Comics as Contemporary Literature

With the changing world of illustration, art, and narrative, comics are still looked down upon as one of the lesser mediums, even with the milestones of notoriety it has already achieved. Just creating comics by themselves isn't enough in today's market.

One not only needs to create comics but find interesting means of designing them, releasing them, and selling them. Some artists, such as Daniel Clowes, have taken the stereotypes of comics, some such which comics were previously looked down upon, and used it to their advantage. One of Clowes' such works, Ice Haven, takes upon a multi-media approach, both stylistically and narratively.

As shown in the images above, although these strips are following different comic-based trends, they are from the same collection of stories about the same group of people from the town if Ice Haven. This comic was released under one publication, but with the focus of the story ranged over so many different characters, each "chapter" was divided to be its own Sunday Comic series, each tale running their courses until they eventually overlapped one another.

From creative stylization, we move onto creative presentation and printing. Other artists, such as Chris Ware, have furthered their comics by generating different means of viewing them. Ware's most well known piece, The Acme Novelty Library, takes upon a more graphic style, almost like cut paper, show casing the work that audiences would later find in his most creatively distributed and printed work to date, known as Building Stories.

This unconventional work is made up of fourteen printed works, from cloth-bound books to newspapers, broadsheets to flip books, and packaged as a box set. Audiences are already aware of Ware's artistic tendencies prior to Building Stories' publication, but the latter project really takes advantage of the author's already graphic design-inspired style, as well as trends and commercial tactics necessary to get a leg up in the world of creating comics.