ABSTRACT
The What Were Comics? project is a large-scale data-driven study of comic books in the United States. The project seeks to come to terms with processes of change within the American comic book industry. This chapter outlines the foundational first step in our larger program of work that seeks to reorient the study of comics through the use of data-driven research. The comic book industry faces a period of profound institutional, technical, and aesthetic transformation. The comic study is only to benefit from developments in digital humanities and big data, as the visual nature of comics, like Medieval manuscripts, makes them more difficult to mark up. The project extends the insights developed by Moretti and his students to the field of comic books by creating a sample frame and corpus, and by mining that corpus for insights into the historical evolution of the comic book as a publishing format.
