Out of the gutters: A defense of the Hayman-Pratt definition of comics

Obviously rows of paintings in the Louvre are not comics and obviously nearly every issue of Batman is; however, why is this obvious? If there is something which we are meaningfully talking about when we talk about comics, then it follows that there are reasons why these cases are obvious. Further, when it is not entirely clear whether something is a comic, having a grasp on what a comic is will help us decide. A definition of comics that seems to consistently get the right results across cases both obvious and borderline is the Hayman-Pratt definition. Broader criticisms of the definitional project aside, one of the main ways in which the Hayman-Pratt definition has come under attack is the claim that it simply does not do a good job tracking our intuitions. I argue that the Hayman-Pratt definition does, in fact, do a reliable job of delineating the category of things which we can treat as comics. I do this by explicating the various necessary criteria of their pictorial narrative definition and then deploying them to see how we apply them to easy and hard evaluative cases.