Photo comics were common in British magazines such as Jackie in the 1980s, and a few are still published. Although home video largely supplanted this market in the 1980s, a small number of photo comic adaptations continued to be produced as promotional tie-ins to the original work. Similar "Foto Funnies" – often featuring female nudity – were a regular feature of National Lampoon magazine beginning in the early 1970s.ĭuring the 1970s, lines of American paperback books were marketed as "Fotonovels" and "Photostories", adapting popular films and television shows. 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. They remained popular in Mexico into the late 1980s, when 70 million copies of fotonovelas were printed each month.
PHOTOSTORY BOOK MOVIE
By the 1960s, there were about two dozen fotonovela movie adaptations circulating in Latin America and nearly three times as many original works. The technique spread to Latin America, first adapting popular films, then for original stories. ) 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. (Actress Sophia Loren worked for a time as a model. Photo comics emerged in Italy in the 1940s and expanded into the 1950s. There were attempts at photo comics in the early days of tabloids in the United States 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. In Spanish-speaking countries, the term fotonovela refers to several genres of photo comics, including original melodramas. In Italian, a photo comic is referred to as a fotoromanzo ("photonovel", plural: fotoromanzi). Variations such as "photo funnies" and "photostories" have also been used. 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. By extension, comics which use a mixture of photographic and illustrated imagery have been described as mezzo-fumetti ("half" fumetti). Because of the popularity of photo comics in Italy, fumetti became a loanword in English referring specifically to that technique. 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. The terminology used to describe photo comics is somewhat inconsistent and idiosyncratic.