Talk:Comic

British comic

In the United Kingdom the term comic is used to refer to a magazine which consists mainly of comic strips, although also contains text features, puzzles, games and articles. This is not the same thing as the art form of comics and is distinct usage, since the term in the United States is comic book. I believe the Australia and South Africa also utilise the term comic book, although I am not well versed in their distinct cultural idioms with regards to the form. Hiding talk 18:35, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

The encyclopedic definition "a form of visual art consisting of static images in a fixed sequence, often in the form of a magazine or a book" does not change. If you want to inform about semantic differences between the use of "comic" in the US and the UK then do it at comic, (though I question if there's really any difference as per this AHD definition). The place to explain the differences in the medium is comic book.

Your description of British comic books above is identical to how Swedish comic books are made and looking up seriemagasin or serietidning in NE's Swedish-English dictionary results in either "comic [book]" or "comic [magazine]" without any real distinction between the two. You still seem to be trying to exaggerate the uniqueness of British and/or European comics beyond the reasonable, though I don't understand why that would be useful to anyone.

Peter ^Isotalo 01:27, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to make you understand the point that a British person will come to the UK and type in the term comic and expect to find an article on such a thing there. The article at comics regards the art form. The article at British comic delineates the comic as it exists in the United Kingdom. Please tell me why it is useful not to present this information pertinently to our readers, and please refrain from edit warring, cheers. Hiding talk 10:46, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

You know, I think the problem here is that we've only been discussing dicdefs, and that this dab page really doesn't have anything worth disambiguating. "Comic" as in comedian is certainly a rather secondary meaning and is already linked from comics. I can't imagine that anyone would protest to a straight redirect on account of just that. Whether or not we agree on the definitions of the British "comic" vs the US "comics" is actually moot since it's merely a matter of dicdefs and not different encyclopedic definitions. After all, the main article is supposed to be about anything that is defined as "a narrative sequence of cartoon panels" (or thereabouts), no matter the origin or medium, and there's no logic in making a hard disambiguation of British comic from the main article just because British comic books contain more puzzles and editorials than American ones.

So why not just cut this Gordian knot by closing this down as dab page and redirecting the whole thing to comics?

Peter ^Isotalo 15:41, 20 September 2005 (UTC)