Poetry Comics

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A History of Poetry Comics

THE BOOK of Death Haiku Comics

Haiku comics are a relatively new development in the history of poetry comics. While a scattering of forerunners can be found in the 1970s and 1980s, we consider the first haiku comic to be a four-panel rendering of a Basho haiku by the Canadian comics artist Seth published in Drawn & Quarterly in 1995. (See AHOPC #21 for a closer look at this.) Since then there has been markedly more comics artists/poets creating haiku comics.

Cover of Japanese Death Poems compiled by Yoel Hoffman

Joining the movement is Seattle artist/writer William Chen, whose new work is The Book of Death Haiku Comics. Using as a resource Japanese Death Poems (Tuttle, 1986) compiled by Yoel Hoffman, Chen has made his own translations to which he adds skillfully executed drawings that feel like a whole graphic novel in one page.

Chen talks about his project: “Jisei, which come from Japan, are poems written on the occasion of one’s own death. I don’t remember how I stumbled on them, but when I did, death haiku immediately struck me as a fascinating subject for interpreting and illustrating as poetry comics.”

Chen lived in Otsu, Japan (just a 10-minute, local train ride from Kyoto) for about a year. He made a living teaching at an English conversation school to people of all ages. While there he saw sites, studied Japanese, and learned to Pop (Popping, the dance style).

Here’s one example from his forthcoming chapbook:

ChinE’s Fleeting Fireflies

For a copy of “The Book of Death Haiku Comics” visit his table at Short Run (Nov. 1, 2025, in Seattle). After that, you can go to Chen’s Ko-Fi store here. He will also have copies in a few local comic shops around Seattle (Fantagraphics, Phoenix, Outsider).

Follow Chen on Bluesky @zenosarrow.net.

READ MORE: I came across “Japanese Death Poems” in 2006. I was staying with a poet-friend in San Francisco while doing readings for “Punk Poems,” and he had a copy in his library. I couldn’t put it down and had to get my own copy so I could finish consuming it. Hoffman’s background introduction is essential. The poems are in two large sections: Death Poems by Zen Monks and Death Poems by Haiku Poets. And the Index of Poetic Terms at the end of the book provides additional context and cultural insights. Recommended.

Timeline: 2025

Warning: This incomplete history maps my journey as a poet learning about comics and doesn’t follow a strict chronological order.

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A History of Poetry Comics

Notable / Recent Finds

At AHOPC we’re open to exploring the roots, influences, and parallel movements that inform poetry comics. These three notable / recent finds present poetry as art that’s sometimes outside the definition of poetry comics but still in the sphere of influence.

GLYPH by Naoko Fujimoto

Collage has been used by both visual artists and poets alike since it’s recognition as as art form in the early 20th century. Naoko Fujimoto uses collage to create what she calls “graphic poetry,” bringing in materials that thematically underscores their meaning. Her collection “GLYPH: graphic poetry = trans. sensory” (Tupelo Press, 2021) brings both the beauty and the power of collage to the intimacy of personal poetry. In the introduction Fujimoto writes, “I wanted my graphic poems to transport the viewer’s senses from paper, bridging the gap between words and images and their physical counterparts.” She uses found materials to create a base for her poetry, which is often handwritten, sometimes cut up, and always cascaded across her canvas. Her found materials include washi, origami paper, supermarket advertisements, gift wrap, postcards, and magazines among other materials. Among my favorite poems here are “Natane Rain Is,” “Greenhouse,” and “I Burn the Upright Piano.” This is a great addition to the graphic literature canon.

