Text comics

Text comics or a text comic is a genre of comics where the stories are told in captions below the images and without the use of speech balloons. It's the oldest genre of comics and was especially dominant in European comics from the 19th century until the 1950s, after which it gradually lost popularity in favor of comics with speech balloons.

The genre is sometimes referred to as a pantomime comic too, even though text comics do make use of dialogue, only not in the images themselves.

A text comic is published as a series of illustrations that can be read as a continuous story. However, within the illustrations themselves no text is used: no speech balloons, no onomatopoeias, no written indications to explain where the action takes place or how much time has passed. In order to understand what is happening in the drawings the reader has to read the captions below each image, where the story is written out in the same style as a novel.

Much like other comics text comics were pre-published in newspapers and weekly comics magazines as a continuous story, told in daily or weekly episodes. When published in book format the comics were sometimes published as actual illustrated novels. In some cases the original text was kept, but only a few drawings were used as illustrations, rather than the entire comic. In the Netherlands text comics were published in small rectangular books, called oblong books, due to the shape of the books.

Text comics are older than balloon comics. Ancient Egyptian wall paintings with hieroglyphs explaining the images are the oldest predecessors. In the late 18th century and early 19th century picture narratives were popular in Western Europe, such as the cartoons of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. These images provided visual stories which often placed captions below the images to explain a moral message.

The earliest examples of text comics are the Swiss comics series Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1827) by Rodolphe Töpffer, the German Max und Moritz (1866) by Wilhelm Busch and the British Ally Sloper (1867) by Charles Henry Ross and Émilie de Tessier. Töpffer often put considerable effort in the narrative captions of his graphic narratives, which made them just as distinctive and appealing as the drawings. Wilhelm Busch used rhyming couplets in his captions.

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Wikipedia