Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 57

sacrilegious to some, farcical to others, but even the briefest skim demonstrates
obvious parallels. Examining the extent to which we can consider MALM a comic has
the potential to challenge current definitions of comics by questioning what are
considered to be comics’ key constitutional elements. There are a variety of places
to begin such an enquiry, but the relationship between words and images, as one of
the most contested areas of comics theory, presents itself most strongly.
Words, Images and Symbols
David Kunzle, in his book The Early Comic Strip, proposes that texts must meet four
conditions to be considered comics:
1) There must be a sequence of separate images;
2) There must be a preponderance of image over text;
3) The medium in which the strip appears and for which it was
originally intended must be reproductive, that is, in printed form, a
mass medium;
4) The sequence must tell a story which is both moral and topical. 3
Whilst the latter two have been correctly dismissed – most convincingly by Thierry
Groensteen, who also dismisses single panel images in the same segment – 4 as
reflective only of certain comics of a particular era, and the first is largely indisputable
aside from those few critics who still wish to argue for the inclusion of single panel
cartoons as comics, the second has become perhaps the most important defining
characteristic of comics. Those texts where text is the dominant narrative force or
where text (rather than image) is the primary driver of meaning would seem logically
to be one of comics’ few secure boundaries.
By this method of categorisation, MALM is certainly a comic: it is driven
almost entirely by its visual aspects and, aside from five pages of multi-language
safety warnings, contains very little text. This lack of text in no way precludes MALM
3
David Kunzle cited in Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick
Nguyen (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 13.
4
Groensteen, The System of Comics, 13.