This is a rant, and a short one, but I have been holding it in for far too long. The title was supposed to be 'Too many people made this mistake', sorry about that.


Okay, I've seen a lot of comics on Pokemon fansites, and they all make the same mistake. They do not use the correct terms.

Now, this probably seems like a little thing to you, and nothing to type an entire rant over. But I'm that kind of person who gets irritated at the smallest mistakes. Heck, I edit my posts if I see even a simple misspelling. And, like I have said before, I have been holding it in for a long time, and I just want to release it.

Back onto the subject, I have seen those individual comics called 'chapters' and 'episodes'. The comic creators often refer to themselves as 'authors' or 'writers'. Some people even sort their comics into 'seasons'. That is all wrong. The individual comics are called 'strips'. The creator is called a 'cartoonist'. There are no seasons in the world of comics. There are storylines, in which the characters go on an adventure or something like that. Seasons and episodes are for TV. Chapters and authors are for books. Writers are, of course, people who write. None of them are for comics.

I'm sorry if this breaks the rules or offends anyone, I just really wanted to get this out. I love comics, and I do not appreciate seeing the wrong terms used.

Actually, it can be your pet peeve, but ultimately it boils down to what the comic's creator wants to call it. If the comic is patterened like a Manga (in that it tells a story) then it makes sense to call them "chapters" instead of "strips." You don't call a manga book a comic book, now do you? You call it a graphic novel, because it is. Novels tell stories.

You're right about it in some cases, though. If the comic has a bunch of random funny jokes that aren't really tied together in any way, then yes, it's a strip.

((Edit: ...And I fixed the title for you, making it grammatically correct as well. ^^))

It should be the creator's choice to decide what to call their comics and what to call themselves. I don't think it matters, as you can still know what it means easily.

I second what Zephyr said. If it's in manga format and tells a story, then each individual release would be a chapter, and the person who makes the manga would be the artist/author. If you want an example go read any manga, like Inuyasha or something by CLAMP.

The little cartoon strips in newspapers are comics - they're funny and have a joke.

It's not just for Manga, though- Webcomics, sprite comics, anything that tells a tale and isn't necessarily funny each episode can be called a "story," with "chapters" in it.

I was reading a published manga book a few hours ago, and it referred to each "chapter" as episodes. Other manga books, like CLAMP's, refer to them as chapitres.

So eh... I guess it's really up to the author. As for little comic strips, if there are more than one scenerio with the same characters, how else can you number them except as chapters or episodes?

But you're right about the seasons. Those are strictly for the TV shows, really. In manga "seasons" can be referred to as parts, and plotlines are arcs.