"Comics" may be defined as "a series of pictures which tell a story or make a point" ... and as such they are neither a new phenomenon nor the exclusive invention of any single country or culture. Modern-day comics are simply one of the latest incarnations of a narrative picture-story tradition which has been in existence for thousands of years around the world.
In Europe, ancient cave paintings, stained-glass windows, the Bayeux Tapestry in France, and 15th-century German woodcuts are all examples of messages communicated through a series of artistic images. In Asia, Buddhist monks in 6th and 7th century Japan created "picture scrolls" which told epic stories, using symbols such as falling cherry blossoms to indicate the passage of time. Long before the arrival of the Europeans, Australian Aborigines were painting sequential images on bark and rocks to relate their own "dreamtime stories." In Mexico, wall murals in Teotihuacan show illustrated stories of jaguars which even utilize a form of speech balloons.
The current and rather narrow English term "comics" comes from comical versions that gained tremendous popularity in England and the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s. However, this medium is being used nowadays to communicate a whole variety of messages, often more serious than funny, and usually more bad than good. The international audience on the receiving end of this information is enormous.
Throughout Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, billions of people of all ages are avid readers of publications they call manga, manhwa, bande dessinée, historieta, foto novela, fumetti, or some other term within their own culture. All of these are versions and variations of the narrative picture-stories called "comics" in the West.
In fact, this visual medium is the world’s most widely-read form of popular literature.
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