So.

I make comics.

I have spent a lot of time reading about the history of the medium.

I have opinions about the terms used for it, and how they have shaped the medium in the past, and how their meanings have changed.

This conflict between the term we use for this art form in America and the ways it shapes what we think "a comic book" can be was an important discussion for comics creators to have had, as the medium grew and changed. Comics has been a medium seen as only suited for children for much of its American lifespan; it's only in the eighties that this began to change, with best-selling work by creators who would tear you a new one if you called their "graphic novel" a "comic book" because Comics Were For Kids and they were making work that was distinctly Not For Kids. (In the sixties, folks making works distinctly Not For Kids mostly called them "comix", and there are still creators who favor that term for their work because they feel a connection to that particular horny, counter-culture kind of energy. In the nineties, Scott McCloud floated "Sequential Art" as an umbrella term, but it never really stuck, even my copy of his later book "The Sculptor" says "graphic novel" on the back.)

The diversity of literal translations of other terms for "stories told as sequential pictures, often with words" is worth reflecting on, especially if you have devoted a significant chunk of your life to the medium like I have. Were the French more open to adult work than Americans because their term for the medium didn't include implications about the content? Or is it just that Americans are weird and uptight?

And on the other side of the world, a literal translation of "manga" is "whimsical/impromptu pictures" and Japanese comics sure grew up a lot faster than American comics - but on the other hand, the sixties saw the coining of the term "gekiga", which literally translates to "dramatic pictures", and was promoted by... creators who wanted to mark their work as being distinct from kid-friendly manga. The term has faded, they're all just "manga" now for the most part (to the best of my knowledge, I am not exactly up to the minute on the current manga scene), but the way this parallels the period of distaste for the literal meaning of "comic book" is pretty interesting! This is a thing people making Serious Work in a medium whose name has connotations of being silly need to grapple with.

Of course, there was also Frederic Wertham and his 1954 book "Seduction of the Innocent", which lead to the creation of the Comics Code. Which essentially set back acceptance of the medium as something you could tell adult stories in for a generation, and it's only in the past couple decades that "comics" have been something it wasn't considered kinda childish for an American adult to read, outside of the subculture of comics aficionados. France had their own crackdown on Immoral BD around the same time, but embraced adult work a lot faster. Did their lack of a term that inherently marked the medium as frivolous help? Maybe it really is that Americans are weird and uptight.

Perhaps we have finally arrived at the point where we can call the overall medium "comics" without ever worrying about the fact that the word originally referred to the comedic content found in much of the form. And that's pretty cool! But the literal meaning of the name has only recently stopped being a thing creators felt a need to really engage with, and the alternative terms still have a life as a cue to booksellers and librarians that they should probably double-check the contents before reflexively shelving a "graphic novel" in the kid's section.

tl;dr: i make comics, and the literal meaning of these words is an important part of the three strands of the global history of this medium.