Vocab Lesson — Indicia

A little while back, I was chatting with a reasonably smart friend who is pretty familiar with books, comics and publishing in general. He surprised me a bit by not knowing the word "indicia" so I thought I'd do a quick blog post for anyone else who's not familiar with the term.

Indicia (pronounced in-DISH-ee-ah) are all those copyright and publishing bits that you see on the insides of comics but really don't pertain to the story. Here's a classic example...

All that text stuff at the bottom of the page is considered indicia. It's the plural form of the Latin word indicium, which means a distinguishing mark. So you'll typically find all sorts of relevant publishing information in the indicia -- what makes that particularly publication different from another, like the issue and volume numbers, the formal copyright notice, the publisher, etc. For graphic novels and books, this would also include the ISBN and Library of Congress information.

There's not a formal or standard format this text needs to take. Here's two other examples that change from the old layout a bit...




There's also not a single location it has to appear. Early comics from the 1940s tended to run the information on the inside front cover underneath a slew of ads. This largely migrated to the first interior page, I believe, in the early 1960s. More recently, it's been included on whatever additional page the comic may have that is already somewhat text-heavy and not germaine to the story -- like a dedicated credits page with a short summary of the characters or the letters pages.

So if anyone starts referring to "all that copyright info" you can correct them by telling them that it's called the indicia and includes a lot more information beyond the copyright.

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