Comic book

Not all superhero comics are necessarily science fiction; Marvel Comics' Daredevil, for example, despite an initial science-fiction premise, may be more usefully classified as a crime drama. There are two major professional societies dedicated to computers, the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society. Frankenstein, for example, is a science fiction/horror novel; The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is a Western/comedy TV series. Terminology for different professional disciplines is still somewhat fluid and new fields emerge from time to time: however, some of the major groupings are as follows:. Note: As with film and literature, genres are rarely pure and often blend. However, certain professional and academic disciplines have evolved that specialize in techniques to construct, program, and use computers. This was a more mature work than many had come to expect from the comics medium, and the critical and commercial success of A Contract with God helped to establish the term "graphic novel" in common usage. In the developed world, virtually every profession makes use of computers.

The term was popularized when Will Eisner used it on the cover of the paperback edition of his work A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (1978). A very large proportion of personal computers regularly connect to the Internet to communicate and receive information. The term graphic novel was first coined by Richard Kyle in 1964, mainly as an attempt to distinguish the newly translated works from Europe which were then being published from what Kyle saw as the more juvenile publications common in the United States. In fact, the number of computers that are networked is growing phenomenally. This choice is still controversial, with critics feeling that Töppfer's work is perhaps somewhat unconnected to the genesis of the artform as it is now known in the region. Initially these facilities were available primarily to people working in high-tech environments, but in the 1990s the spread of applications like e-mail and the World Wide Web, combined with the development of cheap, fast networking technologies like Ethernet and ADSL saw computer networking become ubiquitous almost everywhere. Although Switzerland contributes less to the body of work, it is significant that many scholars point to a Francophone Swiss, Rodolphe Töpffer, as the true father of comics. Computer operating systems and applications were modified to include the ability to define and access the resources of other computers on the network, such as peripheral devices, stored information, and the like, as extensions of the resources of an individual computer.

Donald Duck's superhero alter ego, Paperinik, known in English as Superduck, was created in Italy. In the phrase of John Gage and Bill Joy (of Sun Microsystems), "the network is the computer". Italy is also famous for being one of the foremost producers of Walt Disney comic stories, particularly. The emergence of networking involved a redefinition of the nature and boundaries of the computer. Italian cartoonists have and receive great influences from other countries including Belgium, France, Spain and Argentina. In time, the network spread beyond academic and military institutions and became known as the Internet. Author comics are published in the French BD format, with an example being Pratt's Corto Maltese. The technologies that made the Arpanet possible spread and evolved.

Collections of classic material for the most famous character, usually with over 200 pages, are also common. This effort was funded by ARPA, and the computer network that it produced was called the ARPANET. Mainstream comics are usually published on the monthly basis, in a black and white digest size format, with about 100-132 pages of story. In the 1970s, computer engineers at research institutions throughout the US began to link their computers together using telecommunications technology. Best sellers remain popular comic books Diabolik or the Bonelli line, namely Tex Willer or Dylan Dog. However, progress on creating a computer that exhibits "general" intelligence comparable to a human has been extremely slow. "Author" comics contain often strong erotic contents. Over the years, methods have been developed to allow computers to do things previously regarded as the exclusive domain of humans — for instance, "read" handwriting, play chess, or perform symbolic integration.

After World War II, however, artists like Hugo Pratt and Guido Crepax imposed Italian comics to an international audience. Robotics, indeed, is the physical expressions of the field of artificial intelligence, a discipline whose exact boundaries are fuzzy but to some degree involves attempting to give computers capabilities that they do not currently possess but humans do. In Italy, comics (known as fumetti) made their debut as humouristic strips at the end of the 19th century, and later evolved in adventure stories inspired to those coming from the U.S. Industrial robots have become commonplace in mass production, but general-purpose human-like robots have not lived up to the promise of their fictional counterparts and remain either toys or research projects. DC Thomson also repackage The Broons and Oor Wullie strips in softcover A4 books for the festive season. Perhaps the most famous computer-controlled mechanical devices are robots, machines with more-or-less human appearance and some subset of their capabilities. At Christmas time publishers will repackage and commission material for comic annuals, hardback A4 books. Today, it is almost rarer to find a powered mechanical device not controlled by a computer than to find one that is at least partly so.

