Comics

Comics are representative of consumer culture both as forms of entertainment (consumption) and as reflections of popular culture and subcultural groups. Themes central to critiques of consumer culture, including the sexualization of women, fantasy, hedonism, escapism, violence, erotica, and visions of utopia, are represented, captured, and mimicked in comics.

The term comics, generally speaking, is used to deal with both newspaper comics, comic books (which are magazines), and all other kinds of narrative texts or art forms that have the following characteristics: they are told in drawings; the drawings usually are in frames; there are recurring characters; the dialogue is in balloons; other information is found in panels, often at the bottom of frames. All of these conventions are sometimes violated but [Page 209]generally speaking, comic ...