What’s Sequential Art?
This question has most likely crossed your mind. You being not int the know. It’s cool I won’t tell anyone. I’ll just school you, and we’ll pretend like you knew all along cuz we’re homies.
Sequential art is generally defined as an art form consisting of juxtaposed words, and pictures expressing multiple ideas, or concepts in a series (sequence). Being the Image Creator that I am I will go even further than the standard textbook definition to say that sequential art is a narrative art manifested visually. That is to say it tells a story…even if that story is as boring as the storyboards of an anti-depressant commercial.
The most commonly known expressions of sequential art are: comic strips, comic books, storyboards, and sometimes children’s books (the words and pictures aren’t always integrated in children’s books.)
The Black Age of Comics, Gekiga, and Manga also fall under this banner, but i won’t get too detailed about that here.
Some people would say that sequential art started with the Penny Dreadful comics in europe. Well those people are wrong. Sequential art or Seqa (see-kwa) as we aficionados call it is basicly show, and tell. So the earliest form of Seqa belongs to the African griots. Even today MC’s conjure images in the listeners minds. But I digress. The most famous of the early Sequential artists would have to be the ones that rocked those ill pieces inside the pyramids in Kemet, and Nubia.
That’s a short history lesson for you. I had to give it beacuse I wince every-time I have to use the misnomer “comics” to describe my work concisely. I’ll save the gritty details on that for another diatribe though.
