Whats in a definition?

The first chapter of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is all about trying to create a definition for comics in general. Now definitions are an incredibly tricky thing. He takes Eisner's definition "sequential art" (pg.5) and then begins to expand on it (pg.7). His definition and in fact much of the readings we had on the subject left words almost entirely out of the matter. One thing that really caught my attention though was on page 12 and 13 he shows two things he considers to be comics that have no panels, one by Eisner himself, and then on page 20 he assserts that one panel strips aren't comics. It seems like an inherint contridiction. It seems as though knowing a comic when you see one is a lot easier then defining the whole genre.

1/25/10 First day of class

Meeting everyone today was lots of fun; it was very interesting to see the wide variety of comic book fans/newcomers the class attracted. It was a lot of fun to have something other then just the teacher reading the syllabus on the first day. I also heard people mentioning some things i had already read and enjoyed i.e Hellboy, Watchmen, Batman, Persepolis etc. and was excited to see people who had similar interests. Also of note was one classmate mentioned a comic called Transmetropolitan which i had not heard of ,but am now very much interested in finding out about.

On a personal note I would highly recommend a few comics myself; Tek Jansen is a very funny sci-fi story, the follow up to Understanding Comics is making comics and i would definatly reccomend that if thats your goal and if super heroes are your thing the Elseworlds story Kingdom Come is a highly entertaining story of aging heroes coming into conflict with a world that no longer wants them.