More often closer to Abstract Comics than Poetry Comics, David Lasky‘s “Manifesto Items #14: Postcard Comics” (2025) expands what can be done with the constraints of a structured format. Like fitting a sonnet into 14 lines or a haiku into 17 syllables, Lasky masters the postcard form to tell stories, illuminate poems, and expand our definnition of landscapes. He then mails them out, as he writes in the introduction, “to see if something small and precious could survive the machinery of the USPS and reach its destination.” His humor, wit (he goes meta in all the right ways), and color expertise are all on display here. For example, check out the raven’s attempt to correct Poe’s nevermore! Don’t wait to get your copy! Available here. ICYMI: I first mentioned Lasky’s “Lucky 13” a year ago in AHOPC #23. Lucky for us, he has reissued this 2023 sprawling collection of poems, comics, and poetry comics, adding some new ones and giving others more space. Full disclosure: David is my comics teacher and friend. We’ve co-curated exhibitions of haiku comics in 2024 and 2025 for art spaces in Washington and Oregon. And he’s the inspiration for this blog!

Letter of Intent by Nico Vassilakis

Visual poetry, as noted in AHOPC #28, is the direct descendent of concrete poetry. There’s a painterly feel to vispo that’s not always present in concrete. Poet Nico Vassilakis continues to explore and explode the power of letters to create (or should I say paint?) his poetry work “Letters of Intent” (Cyberwit.net, 2022). He notes this is “a collection of visual essays designed to explore the interior space of language material.” There’s humor (“Letters Are Escaping”); there’s instruction (“Ways To Begin”); there’s a nod to couplets (“Doubles”). The section “Opinions” sees messages emerging from the alphabet-primordial soup such as “letters are leaving these words,” “staring,” and “words are a crowd.” Like an abstract painting, I like taking my time when looking at each piece as different meanings emerge and submerge. Often layered like graffiti on graffiti, other times blended until just a color field remains, the work grabs your attention and creates wonder (a future language, perhaps?) for the reader/viewer.

Timeline: Current

Warning: This incomplete history maps my journey as a poet learning about comics and doesn’t follow a strict chronological order.

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A History of Poetry Comics

A Map of Roots & Influences


Poetry comics and haiku comics are a relatively new development in the historical context of artists and writers using words and pictures together to create meaning deeper than either could do on its own.

Historical roots can be traced back centuries to pattern poems and illuminated texts in Europe and calligraphic pictures and poems in Asia, Japanese haiga for example. By the 1800s painters and poets were looking at things differently and becoming more experimental and more accepting of non-traditional influences. This led to the concrete poetry movement in poetry and the pop art aesthetic in painting.

Comics, which can be defined as drawings that tell a sequential narrative, started in the (mostly agreed to) 1870s. The rise of comics and comic strips, which were going full bore by the 1940s in newspapers and magazines, provided source materials for poets and artists who used influences from comic book aesthetics, comic strip characters, and comics’ mechanics.

Poetry comics, a term finally coined in the 1970s, have continued through today, running parallel with the mainstream acceptance and interest in graphic literature, DIY, and zines. Haiku comics, starting around 1995 as a natural outgrowth of poetry comics, have been recently popularized by poets/comic artists.

I’m sharing the first draft of my map of “A History of Poetry Comics” that attempts to show related roots, influences and representative practitioners of poetry comics. While definitely not definitive, hopefully it will serve to illuminate and inspire further investigation. This is what I’ve learned so far.

Timeline: 2025

Warning: This incomplete history maps my journey as a poet learning about comics and doesn’t follow a strict chronological order.

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A History of Poetry Comics

Naming Poetry Comics

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” -Gertrude Stein

Although labeled differently by poets, artists, and historians, work that investigates the relationship between pictures and words (i.e. drawing and poetry) strives for the same result: create meaning that’s not possible with words or pictures alone.

Here are terms “A History of Poetry Comics” has uncovered that each point in their own way to the practice of incorporating words and pictures into art.

TermRepresented byTimeline
haiga (Japanese haiku drawings)Bashō, Buson1500s on
illuminated poemsWilliam Blake1780s
sequential narrativesRodolphe Topffer1830s
comic books, comic strips, comics Various*1890s-1930s
pictorial prose poems (without words)Lynd Ward1930s
picture poemsKenneth Patchen1940s-70s
concrete poems –> vispo (visual poetry)Augusto deCampos,
Nico Vassilakis 		1950s-70s on
graphic novelscoined by Richard Kyle1960s
hand-drawn poemsbpNichol1970s
poetry comics (drawings w/ other’s poems)Coined by Dave Morice1980s
comics mainly without picturesKenneth Koch1990s
haiku comicsSeth1995
poetry comics** (drawings w/ own poems)Bianca Stone2010s
poem/drawingsAlice Notley2020s
graphic poetryNaoko Fujimoto2021

*A good starting point to get perspective on when these terms were first use is Wikipedia’s History of Comics. For U.S.-centric perspective, American Comics: A History by Jeremy Dauber (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022) comes recommended.

