I’ll have a lot more to say about this later on (big shock, right?), but I should make one thing clear up at the start.

Back in the old days, we had a lot of distinctions we threw out. Newspaper Comics. Webcomics. Independent Comics. Mainstream Comics. Comic Books. Editorial Cartoons, Cartooning, Cartoonists, et al ad nauseum.

That was then. It’s 2011 now, and it seems to me we can simplify all of the above.

It’s “Comics.”

That’s all. Just “Comics.” Webcomics are increasingly meaningless as terminology — I have access to several thousand of Marvel’s archived comics at will. I can buy almost anything from DC at a moment’s notice. There are few to no comics available in newspapers that can’t be seen on a website. Setting up an artificial distinction based on… well, community identification from 5-10 years ago just seems silly.

So. I’m not only going to talk about comics, though I’ll talk a lot about them. But when I do talk about comics, I’m going to talk about comics, regardless of where they first came from. It’s all sequential art, baby.

I’ve tagged this post as Lexicon. That’ll be where all my annoying idiosyncratic turns of phrase get defined. Seems somehow appropriate.