Constrained comics

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Constrained comics is a form of comics that places some fundamental constraint on form beyond those inherent to the medium. By adding a constraint, the artist is attempting to produce original art within tightly defined boundaries.

Comics creative work in which pictures and text convey information such as narratives

Comics is a medium used to express ideas by images, often combined with text or other visual information. Comics frequently takes the form of juxtaposed sequences of panels of images. Often textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia indicate dialogue, narration, sound effects, or other information. Size and arrangement of panels contribute to narrative pacing. Cartooning and similar forms of illustration are the most common image-making means in comics; fumetti is a form which uses photographic images. Common forms of comics include comic strips, editorial and gag cartoons, and comic books. Since the late 20th century, bound volumes such as graphic novels, comic albums, and tankōbon have become increasingly common, while online webcomics have proliferated in the 21st century.

Contents

A conceptually similar movement is the constrained writing movement, where writers have attempted to do things such as write novels in palindromic form or without the letter "e". Poetry is sometimes constrained into specific rhyme and meter categories such as haiku or sonnet.

Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.

A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, such as madam or racecar or the number 10801. Sentence-length palindromes may be written when allowances are made for adjustments to capital letters, punctuation, and word dividers, such as "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!", "Was it a car or a cat I saw?" or "No 'x' in Nixon".

A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided—usually a common vowel, and frequently E, the most common letter in the English language. Larousse defines a lipogram as a "literary work in which one compels oneself strictly to exclude one or several letters of the alphabet". Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.

Examples

Notable examples of constrained comics:

Gustave Verbeek Dutch-American illustrator and cartoonist

Gustave Verbeek was a Dutch-American illustrator and cartoonist, best known for his newspaper cartoons in the early 1900s featuring an inventive use of word play and visual storytelling tricks.

<i>The Angriest Dog in the World</i> comic strip

The Angriest Dog in the World is a comic strip created by film director David Lynch.

David Lynch American film director and artist

David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, painter, musician, actor, and photographer. He has been described by The Guardian as "the most important director of this era", while AllMovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking". His films Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are widely regarded by critics to be among the greatest films of their respective decades, while the success of his 1990–91 television series Twin Peaks led to him being labeled "the first popular Surrealist" by film critic Pauline Kael. He has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and has won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film twice, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. In 2016, Mulholland Drive, was named the top film of the 21st century by the BBC following a poll of 177 film critics from 36 countries.

See also

The infinite canvas refers to the potentially limitless space that is available to webcomics presented on the World Wide Web. The term was introduced by Scott McCloud in his 2000 book Reinventing Comics, in which he suggested that webcomic creators could make a Web page as large as needed to contain a comic page of any conceivable size. This infinite canvas would create an endless amount of storytelling benefits and would allow creators much more freedom in how they present their artwork.

Further reading

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Comic strip short serialized comics

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<i>Little Nemo</i> US early 20th century comic strip

Little Nemo is a fictional character created by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. He originated in an early comic strip by McCay, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, before receiving his own spin-off series, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The full-page weekly strip depicted Nemo having fantastic dreams that were interrupted by his awakening in the final panel. The strip is considered McCay's masterpiece for its experiments with the form of the comics page, its use of color, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, perspective, architectural and other detail.

Oulipo is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior, Jean Lescure and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

<i>The Far Side</i> comic strip by Gary Larson

The Far Side was a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from January 1, 1980, to January 1, 1995. Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life. Larson's frequent use of animals and nature in the comic is popularly attributed to his background in biology. Reruns are still printed in many newspapers.

Tom the Dancing Bug is a weekly satirical comic strip by cartoonist and political commentator Ruben Bolling that covers mostly US current events from a liberal point of view. The strip appears in mainstream and alternative weekly newspapers, as well as on the Boing Boing website. Tom the Dancing Bug won the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards for Best Cartoon. In 2011, the strip was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial cartooning by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2017, Bolling won the Herblock Prize for his work on the strip.

Dinosaur Comics is a constrained webcomic by Canadian writer Ryan North. It is also known as "Qwantz", after the site's domain name, "qwantz.com". The first comic was posted on February 1, 2003, although there were earlier prototypes. Dinosaur Comics has also been printed in three collections and in a number of newspapers. The comic centers on three main characters, T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus.

<i>PartiallyClips</i>

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<i>Marmaduke</i> comic strip

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Speech balloon Graphic convention in comics for representing speech

Speech balloons are a graphic convention used most commonly in comic books, comics and cartoons to allow words to be understood as representing the speech or thoughts of a given character in the comic. There is often a formal distinction between the balloon that indicates thoughts and the one that indicates words spoken aloud: the balloon that conveys thoughts is often referred to as a thought bubble.

Panel (comics) individual frame in the multiple-panel sequence of a comic

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Comics artist people who creates comics

A comics artist is a person working within the comics medium on comic strips, comic books, or graphic novels. The term may refer to any number of artists who contribute to produce a work in the comics form, from those who oversee all aspects of the work to those who contribute only a part.

Sunday comics

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<i>Krazy Kat</i> comic strip

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The Corriere dei Piccoli, later renamed Corriere dei Ragazzi and nicknamed Corrierino, was a weekly magazine for children published in Italy from 1908 to 1995. It was the first Italian periodical to make a regular feature of publishing comic strips.

Comics has developed specialized terminology. Several attempts have been made to formalise and define the terminology of comics by authors such as Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, R. C. Harvey and Dylan Horrocks. Much of the terminology in English is under dispute, so this page will list and describe the most common terms used in comics.