The repackaging of European material has been less frequent, although the Tintin and Asterix serials have been successfully translated and repackaged in soft cover books. Computers have been used to control mechanical devices since they became small and cheap enough to do so; indeed, a major spur for integrated circuit technology was building a computer small enough to guide the Apollo missions and the Minuteman missile, two of the first major applications for embedded computers. Marvel eventually established a UK office, with DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics also opening offices for periods in the 1990s. They have also been used for entertainment, with the video game becoming a huge industry. Several reprint companies were involved in repackaging American material for the British market, notably the importer and distributor Thorpe & Porter. Sound, still pictures, and video are now routinely created (through synthesizers, computer graphics and computer animation), and near-universally edited by computer. The lack of reliable supplies of American comic books led to a variety of black and white reprints, including Marvel's 1950s monster comics, Fawcett's Captain Marvel, and some other characters such as Sheena, Mandrake the Magician and the Phantom. As computers have become less expensive, they have been used extensively in the creative arts as well.

The United Kingdom has also established a healthy market in the reprinting and repackaging of material, notably material originated within the United States. In the 1980s, personal computers became popular for many tasks, including book-keeping, writing and printing documents, calculating forecasts and other repetitive mathematical tasks involving spreadsheets. The content of Action, another title aimed at children and launched in the mid 1970s became the subject of discussion in the House of Commons, and although this was on a smaller scale to such similar investigations in the United States, it also led to a moderation of content published within comics, although such moderatiuon was never formalised to the extent of a creation of any code, and nor was it particularly lasting. Moreover, with the invention of the microprocessor in the 1970s, it became possible to produce inexpensive computers. Underground comics and "small press" titles have also been published within the United Kingdom, notably Oz and Escape Magazine. Continual reductions in the cost and size of computers saw them adopted by ever-smaller organizations. Popular titles within the United Kingdom have included The Beano, The Dandy, The Eagle, 2000 AD and Viz. in the United Kingdom, was operational and being used for inventory management and other purposes 3 years before IBM built their first commercial stored-program computer.

Although Ally Sloper's Half Holiday (1884), the first comic published in Britain, was marketed at adults, publishers quickly targeted a younger market, which has led to most publications being for children and created an association in the public's mind of comics being somewhat juvenile. Lyons and Co. Some comics, such as Judge Dredd and other 2000 AD titles, have been published in a tabloid form known as a "programme", or "prog" for short. The LEO, a stored program-computer built by J. Although generally referred to as a comic, it can also be referred to as a comic magazine, and has also been known historically as a comic paper. From the beginning, stored program computers were applied to business problems. Originally the same size as the comic book in the United States, although lacking the glossy cover, the British comic has adopted a magazine size, with The Beano and The Dandy the last to adopt this size in the 1980s. Despite this early focus of scientific and military engineering applications, computers were quickly used in other areas.

Most books are first published as a hard cover oversized book, usually 48 or 64 pages, with later re-releases in soft cover. Others were used in cryptanalysis, for example the first programmable (though not general-purpose) digital electronic computer, Colossus, built in 1943 during World War II. In France, most comics are published at the behest of the author, who will work within his self-appointed time frame, so a wait from six months to two years between installments is common. (Many of the most powerful supercomputers available today are also used for nuclear weapons simulations.) The CSIR Mk I, the first Australian stored-program computer, evaluated rainfall patterns for the catchment area of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a large hydroelectric generation project. In North America, the more serious Franco-Belgian comics are often seen as equivalent to graphic novels, for various reasons, but whether they are long or short, bound or in magazine format, in Europe there is no need for a more sophisticated term, as the art's name does not itself imply something frivolous. This calculation, performed in December, 1945 through January, 1946 and involving over a million punch cards of data, showed the design then under consideration would fail. Relative to the respective size of their countries, the innumerable authors in the region publish huge numbers of comic books. The ENIAC was originally designed to calculate ballistics-firing tables for artillery, but it was also used to calculate neutron cross-sectional densities to help in the design of the hydrogen bomb.

