/lit/ - Literature

>>19905722
>>19905737
they are not written works since they are primarily visual works and the words are not a necessary element of the medium.
>>19905757
"literary themes" doesn't mean they are saying it "is literature" in the same way that saying you have "hairy legs" doesn't mean that you "are a piece of hair"
--

'literature' is not some rarefied award you give to 'good works of art'. an academic article is 'literature', so is a novel, so is a philosophical treatise. literature is a word for written works. comics are not literature, because they are not words on a page. they are sequences of images on a page that may or may not have words attached to them.

imagine if we were having the discussion about whether or not 'films can be literature' -- its fucking stupid, they're different mediums. citizen kane isn't considered a great film because it has language to rival shakespeare, its because of the way it conveys a narrative through filmed sequences.

when you start talking about 'comics as literature' you inevitably start prioritizing 'comics that are reminiscent of written works' and cease to view the medium for what it actually is. the best comics become the comics with the 'best prose' or 'the most fitting allegories' or 'the most complex metaphors' rather than being the comics that are best at organizing images sequentially on a page.

you literally shut yourself off to all the best work in the medium and, as we so often see, become obsessed with comics that mimic literary techniques and are basically just second-rate novels.

if you want to go into a new medium and try to treat everything as if its a variant of literature then nobody can stop you. you're just going to be another person who reads watchmen, maus & persepolis and comes away with no wider understanding of or appreciation for other mediums of art. all you will have done is reinforce your existing ideas about what great works of literature look like. alternatively, you could have an amazing time reading classics of the medium like Little Nemo in Slumberland, Krazy Kat; appreciating foundational artists like Eisner, Kirby, Carl Barks; engaging with cult outsiders like Crumb & co., Los Bros Hernandez, Jim Woodring; experiencing all the fantastic work made in this century by people like Chris Ware, Olivier Schrauwen, Michael Deforge, Patrick Kyle.

None of these people ever really attempted to write anything close to 'literature', but they're all regarded as highly significant figures in the medium for reasons that will be obvious if you give any of their work a go without trying to shoehorn it into your mental conception of 'literature'.

2ar2k