Silent comics (or pantomime comics) are comics which are delivered in mime. They make use of little or no dialogue, speech balloons or captions written underneath the images. Instead, the stories or gags are told entirely through pictures.
Definition
Silent comics have the advantage of being easily understandable to people - like children - who are slow readers. The genre is also universally popular since translation is not required, lacking the usual language barriers. Sergio Aragonés, a famous artist in the field, once said in a 1991 interview with Comics Journal: "What happens is like a supersimplification. Something you can say with words, you have to eliminate all the words until it can be told in a little story without words. You just think a little longer. But it becomes rewarding in the end because everybody can understand your cartoons no matter what your nationality. And that, to me, has been always a big thing—to do cartoons that everybody can understand, every age, every nationality. It is different. It's like in the theater. You have regular theater, and you have pantomime, like Marcel Marceau or Alejandro Jodorowsky. And I apply that to cartooning and it works."[1] Silent comics tend to be popular in the gag-a-day comics genre, where they typically consist of just three or four images per episode. But some graphic novels with longer narratives also make use of pantomime (see Wordless novels). This allows for a more visual experience, where the actual meaning of the events is left to the readers' own interpretation. Some famous silent-comics artists are Sergio Aragonés,[1]Guy Bara,[2]Chaval,[3]Henning Dahl Mikkelsen,[4]Adolf Oberländer,[5]Wil Raymakers,[6]Otto Soglow,[7]Gluyas Williams[8] and Jim Woodring.[9]
Maurice Rosy made a surreal pantomime comic about hat-like creatures in a seemingly Martian landscape in 1966, which never received a proper title.[22]
Max L'Explorateur (Max the Explorer) by Guy Bara.[2]
Les Mille et Une Aventures d'Oscar by Jean Léo.[23]
Geste Hypergraphique by Roberto Altmann, a comic book with abstract imagery, a surreal plot and symbols and freeform interpunction. While there are speech balloons it's unreadable gibberish, making it somewhat of a pantomime comic.[39]
Malabar, the mascot of chewing gum brand Malabar, whose adventures were told in pantomime comics. The first artist to draw the series was Jean-René Le Moing.[49]
Séta Álomországban by Bit (a.k.a. Nándor Honti [hu]). One particular episode, A Francia Bonne Álma (lit.'The French Nurse's Dream' or 'The French Nanny's Dream'), took the interest of famous psychologists Sándor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud.[74]
