Sequential art
Encyclopedia
Sequential art refers to the art
form of using a train of image
s deployed in sequence to graphic storytelling or convey information. The best-known example of sequential art is comics
, which are a printed arrangement of art and balloons, especially comic book
s and comic strip
s.
The term is rarely applied to other media, such as film
, animation
or storyboard
s. Scott McCloud also notes that the movie roll, before it is being projected, arguably could be seen as a very slow comic.
in his book Comics and Sequential Art
. Scott McCloud
, another comics artist, elaborated the explanation further, in his books Understanding Comics
and Reinventing Comics
.
American
picture manuscripts, which were recurrent mediums of artistic expression.
Egyptian hieroglyphs
codified the images into repeatable and easier to reproduce symbols. In fact the proto-writing and the early alphabets, such as the Egyptian Canaanite alphabet, Chinese
and Phoenician
, also make clear references to their evolution from wall painting.
Greek
artists used to use friezes and vases as mediums to tell stories. They lack color and use sculpture instead.
Rome
's Trajan's Column
, dedicated in 113 AD, is an early surviving examples of a narrative told through the use of sequential pictures.
Since only five codices of Mayan culture are known to survive to this day, the major sources of pre-Columbian sequentian art are paintings on vessels and plates.
and Mixtec
cultures are clear examples of sequential art.
is a form of textile art. One of its basic characteristics is that is woven, rather than embroidered. Weaving has a direction--that is, you begin at one point and proceed, by interlacing threads, to another point. You do not range over the surface, as a painter might while working on a canvas. In some cases tapestry was used as a medium to tell stories.
The misleadingly named Bayeux Tapestry
(it is actually an embroidery) tells the story of the Norman conquest of England. It looks in some ways like a cartoon, as the story unrolls--two combatants [the Anglo-Saxon English, led by Harold Godwinson, recently crowned as King of England (before that a powerful earl), and the Normans, led by William the Conqueror] fight a battle over the control of what was then England (1066 CE).
's "Adam and Eve
" different scenes of the Biblical story are shown in the same painting: on the front, God is admonishing the couple for their sin; in the background to the right are shown the earlier scenes of Eve's creation from Adam's rib and of their being tempted to eat the forbidden fruit; on the left is the later scene of their expulsion from Paradise.
Cubist
paintings share characteristics with sequential art, with the main difference being that the images are not juxtaposed but repeated over themselves in different poses sharing some shapes.
The invention of the printing press
, allowing movable type
, established a separation between images and words, the two requiring different methods in order to be reproduced. Early printed material concentrated on religious subjects
, but through the 17th and 18th centuries they began to tackle aspects of political
and social life
, and also started to satirize
and caricature
. It was also during this period that the speech bubble was developed as a means of attributing dialogue.
William Hogarth is often identified in histories of the comics form. His work, A Rake's Progress
, was composed of a number of canvases, each reproduced as a print, and the eight prints together created a narrative. As printing techniques developed, due to the technological advances of the industrial revolution
, magazines and newspapers were established. These publications utilized illustrations as a means of commenting on political and social issues, such illustrations becoming known as cartoons in the 1840s. Soon, artists were experimenting with establishing a sequence of images to create a narrative.
While surviving works of these periods such as Francis Barlow's
A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot (c.1682) as well as The Punishments of Lemuel Gulliver and A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth
(1726), can be seen to establish a narrative over a number of images, it wasn't until the 19th century that the elements of such works began to crystallise into the comic strip
.
: film
and animation
. The three forms share certain conventions, most noticeably the mixing of words and pictures, and all three owe parts of their conventions to the technological leaps made through the industrial revolution
.
, motion graphic or interactive media
sequence, including website interactivity. They are commonly a series of illustrations, pictures or images displayed in sequence.
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
form of using a train of image
Image
An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...
s deployed in sequence to graphic storytelling or convey information. The best-known example of sequential art is comics
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...
, which are a printed arrangement of art and balloons, especially comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
s and comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
s.
The term is rarely applied to other media, such as film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, animation
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
or storyboard
Storyboard
Storyboards are graphic organizers in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence....
s. Scott McCloud also notes that the movie roll, before it is being projected, arguably could be seen as a very slow comic.
Origins of the term
The term was coined in 1985 by comics artist Will EisnerWill Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...
in his book Comics and Sequential Art
Comics and Sequential Art
Comics and Sequential Art is a 1985 book by Will Eisner that provides an analytical overview of comics. It is based on a series of essays that appeared in The Spirit magazine, themselves based on Eisner's experience teaching a course in sequential art at the School of Visual Arts...
. Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud is an American cartoonist and theorist on comics as a distinct literary and artistic medium...
, another comics artist, elaborated the explanation further, in his books Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a 215-page non-fiction comic book, written and drawn by Scott McCloud and originally published in 1993. It explores the definition of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements...
and Reinventing Comics
Reinventing Comics
Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form is a 2000 book written by comic book writer and artist Scott McCloud...
.
Types of sequential art
Sequential art predates comics by millennia. Some of the earliest examples are the cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics and paintings and pre-ColumbianPre-Columbian era
The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic period to European colonization during...
American
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
picture manuscripts, which were recurrent mediums of artistic expression.