Indeed, the distinction of comics as the "ninth art" is prevalent in Francophone scholarship on the form (le neuvième art), as is the concept of comics criticism and scholarship itself. The first digital computers, with their large size and cost, mainly performed scientific calculations, often to support military objectives. It is not insignificant that the French term contains no indication of subject matter, unlike the American terms "comics" and "funnies," which imply an art form not to be taken seriously. Instead, the custom programs written for their task perform all necessary functions that would be performed by an operating system in less specialized roles. La bande dessinée is derived from the original description of the artform as "drawn strips". Embedded computers may have a specialized operating system, or sometimes none at all. Belgian comic books originally written in Dutch are influenced by the francophone "Franco-Belgian" comics, but have a different feel. Not all operating systems provide all of the above functions; operating systems for smaller computers typically provide fewer, such as the highly minimal operating systems for early microcomputers.

Belgium and France are two countries that have a long tradition in comics and comic books, where they are called BDs (from Bande Dessinée) in French. For instance, Apple's Mac OS X ships with a digital video editor application. Along with the shift toward graphic novels among comics publishers, traditional book publishers such as Pantheon have released several dozen graphic novels, including works originally released by comics publishers with much less publicity. Outside these "core" functions, operating systems are usually shipped with an array of other tools, some of which may have little connection with these original core functions but have been found useful by enough customers for a provider to include them. In the early 2000s, sales of standard monthly comic books declined while graphic novels made increasing headway at retail bookstores. While there are few technical reasons why a GUI has to be tied to the rest of an operating system, it allows the operating system vendor to encourage all the software for their operating system to have a similar looking and acting interface. The "minicomics" form, an extremely informal version of self-publishing, arose in the 1980s and became increasingly popular among artists in the 1990s, despite reaching an even more limited audience than the small press. Perhaps the last major addition to the operating system were tools to provide programs with a standardized graphical user interface.

A number of small publishers in the 1990s changed the format and distribution of their comics to more closely resemble non-comics publishing. Security access controls, allowing computer users access only to files, directories and programs they had permissions to use, were also common. By the 1980s, several such independent publishers as Eclipse Comics, First Comics, and Fantagraphics were releasing a wide range of styles and formats from color superhero, detective and science fiction comic books to black-and-white magazine-format stories of Latin American magical realism. The range of devices that operating systems had to manage also expanded; a notable one was hard disks; the idea of individual "files" and a hierarchical structure of "directories" (now often called folders) greatly simplified the use of these devices for permanent storage. The "small press" scene continued to grow and diversify. Such a development required the operating system to provide each user's programs with a "virtual machine" such that one user's program could not interfere with another's (by accident or design). A few (notably RAW) were experimental attempts to bring comics closer to the world of fine art. The next major development in operating systems was timesharing — the idea that multiple users could use the machine "simultaneously" by keeping all of their programs in memory, executing each user's program for a short time so as to provide the illusion that each user had their own computer.

Some independent comics continued in the tradition of underground comics, though were generally less overtly graphic, and others resembled the output of mainstream publishers in format and genre but were published by smaller artist-owned ventures or by a single artists. The combination of managing "hardware" and scheduling jobs became known as the "operating system"; the classic example of this type of early operating system was OS/360 by IBM. The rise of comic-book specialty stores in the late 1970s created a dedicated market for "independent" or "alternative comics"; two of the first were the anthology series Star Reach, published by comic-book writer Mike Friedrich from 1974-1979, and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, published from the 1970s through the present day. Soon, special software to automate the scheduling and execution of these many jobs became available. Natural, and published Gilbert Shelton's The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. By the 1960s, with computers in wide industrial use for many purposes, it became common for them to be used for many different jobs within an organization. Crumb later created the popular characters Fritz the Cat and Mr. A particularly common task set related to handling the gritty details of "talking" to the various I/O devices, so libraries for these were quickly developed.

