Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2018 August 4

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August 4

Text comics

The term text comics seems to be a useful one, but in the Wikipedia article it says nothing about the origin of the term or how established it is. Who coined it and when?

I don't know the answer to that, but it seems likely that it's a retronym. Prior to the advent of balloon comics, text comics would have been called a wide variety of names (comics, bandes dessinees, etc.). In many cases, they probably weren't called anything in particular because they were simply sequential art. My guess, and that's all that it is, is that the term is relatively new, mid 20th Century, and was developed to distinguish it from the balloon comics flooding into Europe after WW2. Matt Deres (talk) 01:14, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

The article is relatively recent, just three years old, and its creator, User:Kjell Knudde, is still active. If you've looked through the footnotes and can't find the answer, you could ask the creator. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:19, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

The term text comics is quite common in Dutch, because the Netherlands have a far longer-lasting tradition in the genre than most European countries. The name is derived from the fact that huge blocks of text are written underneath the images, as opposed to speech balloons. For people used to reading speech balloons this comes across as being closer to an actual reading text, hence the name. Yet it is also true that different names to describe the phenomenon have been in use over the decades. The word text comic might just be the shortest description. - User:Kjell Knudde, 9:31, 4 August 2018 (UTC).