**See A History of Poetry Comics #05 for suggested ways to identify poetry comics.

Timeline: Pre-history to Current

Warning: This incomplete history maps my journey as a poet learning about comics and doesn’t follow a strict chronological order.

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Poetry Comics’ Intersection with Vispo

There’s a reason why borders, boundaries, and categorizations don’t work. Even with narrowly defined genres, movements, schools, etc. there are works that blur the edges and distinctions. Such is the case with visual poetry (vispo) and its intersection with poetry comics.

While definitely an oversimplication, here’s a Venn diagram that attempts to illustrate this point of overlap and influence:

Vispo grew directly out of the concrete poetry movement of the mid-1900s. (See AHOPC #10 for more on concrete poetry.) Definitions of vispo are as varied as its practicioners. Poet Nico Vassilakis in a 2014 inteview with BODY offers this way into understanding vispo:

Vispo is clearly a response to language. It tends to enhance the quantum aspects of language by focusing on the elemental design parts of language material. What’s that mean? People like fidgeting with alphabet.

The letter, itself, has been my point of interest.

Vispo is a response to reading and writing language. There is a connection between seeing writing and writing reading and reading seeing (hand-eye-brain).

–Nico Vassilakis

To locate the overlap between vispo and poetry comics, I turned to the volume “The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008” (Fantagraphics Books, 2012) edited by Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis. I found examples that hint (either directly or indirectly) at some aspect of poetry comics, such as sequential panels, comic books, speech bubbles, and hand lettering. I make the case these works exist in the intersection of vispo and poetry comics — regardless of how they’re categorized.

Closed Caption by damian lopes (The Last Vispo Anthology, No. 36). The poetry here is created in the interplay between speech/thought bubbles; the speech bubble, with a Lichtenstein looking eye, is having thoughts of its own, each more abstract. With the above we’re led to consider Pop Art as well as comics. Speech bubbles have a long history when pictures and words are used together and have become of one of the hallmarks of comics and graphic novels.
Languages & Isolation by Gustave Morin (The Last Vispo Anthology, No. 109). These two-panels allude to a sequential narrative, one definition of comics. To be sure we see this poem as sequential, the poet has the two panels overlap slightly. It makes me ponder how isolating languages can be for travelers, immigrants, and others. And I wonder what has been blacked out. Check out Morin’s “Toon Tune” on the Poetry Foundation website.
See by David Ostrem (The Last Vispo Antholoogy, No. 168). It’s easy to consider this work in terms of poetry comics; a little harder to explain why. The poet/artist includes faithfully drawn copies of three books, one being an opened Western comic book (easy). The word SEE is open to interpretation (harder). I take it as “notice this” — here are drawn pictures of books that are either about drawing or are drawn themselves.
Punctuation Funnies / Questionable Shadow by Gary Barwin (The Last Vispo Anthology, No. 221). I feel this work by Canadian poet/artist Gary Barwin definitely falls inside the shared space of vispo and poetry comics. It’s one of my favorite examples. Starting with calling these drawings “funnies,” then using the standard newspaper comic strip of four frames, and ending with a thought bubble, there’s little doubt they intended to evoke comics. The visual joke of the Questionable Shadow mirrors the kind of humor found in daily newspaper comic strips.
Cartoon0002 by Paul Lambert (The Last Vispo Anthology, No. 249). There’s something comic-book-ish about the lettering that hints at a connection with poetry comics. The shape of the frame and how the lettering reverses to create a kind of horizon line cause a comics feeling to arise. Again, it’s hard to put an exact finger on the reason, but what’s happening in this single frame results in something happening outside the frame, which in turn makes the reader/viewer imagine a second sequential frame and then perhaps a third.

