Comics as By-Product

In the history of image/text pairings, comics stand as an industrial by-product of the mainline technological legacy. Illuminated manuscripts and public monuments set us on a trajectory to develop subsequent image/text innovations, notably the mass-proliferated formats of newspapers, magazines, and posters, whose basic theory tenets are the foundations of the internet, particularly multifaceted web page design. Much like petroleum jelly was a consequential by-product of oil refinement, comics are the cast-off remainder of ideas, words, and images which accumulate at the periphery of true industrial image/text production: With this premise, we can reposition an understanding of both the history of comics and their future as the mainline technology continues to evolve through platforms like Instagram. At the risk of running counter to one of the presented claims of the call for papers—"Our aim is to critically rethink comics not as passive recipients of technological change"—I would propose that comics' history has a strategic passivity, actively taking advantage of the remainders of unbalanced equations. While the notion of a "by-product" may seemingly minimize the proactive potency of comics, the noble tradition of reclaiming by-products and finding purpose with them is by no means marginal. As new technological epochs rise and fall, comics as a medium necessarily have to reckon with the available castoffs as substance for sympathetic (if not parallel) innovation.