Once upon a time—in the distant twentieth century—people enjoyed reading comic strips in newspapers. Today, many find amusement in viewing and sharing ironic memes online, and even the least social media-savvy crack a smile when receiving them, perhaps via WhatsApp. These humorous images, bouncing from phone to phone, have now been elevated to the status of a collective artistic expression by experts, who note strong parallels with classic comics.
Who doesn’t remember the “distracted boyfriend” meme, depicting a man turning his head to check out another woman while walking with his girlfriend? It was one of the most popular in recent years, alongside ‘Batman slapping Robin’. The original distracted boyfriend image was not created for this purpose. It was a stock photo taken by photographer Antonio Guillem, which was first paired with an ironic caption by a Turkish rock group. After countless permutations, it went viral globally, spawning a myriad of captions for ironic, political, and social commentary.
Since 2017, countless digital contents with a sarcastic or ironic twist have gained massive fame, ricocheting across social platforms worldwide. Recent examples include memes featuring Conclave protagonists, ‘Fanta-Pope’ themes, and the seagull perched next to the Sistine Chapel’s chimney.
Are memes the new comics? The comparison has been drawn by comics scholar Michelle Ann Abate of The Ohio State University, who argues that these contents represent a significant new typology of digital comics and a form of pop art. “Memes use many of the same visual and verbal elements that characterize a comic, and these elements function in very similar ways. So yes, they absolutely should be considered a type of comic,” Abate explained in an article recently published in The Journal of the Comics Studies Society.
The term ‘meme’ (from the Greek *mímēma*, “imitation”) is a cultural element that propagates by imitation from one individual to another and shares several similarities with comics in generating humor. “Of course, in comics, the artist usually produces both the drawing and the language. In memes, people use a base image—known as a ‘macro image’—and add their own commentary,” the expert noted. “Using a pre-existing image as a base for a meme is similar to sampling in music. Someone takes that base content and reuses it, re-imagines it, and develops it into an original work of art.”
Reader contribution can also be fundamental in the world of comics, as seen with The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest. Since 1999, the magazine has published a single-panel cartoon each week without a caption. Readers submit their ideas for the missing verbal element, and a winner is chosen by public vote. “The New Yorker’s caption contest is often framed as a kind of crowdsourcing, but it’s also a kind of meme,” Abate highlighted.
This marks a qualitative leap for the images we share daily, now promoted to a new form of popular, collective, and ever-evolving art.
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