I've had my own assorted arguments on this forum with Scathach80, but I'll have to side with him in one respect against Herman (to the extent that I'm understanding the argument). Whether or not the original post was clear about specifying "comic book hero," I think one can make a coherent argument that comic books are a medium distinct from comic strips. For me it comes down to the observation that one can do achieve effects in a structural sense that the other cannot do, or at the very least, is constrained against doing.

For instance, it is POSSIBLE for comic strips to use as many "splash panels" as comic books do. A few Sunday-only strips, such as LITTLE NEMO, specialized in same. But comic strips are primarily designed to appear in both daily and Sunday newspapers, in order to maximize exposure/popularity, and the daily format mitigates against the use of expansive devices like splash panels.

I've posted here a few times on a subject I term the "superhero idiom," that concerns the morphological relationship of many of the characters mentioned: Tarzan, Zorro, Superman. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter what medium they appear in as to whether they qualify for the idiom. BUT-- there's no doubt in my mind that comic *books,* being in practice freer from logical constraints than comic strips, contributed far more to the idiom than their "sister" medium.

So I think it's entirely legitimate to consider comic books' contributions as a separate entity from those of comic strips--

Even if it's quite true that Penny Singleton totally owns Hugh Jackman and Samuel L. Jackson combined.