hieroglyphs

Our new library doesn’t only make us think about books, it makes us think about comics too. Today we want to write about them because we like reading them and because some of them are very funny.

There are many types of comics:

1° ) Comic Strips: these are short comics with drawings that make stories which are often found in newspapers.

2°) Comic Books are books with drawings and balloons that make a story. Like Mickey Mouse, Spider-man, Batman etc..

3°) Graphic Novels: are similar to Comic Books but are longer.

All of them use: speech ballons that can have different definitions. For example: normal balloons are used for normal dialogue; balloons with points are used when the character is thinking. But there are also other speech balloons which can have onomatopoeia (BOOM! CRASH SPLASH! GULP!).

  The history of comics

The history of comics began in Ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece. Ancient Egyptians used the hieroglyphs, Ancient Romans used mini pictures with words written under them. Some can be found on Trajan’s Column. The Greek used a type of comic to represent their gods.

In medieval paintings, multiple sequential scenes of the same story  appear and pieces of dialogue could be linked to them.

After the invention of the printing press (around 1439) there appeared images with words below. One of the first creators was William Hogarth; his print was composed by a number of papers so that he created a narration.

In the half of the nineteenth century there were no copyright laws and so a lot of comics could be copied or stolen. it was a bad period for comic writers.

In the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century there were funny comics for children (for example: The Dandy and The Beano). Another famous comic character was Mickey Mouse but his first appearance wasn’t in a comic but in a mini film: Steamboat Willie (1928).

mickey steamboat

Chiara and Beatrice (Class 5)