Text comics or a text comic is a genre of comics where the stories are told in captions below the images and without the use of speech balloons. It's the oldest genre of comics and was especially dominant in European comics from the 19th century until the 1950s, after which it gradually lost popularity in favor of comics with speech balloons. The genre is sometimes referred to as a pantomime comic too, even though text comics do make use of dialogue, only not in the images themselves.