Not sure about the industry term, but jokes/comments at the bottom of many or most pages of a comic. I only remember seeing it in Squirrel Girl and now in Star Trek Lower Decks. What are some other examples?
Here’s a typical page from Lower Decks.
Going way back in time, I feel like Groo used to have footnote jokes too. As this was by a Mad Magazine guy, probably why.
xkcd has been doing it for years with their mouse-over commentary!
I believe Doonesbury has had footnotes, though I can’t remember when.
I think you are misremembering. I don’t recall any of the versions of Groo having footnotes.
Translation notes aren’t unusual in manga scanlations. When I read Marvel comics decades ago, there would be footnotes specifying the issue numbers where the action that the characters was referring to occurred.
Back when only children read comics, I recall footnotes being used often. Usually to explain a term that children couldn’t be expected to know.
One I recall was when Batman or Batgirl was fighting Catwoman. Catwoman had constructed a catafalque, which a handy footnote explained was a wooden framework supporting a coffin.
You’re probably right. Maybe I’m thinking of The Asterix Comics.
Larry Gonick’s History of the World comic books used them.
I remember from some of my 1960’s Superman comics that they’d sneak a few footnotes in there, too.
There was a footnote in Spider-Man : Across the Spider-Verse.
It happens when Miguel and Gwen are fighting Vulture in the museum. Miguel says “he has hammerspace” and an astric pops up to explain the term.
It can be seen here at the 4:53 mark.
At one point in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, there’s a panel showing Art’s psychiatrist with a pet cat, along with the footnote “His pet cat - really!” (Like the rest of the Jewish characters in Maus, both Art and the psychiatrists are drawn as humans wearing mouse masks.)
Schlock Mercenary didn’t have them all or even most installments, but it did occasionally have a footnote, usually explaining some bit of worldbuilding.
Back in the 1960s, Marvel used to include footnotes to talk to the reader, explaining stuff that was going on or referring to other comics for background or a continued story or just pretend Stan was connecting with you.
I think the Metal Men comics of that period had footnotes giving scientific facts that “enhanced” the scientific spirit of the text.
Both Squirrel Girl and the Lower Decks comic were written by Ryan North, who is doing the equivalent of the alt-text/e-mail subject line gags he does in his webcomic Dinosaur Comics. As opposed to the typical comics footnote, which usually comes with an asterisk and is within a panel, not at the bottom of the page.
The Jewish characters in the flashback and modern-day parts are metaphorical anthropomorphic mice. It’s only the metafictional “real world” section, when Spiegelman is writing about himself as the author of Maus, that has the mouse masks.
‘Marginalia’ is the broad term used by bibliophiles and scholars that I think would work best. It doesn’t just cover footnotes*, but random editorialising, comments and doodling.
*like this one
I remember one panel of a Fantastic Four comic had a couple of young men in the background, one with blond hair and the other larger with short black hair, with the footnote “No, this isn’t Johnny Storm and Wyatt Wingfoot. They’re in the Himalayas. We just wanted to see if you were paying attention!”
I always wondered if that was really intentional, or an art team accident, and that was Stan Lee’s way of making it fun.
The Questionable Content webcomic does this. It hasn’t always, but has done it for a few years.
It’s been just short of forever since I saw a Metal Men but I think there was often accompanying narration in the panels. Facts about the elements were part of it, along with some general descriptions instead of exposition by characters to fill in the details.
Irregular Webcomic/Darths & Droids is one of the four webcomics I read regularly, and DMM often includes notes – some of them rather lengthy – explaining things.