A comic book (often shortened to simply comic and sometimes called a comic paper or comic magazine) is a magazine or book of narrative artwork and, virtually always, dialog and descriptive prose. Despite the term, the subject matter in comic books is not necessarily humorous; in fact, it is often serious and action-oriented.

The term "comic book" arose to describe some of the earliest such publications, which reprinted newspaper comic strips, themselves so labeled for originally presenting humor exclusively.