Comic Books  - Comics  - Anime
Napa Valley, San Francisco North Bay, Ca. USA

combined with text, often in the form of speech balloons or image captions. Originally used to illustrate caricatures and to entertain through the use of amusing and trivial stories, it has by now evolved into a literary medium with many subgenres. 


The most common forms of printed comics are comic strips (most commonly four panels long) in newspapers and magazines, and longer comic stories in comic books, graphic novels and comic albums. In the first two forms the comics are secondary material usually confined to the entertainment sections, while the latter consist either entirely or primarily of comics.

A comic book is a magazine or book containing sequential art in the form of a narrative. Comic books are often called comics for short. Although the term implies otherwise, the subject matter in comic books is not necessarily humorous, and in fact it is often serious and action-oriented. The term "comics" in this context does not refer to comic strips (such as Peanuts or Dilbert). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, greater acceptance of the comics form among the general reading populace coincided with a greater usage of the term graphic novel, often meant to differentiate a book of comics with a spine from its saddle-stitched form, but the difference between the terms is ambiguous, as comics have become increasingly available in libraries and mainstream book stores.

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