My mum and dad gave me a lot of Marvel films for christmas, in response to me saying that I wanted to find something new to get into. I keep intending to bung them in my dvd drive and start watching. I was about to do so a few days ago, but I thought I’d do some Googling first. What I found was intriguing: a plethora of new characters and narratives, captured not in good old prose or film, but in a visual language I’d never considered before. Like most people, I suppose, I’d always dismissed comics/graphic novels as being for children; but if you think about it, it’s an artform unto itself – a completely unique way of telling stories. The images are static, yet combine to form a narrative. The images incorporate text, but text is only one component of the form. Thus comic strip exist somewhere between prose and film. My initial searches were only cursory, but what I wonder now is, is there any kind of theory or analysis associated with this artform, as there is with literature and film? Just how seriously can one take it?