"Comic Book" Etymology?

[PovertyRow]

Found this etymoligical citing of "comic book" on the internet.

 

"Meaning "a comedian" is from 1619; that of "comic book or strip" is from 1889. Something that is comic has comedy as its aim or origin; something is comical (c.1432) if the effect is comedy, whether intended or not. Comic strip first attested 1920; comic book is from 1941."

 

So, do we have any confirmation of the first use of "comic book" being from 1941? Considering the content of the 1941 books, many were certainly not "comic" - but while a point of minutea, I think it is pretty interesting where the term for what we collect came form.

 

typo edit

[chrisfuccione]

I'm not sure if this would help the discustion but I was looking up the first usage of the term comic book and I found this little gem. They call comic books in england comic magazines.

 

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=15292&dict=CALD

[PovertyRow]

I'm not sure if this would help the discustion but I was looking up the first usage of the term comic book and I found this little gem. They call comic books in england comic magazines.

 

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=15292&dict=CALD

 

Not just in England - they were called magazines in the US too. Even now, if you watch the old Superman show on cable, the voiceover at the end says "Superman magazines".

 

I remember what? A yearish ago? We had a "magazine" discussion on the boards. Was pretty interesting.

 

Find anything else in your perusals so far???

[deathlok]

The early Action comics felt like magazines. They were oversized and had a lot of pages. Over the years the comics got smaller and smaller, yet the price kept going up.

[dgillock]

I remember seeing an advertisement for "Comic Books" on the back cover of a turn-of the century American "dime novel", or early pulp. Not advertising "comic books" in the pictures with text sense, but rather "Comic" books- text stories with comedic content. I really should have picked it up just as a conversation piece.

 

I am also curious when this term in it's current use became common.

[chrisfuccione]

Here is some more infomation I could dig up on Wikipedia.

 

Some credit Max Gaines with publishing the first comic book, Funnies on Parade, in 1933. He printed an 8-page comic section that folded down from the large broadsheet to a smaller 9-inch by 12-inch format containing reprints of comic strips. Others have contended that comic books had begun appearing in the previous decade. Also, the Belgian comic book "Tintin au Congo" had already been published in 1931.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book

 

The Adventures of Tintin is a well-known series of comic books written and drawn by the Belgian writer-artist Hergé. Over 200 million issues of comic books featuring Tintin have been published and translated into 40 languages. The hero of the series is a young reporter named Tintin, who travels around the world landing himself in a variety of adventures. The character of Tintin was created on January 10, 1929.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin

 

The precise definition of comics remains a subject of debate, with some scholars insisting that their printed nature is crucial to the definition, or that they should be defined by the interdependence of image and text. Others define the medium in terms of its sequential nature. Artist Will Eisner has referred to comics as sequential art. Artist Scott McCloud refined this definition in his 1993 work of comics theory, Understanding Comics. According to McCloud, "[Comics are] juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer." By this definition, single panel illustrations (such as The Far Side, The Family Circus, or many political cartoons) are not comics, but are instead cartoons.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics

 

 

Now only if you guys asked me something that had to deal with books about coins I might of had an educated guess!

 

CHRIS

[JohnBull]

[Zonker]

I'm not quite sure what the question is?

 

But I would be very surprised if the first use of the term comic book was as late as 1941. What I thought happened was that the newspaper panels branched off around the turn of the century from their roots as political cartoons into more of a gag type strip: setup + development + punchline. Ba-Dum-Bump. So gag panels = comic strips. Then with "comic strips" established as a term, when the first magazines of similar format (in fact re-pasted newspaper strips) were widely distributed in the 1930s, it would be natural to use the term comic book for a collection of comic strips ("comic magazine" being a relative mouthful to say).

 

Now this is just my quick opinion, and sorry for the hit&run nature of this post. What I've said may be either contradicted or duplicated by the web sites Chris has already posted (I'll check those later).

 

Also, doesn't Overstreet-- particularly the Beerbohm Platinum Age article-- have a lot to say about this?

[Stronguy]

Stan Lee had a good take on "comic book" vs. "comicbook". The phrase "comic book" is merely a noun with an adjective slapped on the front of it -- it is a "book" that is "comic" or humorous. He said he uses the word "comicbook" because it describes a unique creation -- a book that contains illustrations and stories that are not necessarily "comic".

 

I'm with Stan on this one...

[Stronguy]

 

Etymology... Entomology...

Nephrology... Phrenology...

 

It's all the same to a dyslexic.