Comics and their inner message

It is not a usual act to ask what are the comic books? and this is because no one will ask that apparently childish question, in fact, many of us think that comics are just a new and modern way of expressing ones self or even just a kind of literature for children In order to clear all those prejudices I would like to talk firstly about the history of comic books, about their appearance and development and about their significance. We often consider comics as being modern texts, but they are used by the ancient civilisations, there are many caves that show signs of civilisation exactly by the graphics and signs from the walls. Humans use signs, symbols and even drawings to express themselves and that we can clearly see at the early Egyptians who used hieroglyphs accompanied with drawings to help their myths and legends survive. Those sequences of pictures or drawings were also used to tell stories and to mark important historical events. However, comics were fist created in the end of the 19th century in England. The very first comic hero, Ally Sloper appeared in 1884. When critics talk about the first regularly appearing comic they come upon some difficulties. There have been contradictions in whether Comic Cuts from 1890 or The Yellow Kid from 1894 represent the starting point. Thanks to their popularity, some publishers in the early 1930s collected the publications of comic strips from different magazines and published them in a book, hence the term comic book. These collections enjoyed great success and in the meantime other famous characters were created like Mikey Mouse or Tarzan. In 1935 was published the first comic book, New Fun Comics that had other material rather than reprints of newspaper comic representations. That representing a real success, many other publications followed, and publications like Mikey Mouse, Flash Gordon and so. All over Europe, especially in France, Italy and Spain these comic books were used for childrens education and appeared some national heroes such as Tintin. After these characters, shortly appeared the costumed superheroes, the first being the Phantom, followed by Supermen and Batman. After the success of these costumed heroes many others were created.

Towards the end of the 1940s the popularity of the superhero genre started to fade and the crime and horror gained a special position in the publics interest. Because of this, many started to worry about the possible influences of these violent comics upon young readers and that lead to the censure of comics in the mid-1950s. In the 1960s we assist at a revival of the genre of the superhero with the comics Spider Man and The Fantastic Four. In the same period is borne the underground comic, named comix. In the 1970s the intellectual comics developed and attracted special scholar attention. In the 1990s were published the so called adult comics which treated more serious themes and motifs and were experimental in form. The comic books also knows as graphic novels have some peculiar characteristics that make them interesting, funny, sometimes scary or even unbelievable. The most important thing is that the graphic novels, as their name suggest use both pictures and text to create an imaginary world, and in this equation, the pictures have a more complex role than the words because beneath the picture the experienced reader can discover more. And, on the other hand, the text is organised in units, sequential ones and the parts are graphically divided; fact that helps the reader in creating the sequences.