SOURCE: An introduction to "The Comics as Culture," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. XII, No. 4, Spring, 1979, pp. 631-39.

In the following essay, Inge assesses the comic as an art form.

The comic strip has been defined as an open-ended dramatic narrative about a recurring set of characters told in a series of drawings, often including dialogue in balloons and a narrative text, and published serially in newspapers. The daily and Sunday comic strips are part of the reading habit of more than one hundred million people of all educational and social levels. During the first half of this century, surveys have indicated that sixty percent of newspaper readers consider the comic page the priority feature in their reading. Along with jazz, the comic strip as we know it perhaps represents America's major indigenous contribution to world culture.

Comic books, on the other hand, originally an offshoot of...