<
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/07/the-case-for-memes-as-a-new-form-of-comics/>
"It’s undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on
cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new
publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the
emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an education
professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in
INKS:
The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image
macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and
creative ways in which they operate.
“One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics,” Abate told
Ars. “I’ve published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and
various titles: everything from Charles Schulz’s
Peanuts to
The Far Side,
to
Little Lulu to
Ziggy to
The Family Circus. So I’ve been working on
comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many
years now.”
Her most recent book is 2024’s
Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of
One-Panel Comics in the United States, which Abate was researching when the
COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. “I was reading a lot of single panel comics and
sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were
always sharing, too,” Abate said. “It occurred to me one day that there isn’t a
whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I’m sharing and the
memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the
verbal and the visual, there’s more continuity than there is difference.”
So Abate decided to approach the question more systematically. Evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 popular science
book,
The Selfish Gene, well before the advent of the Internet age. For
Dawkins, it described a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of
information”: ideas, catchphrases, catchy tunes, fashions, even arch building."
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