The underground-comics movement is often considered to have started with Zap Comix #1 (1968) by cartoonist Robert Crumb, a former Cleveland greeting-card artist living in San Francisco. For the purposes of efficiency, standard versions of these were collected in libraries and made available to all who required them. Underground comics were virtually never sold on newsstands but in such youth-oriented outlets as head shops and record stores, and by mail order. Soon after the development of the computer, it was discovered that certain tasks were required in many different programs; an early example was computing some of the standard mathematical functions. Many were notable for their uninhibited, irreverent style; their frankness in graphic sex, nudity, language and overt politics hadn't been seen in comics outside of their precursors, the pornographic and even more underground "Tijuana bibles". Nevertheless, the process of developing software remains slow, unpredictable, and error-prone; the discipline of software engineering has attempted, with some partial success, to make the process quicker and more productive and improve the quality of the end product. These comics were published and distributed independently of the established mainstream, and most reflected the youth counterculture and drug culture of the time. The management of this enormous complexity is key to making such projects possible; programming languages, and programming practices, enable the task to be divided into smaller and smaller subtasks until they come within the capabilities of a single programmer in a reasonable period.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a surge of underground comics occurred. A typical example is the Firefox web browser, created from roughly 2 million lines of computer code in the C++ programming language; there are many projects of even bigger scope, built by large teams of programmers. comic book industry created the Comics Code Authority in 1954 and drafted the Comics Code, a move which saw the particularly targeted EC change its satirical comic book Mad from comic book to magazine format in order to circumvent the Code. Going from the extremely simple capabilities of a single machine language instruction to the myriad capabilities of application programs means that many computer programs are extremely large and complex. In response to this attention from government and the media, the U.S. The stereotypical modern example of an application is perhaps the office suite, a set of interrelated programs for performing common office tasks. Notable events in the history of the American comic book include the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham's criticisms of the medium in his book Seduction of the Innocent, which saw the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency investigate comic books. A computer application is a piece of computer software provided to many computer users, often in a retail environment.

However, these eras are refered to far less frequently than the traditional metalic eras. For instance, a video game includes not only the program itself, but also data representing the pictures, sounds, and other material needed to create the virtual environment of the game. 1961 are sometimes refered to as being from the Marvel Age (refering to the advent of Marvel Comics). Computer software is an alternative term for computer programs; it is a more inclusive phrase and includes all the ancillary material accompanying the program needed to do useful tasks. Comics published after World War II in 1945 are sometimes refered to being from the Atomic Age (refering to the dropping of the atomic bomb), and books published after Nov. The language chosen for a particular task depends on the nature of the task, the skill set of the programmers, tool availability and, often, the requirements of the customers (for instance, projects for the US military were often required to be in the Ada programming language). The start of the Modern Age (occassionally refered to as the Copper Age) has even more potential starting points, but is most likely the publication of Alan Moore's Watchmen in 1986. Some programming languages map very closely to the machine language, such as Assembly Language (low level languages); at the other end, languages like Prolog are based on abstract principles far removed from the details of the machine's actual operation (high level languages).

1970) or Amazing Spider-Man #96 (May 1971) (the non-Comics Code issue). Instead, programmers describe the desired actions in a "high level" programming language which is then translated into the machine language automatically by special computer programs (interpreters and compilers). 1970), Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (Apr. Such programming is incredibly tedious and highly error-prone, making programmers very unproductive. Starting points that have been suggested for the Bronze Age of comics are Conan #1 (Oct. In practice, people do not normally write the instructions for computers directly in machine language. Indeed, some suggest that we are still in the Bronze Age. Rather, they do millions of simple instructions arranged by people known as programmers.

The beginings of the Bronze and Modern ages are far more disputable. Computers do not gain their extraordinary capabilities through the ability to execute complex instructions. 1956) — and last through the early 1970s, during which time Marvel Comics revolutionized the medium with such naturalistic superheroes as the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. A typical modern PC (in the year 2005) can execute around 3 billion instructions per second. The Silver Age of Comic Books is generally considered to date from the first successful revival of the dormant superhero form — the debut of the Barry Allen Flash in Showcase #4 (Sept.-Oct. Many computer programs contain millions of instructions, and many of those instructions are executed repeatedly. Both of these were simply reprints of newspaper strips. These can range from just a few instructions which perform a simple task, to a much more complex instruction list which may also include tables of data.

