Chatterbox: Pudding's Place

The Ninth Art

This is something I came across when traveling across the vast lands also known as the internet for a school project.

The Ninth Art.

The Ninth Art is a term in which comics are filed under in Europe. French comics. Meaning they're in French. Since they're also by Belgian cartoonists. And some other people, too.

I think it's interesting how seriously comics are taken there. So, of course, I searched "Ninth Art" on google hoping to come up with many wonderful completely trustworthy internet articles on comics there, which have this fancy title, but are commonly shortented to BC. So that's what I'll be calling comics there from now on.

Sadly, the ninth art does not head as many titles as one would hope. And I had quite a bit of hope. Instead, I found some sort of blog THINGS that I'm not even quite sure what they were that were nodding their head in the general direction of BC. Except for one of them.

Now, this could be a totally BC themed webpage. But it didn't seem to be to me. For one thing, it had two pictures of sterotyped American Superhero Comic book characters. That does NOT say BC to me. So I refused to poke around.

But that got me thinking. Because the French, or, in general, the Europeans (BELGIUM!!!), put comics under the categorey of "The Ninth Art," is it a general enough term for comics outside of that area? Could I call manga and American comics and webcomics all part of the ninth art?

I feel like this is sort of illegal. Then I thought about why I thought it was illegal. Comics are taken seriously there. They're the ninth art. But comics are, at least in my opinion, shunned and tosed aside as not worthwhile and brain-rotting even in America. At my school we get to read for ten minutes at the beginning of each class. But we're not allowed to read comics. Why? I'm not quite sure. Because if kids could read comics, that's all they would read? Because they're not helping you at all? They're killing brain cells? It can't be that, that's the most silly thing I've ever heard. Because comics are shunned in American society, I subconiously felt like "The ninth art" could only be used for comics when they were in Europe. They didn't even have to be BC. They just had to be there.

I think it wouldn't actually be too bad to have comics referred to as "The ninth art." Everywhere. But how far away are we from that? Very, very far away. As far as I can tell.

So. What do you guys think?