Quick Announcement and Quick Note on Semantics

If I may be allowed a small plug, I have recently re-branded my old personal blog
"Gorga's Thoughts" into "The Comicsmithy" A Place Where Comics Are Forged(TM... not really).

"Comicsmith" is the only word I've ever come up with to adequately describe what we do. We who make comics.

Writers write, painters paint, filmmakers make films, but people always seem to stick to "comics creator" or "comics artist" to sum up the position of a person who makes comics. We're ALL "artists". None of these do it for me. The nearest one is "cartoonist", but that word technically refers to a style and not a medium according to Scott McCloud; "an approach to picture-making" as he puts it in "Understanding Comics", (McCloud, 21) and I agree. I heard a discussion of this problem just a few weeks ago at a panel on "Brooklyn Women in Comics" (on which there is an article covering it coming, I swear) and I wanted to say it out loud... but I didn't. It would have been obnoxious of me.

"Comicsmith" is great because it resolves the "s" at the end of the word "comics" with a word that denotes creation: "smith", like a "blacksmith", a "metalsmith", or, more importantly, a "shipsmith". A shipsmith makes ships so a comicsmith makes comics. I also feel like it's, therefore, a better translation of the Japanese word mangaka. A bit antiquated, yes, but after realizing that comics is, more often than not, a "forging" of disparate elements into a work, I've fallen even more in love with the word. I'll even go so far as to say that if my word (or one better, but equally unique to the medium), gains enough popularity it would help to consciously/subconsciously affect the way people treat comics as a medium.

So I'll be putting a bigger effort at putting my simple photo comics up for all to see. Soon I hope to include more elaborate comics written by me and drawn by others as well!

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