While comics as an artform could arguably extend as far back as sequential cave paintings from thousands of years ago, comic books are dependent on printing, and the starting point for them in book form is generally considered to be the tabloid-sized The Funnies begun in 1929, or the more traditional sized Funnies on Parade from 1933. Computer programs are simply lists of instructions for the computer to execute. The Platinum Age refers to any material produced prior to this. This easy portability of existing software creates a great incentive to stick with existing designs, only switching for the most compelling of reasons, and has gradually narrowed the number of distinct instruction set architectures in the marketplace. The Golden Age is generally thought as lasting from 1938's introduction of Superman until the early 1950s, during which comic books enjoyed a surge of popularity, the archetype of the superhero was invented and defined, and many of comic books' most popular superheroes debuted. To slightly oversimplify, if two computers have CPUs that respond to the same set of instructions identically, software from one can run on the other without modification. The exact boundaries of these eras, the terms for which originated in fandom press, is a debatable point among comic book historians. The particular instruction set that a specific computer supports is known as that computer's machine language.

The history of the comic book in the United States is split into several ages or historical eras: The Platinum Age, The Golden Age, The Silver Age, The Bronze Age, and The Modern Age. For example, the code for one kind of "copy" operation in the Intel line of microprocessors is 10110000. are marketed at younger teenagers, though the market also produces work for general as well as more mature audiences. Instructions are represented within the computer as binary code — a base two system of counting. The majority of all comic books in the U.S. All computer instructions fall into one of four categories: 1) moving data from one location to another; 2) executing arithmetic and logical processes on data; 3) testing the condition of data; and 4) altering the sequence of operations. Since the invention of the comic book format in the 1930s, the United States has been the leading producer, with only the British comic (during the inter-war period through the 1970s) and Japanese manga as close competitors in terms of quantity of titles (although, Japan outweighs America currently in overall sales by a vast margin). Typical sorts of instructions supported by most computers are "copy the contents of memory cell 5 and place the copy in cell 10", "add the contents of cell 7 to the contents of cell 13 and place the result in cell 20", "if the contents of cell 999 are 0, the next instruction is at cell 30".

. A computer responds only to a limited number of instructions, which are precisely defined, simple, and unambiguous. The analogous term in the United Kingdom is a comic, short for comic paper or comic magazine. The instructions interpreted by the control unit, and executed by the ALU, are not nearly as rich as a human language. In the U.K., the term comic book is used to refer to American comic books by their readers and collectors, while the general populace would mainly consider a comic book a hardcover book collecting comics stories. The global Internet allows millions of computers to transfer information of all types between each other. American comic books have become closely associated with the superhero sub-genre. The ability to transfer data between computers has opened up a huge range of capabilities for the computer.

Like jazz and a handful of other cultural artifacts, comic books are a rare indigenous American art form, [1] [2] though prototypical examples of the form exist. The first class is that of secondary storage devices, such as hard disks, CD-ROMs, key drives and the like, which represent comparatively slow, but high-capacity devices, where information can be stored for later retrieval; the second class is that of devices used to access computer networks. Long-form comic books, generally with hardcover or trade-paper binding came to be known as graphic novels, but as noted above, the term's definition is especially fluid. There are two prominent classes of I/O devices. The commercial success of these collections led to work being created specifically for the comic-book form, which fostered specific conventions such as splash pages. One example is the digital camera, which can be used to input visual information. The earliest comic books were simply collections of comic strips that had originally been printed in newspapers. There is a huge variety of other devices for obtaining other types of input.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, greater acceptance of the comics form among the general reading populace coincided with a greater usage of the term graphic novel, often meant to differentiate a book of comics with a spine from its stapled, pamphlet form, but the difference between the terms seems fuzzy at best as comics become more widespread in libraries, mainstream bookstores, and other places. For the personal computer, for instance, keyboards and mice are the primary ways people directly enter information into the computer; and monitors are the primary way in which information from the computer is presented back to the user, though printers, speakers, and headphones are common, too. The term "comics" in this context does not refer to comic strips (such as Peanuts or Dilbert). Over the years, a huge variety of other devices have been added. Although the term implies otherwise, the subject matter in comic books is not necessarily humorous, and in fact its dramatic seriousness varies widely. A punch card reader, or something similar, was used to enter instructions and data into the computer's memory, and some kind of printer, usually a modified teletype, was used to record the results. Comic books are often called comics for short. The first generation of computers were equipped with a fairly limited range of input devices.

