A Reflection on American Comics Seriality

In the United States, comics have embraced seriality as their distinctive feature since their origins at the end of the 19th century, when Sunday newspaper supplements began publishing episodic stories of characters who soon became widely known, such as the legendary street urchin Yellow Kid. Following the success of this initiative, within a few years daily newspaper editions also began to publish comics, featuring recurring characters whose stories were presented in serialized strips distributed by syndications, allowing readers to follow their narrative development day by day. By the late 1930s, a new formatâ€Â" the comic bookâ€Â" had emerged, whose impact further consolidated in the 1960s, when new superhero series achieved extraordinary popularity among teenagers. In the following years, underground magazines arose from the countercultural movements, introducing new formats of storytelling and self-contained comics stories and paving the way to today’s graphic novels. Yet comics remain a profoundly serial product, not only because of the vast number of series still in production, but also in their modes of consumption, as repeated readings allow readers to discover new perceptual and cognitive dimensions each time.