This chapter looks at a humor subgenre of manga defined by form, the four-panel (comic) strip known in Japanese as yonkoma manga. While this form has played a significant role in modern manga history, including a close interrelation with story-manga, it remains underrepresented in comics studies today. Yonkoma manga can be found in magazines and on internet platforms, but in this chapter, the focus leans toward newspapers where the strips initially developed and today still reach their widest audience. A brief historical overview of the development and current situation of four-panel strips is given before attention turns to their structure, usually described as ki-shō-ten-ketsu (introduction-development-turn of events-conclusion). How this conventional narrative structure is approached varies. This is demonstrated by introducing the creative processes of a few artists. To highlight this structure, an example strip is described. To move beyond mere explications of narrative pattern, however, this chapter ends with a simple application of linguistic humor theory to reveal in part how the humor is created, and to call for more engagement with humor theories in manga studies.

Comics inherently encompass multiple modalities and are published across numerous platforms, whether in print or digital form. In its distinct combinations of words and images, the multimodal medium of comics has encompassed numerous formats throughout its long history – typically appearing in numerous forms simultaneously in any given era. Comics exist in single-panel and multi-panel strips within newspapers and magazines, in single-issue comic books and longer graphic novel formats and in new digital forms such as webcomics and motion comics. Comics have also been adapted to cinema and television, in both live-action and animated incarnations – often drawing on the original words and imagery of their source material in direct ways. This essay traces the history of comics as a multimodal experience from the 1800s through the twenty-first century; it also examines how other media have translated them onto various types of screens while still drawing on the specific formal qualities used by comics to tell stories. Regardless of the particular format through which readers engage with the medium, comics offer amalgamations of two separate modes of content which allow for unique meanings via the unification of words and images.

The aesthetics of comics is deeply linked to the history of media serialities. Modern comics were born in the newspaper and followed its periodic rhythms and exploited its logic of reader loyalty. The two historically dominant models of comics, the comic strip and the comic book, are each linked to a publication medium or format – the newspaper and the magazine, respectively – and to their logics of consumption. Many characteristics of the comic strip – the principle of gag variations, the importance of generic conventions, recurring characters, spin-off series, crossover logics – can be reinterpreted according to the industrial and media contexts in which they appear and which are aesthetically exploited by the authors. Reflection on the seriality of comics can therefore not be limited to analyses of plots or modes of graphic narration. It needs to consider media logics, including the industrial and commercial dynamics and modes of consumption they encourage. Ultimately, comics seriality engages with, on the one hand, the principles of generic seriality, which thematize these logics of production and consumption. On the other, diegetic seriality, of the recurrent character and the fictional universe, also determines the strategic choices of industrial and media players.

The contemporary fascination with comics archives also revolves around imaginary collections of invented “forgotten” comics. This chapter is not about forgeries of actual cartoonists but about imaginary constructions, fictive comics objects, and pseudo recoveries – whose transmissive function can be as important as the recirculation of actual archives. It details the stakes of this retro reflexivity by looking more closely at paratextual elements in Seth’s graphic novels and then in a more detailed close-reading of Cole Closser’s Little Tommy Lost, which presents itself as a playfully anachronistic work, mobilizing all the conventions of the 1920s comic strip within the publishing framework of a contemporary graphic novel. Productively fed by the many reprints of newspaper comics of the mid-2000s, Little Tommy Lost also offers an indirect critique “in practice,” reminding us of the complexities in reviving these serial objects, but also perhaps failing to take up the digital publication opportunities where such forms might find a new context.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.