A comic book is a magazine or book containing sequential art in the form of a narrative. These results can either be viewed directly by a user, or they can be sent to another machine, whose control has been assigned to the computer: In a robot, for instance, the controlling computer's major output device is the robot itself. Zap Comix (United States-Last Gasp, Apex Novelties). I/O (short for input/output) is a general term for devices that send computers information from the outside world and that return the results of computations. X-Men (United States - Marvel Comics). The level of charge in a capacitor could be set to store information, and then measured to read the information when required. Wonder Woman (United States - DC Comics). A DRAM unit is a type of integrated circuit containing huge banks of an electronic component called a capacitor which can store an electrical charge for a period of time.

Viz (British). Eventually, DRAM was introduced. Tintin (Belgian - Casterman). These somewhat ungainly but effective methods were eventually replaced by magnetic memory devices, such as magnetic core memory, where electrical currents were used to introduce a permanent (but weak) magnetic field in some ferrous material, which could then be read to retrieve the data. Superman (United States - DC Comics). Instead, earliest computers stored data in Williams tubes — essentially, projecting some dots on a TV screen and reading them again, or mercury delay lines where the data was stored as sound pulses traveling slowly (compared to the machine itself) along long tubes filled with mercury. Spike and Suzy (Belgian Flemish, originally called Suske en Wiske). However, few computer designs have used flip-flops for the bulk of their storage needs.

Sandman (United States - DC Vertigo Comics, 1988 World Fantasy Award (unique win for a comic-book series). Tubes, transistors, and transistors on integrated circuits can be used as the "storage" component of the stored-program architecture, using a circuit design known as a flip-flop, and indeed flip-flops are used for small amounts of very high-speed storage. The Amazing Spider-Man (United States - Marvel Comics). Furthermore, The 45nm SRAM chip announced in 2006 by Intel has more than 1 billion transistors. The Smurfs (Belgium - Dupuis). The first IC's contained a few tens of components; as of 2005, modern microprocessors such from AMD and Intel contain over 100 million transistors. Raw (United States - Raw Books). Over the history of the integrated circuit, the number of components that can be placed on one has grown enormously.

Mickey Mouse (United States-Disney). By the 1970s, the entire ALU and control unit, the combination becoming known as a CPU, were being placed on a single "chip" called a microprocessor. Mortadelo y Filemón (Spain). In the 1960s and 1970s, the transistor itself was gradually replaced by the integrated circuit, which placed multiple transistors (and other components) and the wires connecting them on a single, solid piece of silicon. Monica's Gang (Turma da Mônica) (Brazilian). Therefore, by the 1960s they were replaced by the transistor, a new device which performed the same task as the tube but was much smaller, faster operating, reliable, used much less power, and was far cheaper. Lucky Luke (Belgium - Dupuis and Dargaud). They were expensive, unreliable (particularly when used in such large quantities), took up a lot of space, and used a lot of electrical power, and, while incredibly fast compared to a mechanical switch, had limits to the speed at which they could operate.

Lone Wolf and Cub (Japanese). Vacuum tubes had severe limitations for the construction of large numbers of gates. The Incredible Hulk (United States - Marvel Comics). It had about 2,000 valves, some of which were "dual components", so this represented somewhere between 2 and 4,000 logic components. Green Lantern (United States - DC Comics). CSIRAC, one of the earliest stored-program computers, is probably close to the smallest practically useful design. The Fantastic Four (United States - Marvel Comics). This does require a considerable number of components.

