What's the difference between picture books, comics and comic books?

Their creative forms are different, and their respective emphases are also different.

Comics:

This is mainly defined by China's cartoons. Generally speaking, a cartoon is a one-page illustration with a paragraph within 100 words. The picture content shows the text content, which supplements the picture content to a certain extent, and the proportion of pictures and texts is half.

In the later period of comic creation, there appeared a format creation similar to modern story comics, but the original intention of this format creation was mostly to adapt to the format of 16k pictorial magazine, not to optimize the narrative.

Comics are usually narrated from an objective perspective (third-person narration, many in Europe and America are first-person narration, but most of them are presented in the form of narration), and rarely involve the psychology of the characters. Because of this form of comics, his content is not big, and he can only tell one thing simply and clearly, but he can't describe complex emotions, portray plump characters and lead readers' emotions.

Picture book:

Picture books usually put pictures in a more important position, with words as the main part and words as the auxiliary part. Because there is no strict requirement for painting style, picture books are more inclusive, ranging from complicated pictures like Jimmy to simple pictures like Naoko Takagi, but they usually don't choose realistic painting style.

Generally speaking, picture books tell stories, but they don't require story structure and storytelling. The content is often paragraphs and fables. Picture books themselves tend to express emotions and atmosphere. Compared with the other two, the form of picture books is not strict and reading is relatively easy.

Story comics:

Different from the usual satirical cartoons (such as current affairs) and literati cartoons (such as Feng Zikai), the cartoons mentioned by default now mostly refer to sub-story cartoons which are represented by Japanese cartoons and mainly tell stories (China also used the word "comic book").

As the name implies, story cartoons take storytelling as their main purpose, and use continuous and internally logical picture patterns in form to fully mobilize all available means on paper, such as dialogue bubbles, speed lines, onomatopoeia, blanks, sweat drops and other proprietary symbolic languages, to vividly tell stories and manipulate readers' emotions. In content, it is at the same level as cultural works in the form of novels and movies.