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| Comics as an art form established itself in the late 19th and early 20th century, alongside the similar forms of film and animation. The three forms share certain conventions, most noticeably the mixing of words and pictures, and all three owe parts of their conventions to the technological leaps made through the industrial revolution. Though newspapers and magazines first established and popularized comics in the late 1890s, narrative illustration has existed for many centuries.
Rome's Trojan's Column, dedicated in 113 AD, is an early surviving example of a narrative told through sequential pictures, while Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek friezes, medieval tapestries such as the Beaux Tapestry and illustrated manuscripts also combine sequential images and words to tell a story. In medieval paintings, many sequential scenes of the same story (usually a Biblical one) appear simultaneously in the same painting (see illustration to left).
However, these works did not travel to the reader; it took the invention of modern printing techniques to bring the form to a wide audience and become a mass medium. |
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