Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Christian Comics? It’s No Laughing Matter!

By Nate Butler
July 2006

Did you know that people in ancient cultures around the world actually produced and read comics? Don’t laugh … It’s true!

“Comics” may be defined as “a series of pictures which tell a story or make a point.” They are neither a new phenomenon nor the exclusive invention of any single country or culture. Modern day comics are just one of the latest incarnations of a narrative picture-story tradition that has been in existence for thousands of years.

Comics are the most widely read form of popular literature around the world.

Comics Around the World
In Europe stained-glass windows, the Bayeux Tapestry in France and fifteenth century German woodcuts are examples of messages communicated through a series of artistic images. In Asia, Buddhist monks in sixth and seventh century Japan created “picture scrolls” which told epic stories, using symbols such as falling cherry blossoms to indicate the passage of time. Long before the arrival of the Europeans, Australian Aborigines were painting sequential images on bark and rocks to relate their own “dreamtime stories.” In Mexico wall murals in Teotihuacan show illustrated stories of jaguars that utilize a form of speech balloons.

The current and rather narrow English term “comics” comes from comical versions that gained tremendous popularity in England and the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. However, this medium is being used now to communicate a variety of messages, often more serious than funny, and usually more bad than good. The international audience on the receiving end of this type of information is enormous.

Throughout Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa billions of people of all ages are avid readers of publications they call manga, manhwa, bande dessinée, historietas, foto novela, fumetti or some other term within their own culture. All of these are versions and variations of the narrative picture-stories referred to as “comics” in the West. In fact, this visual medium is the world’s most widely read form of popular literature.

This truth can be difficult to grasp in countries such as America, where the largest selling comic book title moves around 2.5 million copies a year. This truth is more obvious in Japan, where the top title Shonen Jump sells 3.2 million copies every single week, the three top sellers have a total turnover of ten million copies per week and a staggering 2.1 billion comics are sold every year. This translates into 16.6 copies for every man, woman, boy and girl in that country! However, Japan is not alone in its extraordinary love of comics.

In Korea seven thousand new comic book titles appear every year, and twenty-five million volumes are published. About 8,700 comic book rental stores and 7,600 comic book arcades exist nationwide. Teenage boys and girls in Thailand rank comics among their most “popular reads,” and the top two comics, Kai Hua Roh and Mahasanook, together sell over eight million copies a month. Graphic novel comics featuring France’s popular cartoon character Astérix le Gaulois have sold approximately 200 million volumes. The Donald Duck comic is one of the most successful periodicals in the Nordic countries, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Norway, Finland and Sweden each month. In the Middle East the successful pan-Arab comic strip magazine Majid has a certified weekly circulation of 150,000 to 175,000 copies and is sold in almost every Arab state. The international examples go on and on.

Nate Butler is president/cofounder of COMIX35. He worked for over twenty years as a cartoonist and writer/illustrator for clients such as Jim Henson, King Features and comic publishers DC, Archie and Marvel.