Abstract

What makes comics comics? The question is difficult. Many answers have been proposed but the debate appears to stagnate, in part because scholars cannot seem to agree about the exact content of the category of comics. In this article, I propose to move the discussion away from the category of comics and instead approach the debate through the category of works that read like comics. After arguing that this change of perspective is relevant and likely to generate more homogeneous views among scholars, I present a series of intriguing works that read like comics, despite not having the characteristics one would probably judge necessary according to the current literature. Doing so, I show that works do not need to have pictures or look like comics to read like comics, that some works read like comics precisely because of the way they look, that a single image can be modified to read like a comic, and that we can create a truly single image that reads like a comic. I discuss how the presented works challenge some common assumptions about the defining features of comics. Finally, I conclude that the category of works that read like comics is useful to further our understanding of comics and to explore what might be the most interesting aspects of the medium.