Sequential art in the context of "Comics studies"

Photo comics are a form of sequential storytelling using photographs rather than illustrations for the images, along with the usual comics conventions of narrative text and word balloons containing dialogue. They are sometimes referred to in English as fumetti, photonovels, photoromances, and similar terms. The photographs may be of real people in staged scenes, or posed dolls and other toys on sets.

Although far less common than illustrated comics, photo comics have filled certain niches in various places and times. For example, they have been used to adapt popular film and television works into print, tell original melodramas, and provide medical education. Photo comics have been popular at times in Italy and Latin America, and to a lesser extent in English-speaking countries.

A comic strip (also known as a strip cartoon) is a sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with daily horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in newspapers, while Sunday papers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the advent of the internet, online comic strips began to appear as webcomics.

Most strips are written and drawn by a comics artist, known as a cartoonist. As the word "comic" implies, strips are frequently humorous but may also be dramatic or instructional. Examples of gag-a-day strips are Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Marmaduke, and Pearls Before Swine. In the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in Popeye, Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and Terry and the Pirates. In the 1940s, soap-opera-continuity strips such as Judge Parker and Mary Worth gained popularity. Because "comic" strips are not always funny, cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that sequential art would be a better genre-neutral name.

A graphic novel is a self-contained, book-length form of sequential art. The term graphic novel is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comics scholars and industry professionals. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term comic book, which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks. It has also been described as a marketing term for comic books.

Fan historian Richard Kyle coined the term graphic novel in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha. The term gained popularity in the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978) and the start of the Marvel Graphic Novel line (1982) and became familiar to the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986, the collected editions of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1987. The Book Industry Study Group began using graphic novel as a category in book stores in 2001.

Comics studies (also comic art studies, sequential art studies or graphic narrative studies) is an academic field that focuses on comics and sequential art. Although comics and graphic novels have been generally dismissed as less relevant pop culture texts, scholars in fields such as semiotics, aesthetics, sociology, composition studies and cultural studies are now re-considering comics and graphic novels as complex texts deserving of serious scholarly study.

Not to be confused with the technical aspects of comics creation, comics studies exists only with the creation of comics theory—which approaches comics critically as an art—and the writing of comics historiography (the study of the history of comics). Comics theory has significant overlap with the philosophy of comics, i.e., the study of the ontology, epistemology and aesthetics of comics, the relationship between comics and other art forms, and the relationship between text and image in comics.