Comic book
“Juxtaposed pictorial images and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” at least that’s how comic creator Scott McCloud defines it in his book Understanding Comics. In layman’s terms, a comic book is a magazine-like publication of varying length that tells a story or informs the reader through panels containing pictures, often illustrated. The average comic book nowadays is usually 22 pages in length; sometimes more or less if the comic is not published by one of the major publishers.
Graphic novels
Sort of a fancy term for “big comic book.” The length of a graphic novel varies, but the page count is usually above that of an average comic book. While some graphic novels tend to be a single story, others are collections of regular comic books. It has been debated that the latter doesn’t qualify as a graphic novel, leading to some to refer to these as “trade paperbacks” or “collected editions,” among other terms.
Major publishers
A.k.a. “The Big Two” or “The Big Four.” The two most popular are Marvel Comics and DC Comics: both mainly publish superhero comics, mostly set in their respective “universes” (Marvel’s comics are set in the Marvel Universe, DC’s comics are set in the DC universe).
Two other notable companies include Image Comics, home to mostly creator-owned material (as opposed to DC and Marvel Comics, where the companies own the characters), and Dark Horse Comics, home to both creator-owned material and Star Wars comics.
Other publishers
A.k.a. “independent” publishers. Pretty much any comic company not listed above; nowadays, that’s a lot! While these publishers release all kinds of comics in a variety of genres, what most of them have in common is that their comics are creator-owned (with some exceptions, i.e. licensed properties like Transformers or Scarface). Notable publishers include BOOM! Studios, Top Shelf Productions and Oni Press.
This is pretty much a basic overview. I’ll get into more particular terms, i.e. “word balloons,” “decompression” and “comix,” in between new posts: can’t just make this blog a glossary, after all!