Donald Duck (United States - Dell Comics, Gold Key Comics). Eventually, through combining circuits together, a complete ALU and control system can be built up. The Dandy (British). Through arrangements of logic gates, one can build digital circuits to do more complex tasks, for instance, an adder, which implements in electronics the same method — in computer terminology, an algorithm — to add two numbers together that children are taught — add one column at a time, and carry what's left over. The Beano (British). Vacuum tubes were originally used as a signal amplifier for radio and other applications, but were used in digital electronics as a very fast switch; when electricity is provided to one of the pins, current can flow through between the other two. Batman (United States - DC Comics). Others soon figured out that vacuum tubes — electronic devices, could be used instead.

Asterix (French). Shannon's famous thesis showed how relays could be arranged to form units called logic gates, implementing simple Boolean operations. Akira (Japanese). However, digital circuits allow Boolean logic and arithmetic using binary numerals to be implemented using relays — essentially, electrically controlled switches. Acme Novelty Library (United States - Fantagraphics). As previously mentioned, a stored program computer could be designed entirely of mechanical components like Babbage's. 2000 AD (British). The conceptual design above could be implemented using a variety of different technologies.

Western comics. Supercomputers often have highly unusual architectures significantly different from the basic stored-program architecture, sometimes featuring thousands of CPUs, but such designs tend to be useful only for specialized tasks. War comics. Larger computers, such as some minicomputers, mainframe computers, servers, differ from the model above in one significant aspect; rather than one CPU they often have a number of them. Science-fiction comics. This procedure repeats until a halt instruction is encountered. Satiric comics. The instructions are executed, the results are stored, and the next instruction is fetched.

Romance comics. Typically, on each clock cycle, the computer fetches instructions and data from its memory. Religious comics. The functioning of such a computer is in principle quite straightforward. Journalistic comics. Physically, since the 1980s the ALU and control unit have been located on a single integrated circuit called a Central Processing Unit or CPU. Humor comics. One key component of the control system is a counter that keeps track of what the address of the current instruction is; typically, this is incremented each time an instruction is executed, unless the instruction itself indicates that the next instruction should be at some other location (allowing the computer to repeatedly execute the same instructions).

Horror comics. Its job is to read instructions and data from memory or the I/O devices, decode the instructions, providing the ALU with the correct inputs according to the instructions, "tell" the ALU what operation to perform on those inputs, and send the results back to the memory or to the I/O devices. Historical comics. The control system ties this all together. Dramatic adventure comics. On a typical personal computer, input devices include objects like the keyboard and mouse, and output devices include computer monitors, printers and the like, but as will be discussed later a huge variety of devices can be connected to a computer and serve as I/O devices. Crime comics. The I/O systems are the means by which the computer receives information from the outside world, and reports its results back to that world.

Autobiographical comics. The second class of ALU operations involves comparison operations, which, given two numbers, can determine if they are equal, and if not, which is of greater magnitude. Anthromorphic/funny animal comics (see also furry). It is capable of performing two classes of basic operations: arithmetic operations, the core of which is the ability to add or subtract two numbers but also encompasses operations like "multiply this number by 2" or "divide by 2" (for reasons which will become clear later), as well as some others. Adaptations of narratives in other media, often movies. The ALU is in many senses the heart of the computer. Action/adventure comics (of which superhero is a sub-genre). In principle, any cell can be used to store either instructions or data.

Political and religious comics. This information can either be an instruction, telling the computer what to do, or data, the information which the computer is to process using the instructions that have been placed in the memory. Adult comics. Each cell has a numbered "address" and can store a small, fixed amount of information. Alternative comics. Conceptually, a computer's memory can be viewed as a list of cells. Underground comics. These parts are interconnected by a bundle of wires (a "bus") and are usually driven by a timer or clock (although other events could drive the control circuitry).

Tijuana bible (aka 8-pagers). The architecture describes a computer with four main sections: the arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), the control circuitry, the memory, and the input and output devices (collectively termed I/O). Brazilian comics - Histórias em Quadrinhos, HQ. The design made the universal computer a practical reality. Italian comics - Fumetti. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly). Franco-Belgian comics - Bande Dessinée, BD. While the technologies used in computers have changed dramatically since the first electronic, general-purpose, computers of the 1940s, most still use the stored program architecture (sometimes called the von Neumann architecture; as the article describes the primary inventors were probably ENIAC designers J.

European comics