment I shall assume from now on that comics in general — rather than the graphic novel 

genre in particular — are a hybrid art form.) It is because comics are descended from lit-

erature that they share so many features in common with paradigmatic works of literature. 

But the fact that the art form is also descended from non-literary forms explains (at least 

in large part) the dramatic ways in which they differ from the run-of-the-mill novel or 

short story. In particular, the ancestral relation that popular printmaking (e.g. intaglio and 

lithography,) bears to comics does much to explain the various distinctions between com-

ics and standard works of literature that I sketched above. These prints are typically pre-

dominantly pictorial or imagistic. They are autographic multiples like comics. Prints 

provide visual access to the traces of artist’s actions in a way that novels do not. So hybrid-

ity seems to explain much of what needs explaining. 

  71           For some examples of pictorial narrative in the pre-comics era, see Herbert L. Kessler and Marianna Shreve Simpson 

(eds),  Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages   ( Studies in the History of Art , Vol. 16) (Washington, DC: National 

Gallery of Art, 1985).  

  72            ‘ In a publishing world just getting comfortable with long-form comic books as graphic novels, Mr. Ware’s comics 

heralded the arrival of a more rarefi ed genre: graphic literature ’  (Neil Strauss,  ‘ Creating Literature, One Comic Book 

at a Time; Chris Ware’s Tales Mine His Own Life and Heart ’ ,  New York Times , 4 April 2001).  

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 238  | AARON MESKIN

 In fact, now that we have this diachronic notion of hybridity in focus, we can see that it 

helps to make sense of some interesting exceptional cases. For example, some webcomics 

differ ontologically from ordinary comics with respect to the ways in which their instances 

are created. But webcomics are a hybrid art form created through the bringing together of 

the art form of comics and the technology of computer graphics, and it is precisely because 

webcomics are descended from computer graphics that they have inherited the ontological 

nature of digital objects. Photocomics are another hybrid — descended from comics and 

photography, they inherit from that latter medium its distinctive mode of representation. 

Concrete poetry is a paradigmatic artistic hybrid formed by the combination of poetry and 

graphic design, and it is descent from the latter that explains why it provides an example of 

a genre of literature in which layout matters. 

 Now it is worth noting that hybridity is consistent with falling into an ancestral category. 

Some hybrids are mules (i.e. neither horses nor donkeys), but not all are. Concrete poetry 

is a form of poetry. Digital photography is a form of photography. So the fact that the art 

form of comics is a hybrid form — descended from literature and some other art forms and 

technologies — does not entail that comics are not literature. And we have already noted 

that literature is a meta-form which contains a range of art forms within it. We have not, 

then, yet settled the issue of whether comics are literature.  

  Towards a Conclusion: What Matters? 

 Are some comics literature? If I am right, the art form is a hybrid one, and this hybridity 

explains many of the relevant phenomena. But it does not settle whether the  ‘ comics as 

literature ’  view is correct. But why do we need to settle it? And how could we settle the 

issue if we needed to. 

 Suppose we treat the question of whether comics are literature as a straightforward ques-

tion about the extension of our term  ‘ literature ’  (or the concept LITERATURE). Then we are 

unlikely to get a clear and unambiguous answer. It is eminently plausible that the linguistic 

practices that underwrite our use of the term do not determine whether some comics fall into 

its extension. And there is good evidence that there are a number of distinct LITERATURE 

concepts in play in ordinary discourse. So if we seek to answer this purely descriptive question, 

then I suspect that there will be no determinate and univocal answer. The best we might be 

able to say is that some comics fall into the extension of certain concepts of literature (namely 

LITERATURE 

1

 ). But no comics will count as belonging to the category picked out by some 

other concept (namely LITERATURE 

2

 ). And it may be indeterminate whether any comics fall 

into the category picked out by a third concept (namely LITERATURE 

3

 ). I am pessimistic 

about the chances of providing good justifi cation for saying that one of those concepts is ours 

and the others are not. If this is right, what should we do? My suggestion is that we should ask 

ourselves what payoff we might get by categorizing comics as literature. That is, given the avail-

ability of a concept of literature that includes some comics and another concept that excludes 

them, we may ask ourselves whether we have reason to prefer one concept over the other. 

