Stories in Pictures

I’m a big fan of the Cambridge Dictionary, but I had just read a definition I really hated.

Comic: a magazine, especially for children, which contains a set of stories told in pictures with a small amount of writing

 

And yeah, you could said that is a comic, and other thing is a Graphic Novel, but I don't really like the differentiation, because, after all, a cheap and silly Hollywood teen comedy is a movie just as Fellini's 8 1/2. And in the same way, Watchmen is a comic, just as some that fits that definition.

I spent many years of my childhood and adolescence reading comics, most of them bought when I was between nine and sixteen. And besides a few ones of the Simpsons, they are all superheroes' comics. Lots of X-Men, lots of Spiderman, and off course lots of Batman. Even some Superman, although I really hate Superman. Nevertheless I stopped reading them for almost seven years. I don't really know why, maybe I just didn't find them interesting anymore. In similar way I'm not sure how I started reading comics again, but I know that Neil Gaiman's work was the start. One book uses to bring me to another one, and thus, Coraline brought me to American Gods, and American Gods guided me to Sandman. And suddenly I was reading comics again. Since the first number I get totally fascinated by Sandman, by its deep story, by all its magic, by its many multicultural references. I read Nocturnes and Preludes in no more than three days. And again one thing brought me to another, and I looked for my old copy of Killing Joke, and then I buy Watchmen, and V of Vendetta, and Maus, and Books of Magic, and more, and more, and more. Today I started reading Y the Last Man, and it's so bloody thrilling, I think it could become one of my favorites. After all this, now I'm much more a comic fan than when I was a kid. Now, I appreciate them in a deeper way, I discovered the comic books have their own language, very rich and very complex. And I discovered, why it is the 8th art. I'm writing this in a kind of hurry, but soon I will write about this again sooner, more deeply. Now I just wanted to say, comics are a genuine form of art, a beautiful and full of potential way to tell stories, and an amazingly interesting juxtaposition of images and text. And I totally love it.