Photo comics

Photo comics are a form of sequential storytelling using photographs rather than illustrations for the images, along with the usual comics conventions of narrative text and word balloons containing dialogue. They are sometimes referred to in English as fumetti, photonovels, photoromances, and similar terms. The photographs may be of real people in staged scenes, or posed dolls and other toys on sets.

Although far less common than illustrated comics, photo comics have filled certain niches in various places and times. For example, they have been used to adapt popular film and television works into print, tell original melodramas, and provide medical education. Photo comics have been popular at times in Italy and Latin America, and to a lesser extent in English-speaking countries.

The terminology used to describe photo comics is somewhat inconsistent and idiosyncratic. Fumetti is an Italian word (literally "little puffs of smoke", in reference to word balloons), which refers in that language to any kind of comics. Because of the popularity of photo comics in Italy, fumetti became a loanword in English referring specifically to that technique. By extension, comics which use a mixture of photographic and illustrated imagery have been described as mezzo-fumetti ("half" fumetti). Meanwhile, the Spanish term fotonovela – referring to popular photo-comics melodramas in Latin America – was adapted in English as fotonovel or photonovel, and came to be associated primarily with film and television adaptations, which were marketed using those terms. Variations such as "photo funnies" and "photostories" have also been used.

In Italian, a photo comic is referred to as a fotoromanzo ("photonovel", plural: fotoromanzi). In Spanish-speaking countries, the term fotonovela refers to several genres of photo comics, including original melodramas.

There were attempts at photo comics in the early days of tabloids in the United States. The New York Graphic (1924–1932) featured a daily multi-panel "Graphic Photo Drama from Life" illustrated feature and an "Antics of Arabella" comic strip in which scantily clad chorus girls or models demonstrated Physical Culture exercise poses while telling jokes in word balloons. As early as 1927 the New York Daily News featured Ziegfeld Follies stars Eddie Cantor and Frances Upton appearing in sequential photographs, telling jokes (presumably from the Follies scripts) with speech bubbles superimposed.

Photo comics emerged in Italy in the 1940s and expanded into the 1950s. (Actress Sophia Loren worked for a time as a model.) The lurid Italian crime photo comic Killing ran from 1966 through 1969, and was reprinted in other countries; it has been reprinted and revived numerous times since then.

The technique spread to Latin America, first adapting popular films, then for original stories. By the 1960s, there were about two dozen fotonovela movie adaptations circulating in Latin America and nearly three times as many original works. They remained popular in Mexico into the late 1980s, when 70 million copies of fotonovelas were printed each month.

Photo comics first became successful in the United States and Canada with Harvey Kurtzman's Help! magazine, which ran humorous photo stories from 1960 to 1965. Similar "Foto Funnies" – often featuring female nudity – were a regular feature of National Lampoon magazine beginning in the early 1970s.