Timeline: 2000s

Warning: This incomplete history maps my journey as a poet learning about comics and doesn’t follow a strict chronological order.

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Curated by David Lasky and J.B., this exhibition features 22 poet-artists with 69 haiku comics.

Artist statement

“A Whistling Kettle: An Exhibition of Haiku Comics,” that I co-curated with David Lasky, provokes a mixed bag of feelings. It’s like when I heard the punk band Ramones broadcast on radio for the first time. And when I saw 1970s street art and graffiti were taken inside to be exhibited and sold in art galleries (RIP Keith Haring). And when I discovered I wasn’t the only angst-riddled teenager that read MAD magazine (thanks to my dentist’s office).

It’s feelings of disbelief that the things I identified with were now being mass marketed. Disappointment at losing another counter-culture fixture to the mainstream. But also pride that things I admire and worship were deemed worthy and valuable. In the end, this validation increased my hip credentials — I knew about an art movement, a music scene, a zine before a lot of others caught on.

We are all students and explorers. The haiku comics here are the direct result of classes taught by Lasky, a comics artist learning about haiku. I’m seeing first-hand, as a poet learning about comics (and trying some myself), the transformative power that pictures and words have together. (See the note on “Illumination” in A History of Poetry Comics #05, part of my attempt to define poetry comics.) I believe the best poetry comics create a third meaning that words or pictures can’t do on their own.

This show collects works that transcend what’s hung on the gallery wall. There are underscores and counterpoints. There are kireji (the “cut” in Japanese haiku) and kigo (the season word in Japanese haiku). There’s context, witnessing, confessions. There’s complexity and simplicity sometimes in the same work. And there’s illumination — that “third meaning” that happens when your mind jumps beyond the words and pictures.

For me, this show is validation of the exploration we poet-artists have been doing on the fringes of both comics and poetry. It expands the audience for our work. And it makes us feel (perhaps) a little less like outsiders.

Enjoy the hip credentials!

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A History of Poetry Comics

here’s the first use of term ‘poetry comics’

The first use of the term “poetry comics” was quite literal. In 1979 poet Dave Morice created “Poetry Comics,” a 22-page comic book of comic-ized poems from the (then) English canon. He drew comics that illustrated poems by Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and others we elders know from high school English class. Each poem got a different treatment, covering many comics styles, that uniquely illuminated that particular poem.

Morice created 17 comic books of poetry comics between 1979 and 1982, which he photocopied and mailed to other poets. His poetry comics werre collected in “Poetry Comics: A Cartooniverse of Poems” (Simon and Schuster, 1985). The same year, he published “How to Make Poetry Comics (Teachers & Writers, 1985), a guide for teachers.

At the time, a review by Bruce Brooks professed: “By the time Ebenezer Cooke was snapping off wry hudibrastics in the early 1700s, the Greek had been chuckling over Aristophanes for twenty-one centuries. But now America has initiated another tradition equally amusing, if not equally honorabler: poetry comics.”

In an essay “Poetry Comics: Taking Poems Out of Church” for Teachers and Writers magazine in 2008, Morice tells about the birth of his poetry comics:

One autumn night in 1977, I went over to the apartment of a friend who was in the Iowa Writers Workshop. She had hundreds of poems stuffed into twelve black binders on her writing desk and I had about as many of those same binders filled with poetry at home, so what else could we begin the evening with but a discussion of poetry? At one point she said in a serious tone, “Great poems should paint pictures in the mind.” And I said, partly to tease her, “Great poems would make great cartoons.” After a short pause, she smiled and said, “Hey, you know you’re right. You should draw some.”

Here’s one example of Morice’s poetry comics:

from Poetry Comics: A Cartooniverse of Poems by Dave Morice (Simon and Schuster, 1985)

Timeline: 1979 – so far, first documented use of the term “poetry comics”

Warning: This incomplete history maps my journey as a poet learning about comics and doesn’t follow a strict chronological order.