This is the opening film in a series which explores the history and development of the comic-book as an artistic entity in its own right. In a moving collage of images, part still photographs, part animation and part documentary film clips, the subject matter, various types of characters, and various types of artistic dipiction are presented in samples from a vast selection of work by an international group of comic book artists. The film thus relates the relatively short history of the form which, despite the criticism routinely leveled against it, has become one of the pillars of twentieth-century mass culture.