Comics have been around since the 19th century, but it is only just recently that they have begun to receive philosophical attention as an art form in their own right. This essay begins by exploring the reasons for their comparative neglect by philosophers of art and then provides an overview of extant work on the philosophy of comics. The primary issues discussed are the definition of comics, the ontology of comics, the relationship between comics and other art forms, the relationship (...) between text and image in comics, and the connection between comics and cartooning. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article: Aaron Meskin, ‘The Philosophy of Comics’. Philosophy Compass 6/12 : 854–64. doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2011.00450.x -/- Author’s Introduction: Comics have been around since at least the middle of the 19th century, but they are just beginning to receive philosophical attention. Much of this recent philosophical work has focused on the definition of comics and their relation to other art forms , but recent work on such topics as narrative in comics, comics authorship, the relationship between words (...) and pictures, and the interpretation of comics shows that there are a range of interesting issues to be explored. Although comics are not essentially a mass or popular art, the vast majority of them are examples of those categories. Hence, comics may be investigated in their own right or as paradigmatic examples of the mass or popular. (shrink)

The category within which an artwork is received affects its critical and aesthetic significance (Levinson 2011; Walton 1970).1 Yet, it is not always clear how.

Most mass-art comics (e.g., “superhero” comics) are collectively produced, that is, different people are responsible for different production elements. As such, the more disparate comic production roles we begin to regard as significantly or uniquely contributory, the more difficult questions of comic authorship become, and the more we view various distinct production roles as potentially constitutive is the more we must view comic authorship as potentially collective authorship. Given the general unreliability of intuitions with respect to collective authorship (coupled with (...) our general unfamiliarity with the medium), we must look to find a principle of comic authorship out of which authorship questions can be settled for comics simpliciter. Furthermore, any such principle found must also be capable of grounding a principled distinction between collective production and collective authorship; should this distinction be absent, any proper manner of framing the central descriptive and evaluative questions for comics must likewise be absent. Quite obviously we need a theory of comic authorship. To this end, I suggest how we should proceed and exactly what such a theory should look like. (shrink)