 Here are two of the main reasons that one might want to categorize comics as literature: 

(1) if it could be established that some comics count as literature, then this would presum-

ably help establish their status as an art form worth taking seriously (i.e. worth studying, 

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COMICS AS LITERATURE? |  239 

teaching, etc.); and (2) if we could show that some comics are literature, then we would 

know how to appreciate them (i.e. evaluate and interpret them). 

 Neither reason is especially persuasive. Merely establishing that some comics are litera-

ture might not be enough to establish their status or worth. There is bad and uninteresting 

literature after all. More signifi cantly, we may establish the status of comics (and the value 

of teaching and studying them) by straightforwardly showing that works of great art can be 

produced in the medium. There is no need to show that they are literature in order to do 

that. We do not need to show that  Maus  or  Krazy Kat  are works of literature in order to 

establish that they are worth reading, studying, and taking seriously. 

 And although it is tempting to reach for such work on literature in order to provide in-

sight into the art form, we need not categorize comics as literature to think that borrowing 

from literary theory and literary criticism would be appropriate. Levinson suggests that:

  If art form C has emerged as a combination of A and B, then we appropriately under-

stand or gauge the A-aspect of a C-work   .   .   . against a background of norms, styles, and 

concerns, attaching to the preexisting practice of an A. 

73

   

  This seems right. The poetic aspects of works of concrete poetry are appropriately appreci-

ated in light of the norms and styles that attach to the practice of poetry. The musical elements 

of musical theatre are appropriately gauged in light of the concerns attaching to the practice 

of music. And, if the arguments above are correct, we appropriately appreciate the literary 

aspects of a comic book (when they are present) in light of the norms and styles and concerns 

that attach to literature. Note that this does not imply that an appreciator of a hybrid must 

have  prior  knowledge of the norms that govern ancestral art forms — it might be the case that 

knowledge of those norms is provided by means of engagement with the hybrid. 

 So the aforementioned reasons do not, in fact, provide a basis for thinking that the ques-

tion of whether comics are literature makes much difference. We have little reason to 

choose LITERATURE 

1

  over LITERATURE 

2

   or  LITERATURE 

3

  if the classifi cation of com-

ics is all that is at issue. There may be other considerations that bear on the issue (e.g. the 

effect that categorizing comics as literature would have on the philosophy and theory of 

literature), but I am sceptical of whether those considerations will ultimately tell one way 

or the other. This is fi ne. We know that comics are a hybrid — descended from the art form 

of literature. That tells us everything we need to know. 

74

   

    Aaron      Meskin  

    University  of  Leeds      

   [e-mail]       

  73    

      Levinson,   ‘ Hybrid  Art  Forms ’ ,  p.  28.  

  74           Material that ended up in this paper was presented at Texas Tech University, The Art of Performance conference at 

Kansas State University, the Leeds Philosophy Work-in-Progress seminar series, the Ilkley Café Humanite, and the 

Popular Cultures Research Network lecture series. Earlier versions of this very paper were presented at the Philosophy 

and Literature/Literature and Philosophy Conference at the University of Sussex and at Aesthetics Anarchy 2 at Indiana 

University, Bloomington. Thanks to audiences at all those events for helpful feedback. I am especially grateful to Mikel 

Burley, Stephen Davies, Jonathan Friday, Stacie Friend, Wolfgang Huemer, Matthew Kieran, Andrew McGonigal, 

Stephen Meskin, Henry Pratt, Jonathan Weinberg, and an anonymous referee for this journal for their helpful comments.  

 at University of Athens on June 19, 2011

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