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Fun thought experiment: if the first comics hadn’t been intended to be funny, we probably wouldn’t call the entire medium “comics”

What would we have called it instead?

in reply to calcifer

they'd still be called cartoons, probably. From the same root as card and carton, it just means drawings on paper.
in reply to Alex, Nevertheless

@WizardOfDocs IIRC, the same root as “carton”: heavy card stock, often used to sketch plans for artwork. Some people would use scraps of them for political humor sketches to pass around, creating the modern association
in reply to calcifer

so is that a plausible alternative to "comic," since political cartoons are often satire of some really heavy shit?
in reply to Alex, Nevertheless

@WizardOfDocs yeah, I think that’s probably very likely. Short, relatively well-understood, etc. and term doesn’t imply humor.
in reply to calcifer

Finnish language calls them "sarjakuva", literally "serial images".
in reply to Skiriki Fyxe

Something like Serials or Pulps might make a lot of sense - especially with the relationship between later comics and the Pulp novels
in reply to calcifer

text-ballooned-drawings of course. It really rolls off the tongue so well.
in reply to calcifer

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics calls them Sequential Art sometimes. Graphic Novels already exist. Dime Novels were basically graphic novels of the Old West/Victorian times.

But humor is so much easier in that form than any other, it seems unlikely it'd get another name first. Funny papers are a dominant market.