Wall paintings and hieroglyphs
All the forms of communications since the dawn of human intellect has always served to transmit human experience. Wall painting is the earliest form of graphic communication; it pre-dates written communication and its earliest example are found in caves. Egyptian friezes made more accurate, methodical and organized depiction of their lifestyle through this same medium.Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
codified the images into repeatable and easier to reproduce symbols. In fact the proto-writing and the early alphabets, such as the Egyptian Canaanite alphabet, Chinese
Chinese alphabet
Written Chinese is not an alphabetic script. Rather, it is a logographic script based on Chinese characters, though there also exist alphabetic systems to transcribe the language.-Alphabetic transcription of Chinese:...
and Phoenician
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...
, also make clear references to their evolution from wall painting.
Sequential sculpture
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
artists used to use friezes and vases as mediums to tell stories. They lack color and use sculpture instead.
Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
's Trajan's Column
Trajan's Column
Trajan's Column is a Roman triumphal column in Rome, Italy, which commemorates Roman emperor Trajan's victory in the Dacian Wars. It was probably constructed under the supervision of the architect Apollodorus of Damascus at the order of the Roman Senate. It is located in Trajan's Forum, built near...
, dedicated in 113 AD, is an early surviving examples of a narrative told through the use of sequential pictures.
Since only five codices of Mayan culture are known to survive to this day, the major sources of pre-Columbian sequentian art are paintings on vessels and plates.
Picture manuscripts
Several pre-Columbian codices produced by the MayanMaya civilization
The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period The Maya is a Mesoamerican...
and Mixtec
Mixtec
The Mixtec are indigenous Mesoamerican peoples inhabiting the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Puebla in a region known as La Mixteca. The Mixtecan languages form an important branch of the Otomanguean language family....
cultures are clear examples of sequential art.
Sequential tapestry
TapestryTapestry
Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven on a vertical loom, however it can also be woven on a floor loom as well. It is composed of two sets of interlaced threads, those running parallel to the length and those parallel to the width ; the warp threads are set up under tension on a...
is a form of textile art. One of its basic characteristics is that is woven, rather than embroidered. Weaving has a direction--that is, you begin at one point and proceed, by interlacing threads, to another point. You do not range over the surface, as a painter might while working on a canvas. In some cases tapestry was used as a medium to tell stories.
The misleadingly named Bayeux Tapestry
Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth—not an actual tapestry—nearly long, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England concerning William, Duke of Normandy and Harold, Earl of Wessex, later King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings...
(it is actually an embroidery) tells the story of the Norman conquest of England. It looks in some ways like a cartoon, as the story unrolls--two combatants [the Anglo-Saxon English, led by Harold Godwinson, recently crowned as King of England (before that a powerful earl), and the Normans, led by William the Conqueror] fight a battle over the control of what was then England (1066 CE).
Sequences in painting
Painting can also be a common ground for sequential art. For instance, in Lucas Cranach the ElderLucas Cranach the Elder
Lucas Cranach the Elder , was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving...
's "Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
" different scenes of the Biblical story are shown in the same painting: on the front, God is admonishing the couple for their sin; in the background to the right are shown the earlier scenes of Eve's creation from Adam's rib and of their being tempted to eat the forbidden fruit; on the left is the later scene of their expulsion from Paradise.
Cubist
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
paintings share characteristics with sequential art, with the main difference being that the images are not juxtaposed but repeated over themselves in different poses sharing some shapes.
Early printed sequential art
Printing press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
, allowing movable type
Movable type
Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
, established a separation between images and words, the two requiring different methods in order to be reproduced. Early printed material concentrated on religious subjects
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
, but through the 17th and 18th centuries they began to tackle aspects of political
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
and social life
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
, and also started to satirize
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
and caricature
Caricature
A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...
. It was also during this period that the speech bubble was developed as a means of attributing dialogue.
William Hogarth is often identified in histories of the comics form. His work, A Rake's Progress
A Rake's Progress
A Rake's Progress is a series of eight paintings by 18th century English artist William Hogarth. The canvases were produced in 1732–33 then engraved and published in print form in 1735...
, was composed of a number of canvases, each reproduced as a print, and the eight prints together created a narrative. As printing techniques developed, due to the technological advances of the industrial revolution
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
, magazines and newspapers were established. These publications utilized illustrations as a means of commenting on political and social issues, such illustrations becoming known as cartoons in the 1840s. Soon, artists were experimenting with establishing a sequence of images to create a narrative.
While surviving works of these periods such as Francis Barlow's
Francis Barlow (artist)
Francis Barlow was an English painter, etcher, and illustrator.-Life:Barlow's first major work was the illustration of Edward Benlowe's Theophila...
A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot (c.1682) as well as The Punishments of Lemuel Gulliver and A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
(1726), can be seen to establish a narrative over a number of images, it wasn't until the 19th century that the elements of such works began to crystallise into the comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
.
Comics
Comics were an eventual product of the invention of printing. As an art form, comics established popularized itself in the pages of newspapers and magazines in the late 19th and early 20th century, alongside the similar forms created as a consequence of the invention of photographyPhotography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
: film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
and animation
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
. The three forms share certain conventions, most noticeably the mixing of words and pictures, and all three owe parts of their conventions to the technological leaps made through the industrial revolution
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
.
Storyboards
A storyboard is a graphic organizer used by directors and artists for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animationAnimation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
, motion graphic or interactive media
Interactive media
Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user’s actions by presenting content such as text, graphics, animation, video, audio, etc.-Terminology:...
sequence, including website interactivity. They are commonly a series of illustrations, pictures or images displayed in sequence.