2. The
History of Comics
The
history of the comic book is one long and interesting journey through the
centuries, being very well documented by comic historians both from the U.S. and Europe.
Following its footsteps, this history does not only reveal the continuous
progress and development of the art itself, but carries with it the history of
the world, entrapping in the panels and speech balloons the eventful and
beautiful parts of the societies in which, and for which, they have been
created. Although the later years of the comic book are crystal clear and can
be found in many comic history books nowadays, the origins of this sequential
art are still up for debate.There is an almost general consensus that the links
between comics and thousand years old sequential depictions are not
coincidental, but there are still questions to be answered by the better of the
academic community in order to conclude that there was a natural and conscious
progression from Trajan’s column, for example, to the colorful interconnected
panels that we see nowadays.
In
the following pages, the most important steps of the comic book have been
reproduced, and more in depth analyzes were performed where it was necessary,
to illustrate in a methodical manner the process of development. It is in no
way meant to be an exhaustive route, but putting everything in the right
context is needed, in order to further dwell in the machinations and
complexities of the art form.
2.1 Stories in images, a
universal means of cognition
Stories
are part of the very fabric of humankind, ever since we developed a social
cognitive brain. Research in human psychology shows that we have a large
appetence for information which comes in the form of stories, making the
message easier to memorize and recall when needed. This means of transferring
information from one individual to another, from the current generation to the
next, has pushed us forward as a civilization, opening up imaginative spaces
that replaced the lack of first-hand experience with the timeless knowledge of
others. Nevertheless, oral storytelling requires a common language and a lot of
people to disseminate. This singular channel was rather restrictive and didn’t
come with our ‘native kit.’ This gap has been largely filled with the invention
of writing and the printing press, but language, especially the written form,
lacks the ability to tap into our native sensorial perception system in our
mind, which is a lot faster, being developed over thousands of years of
understanding the world around us through our eyes and making split-second
decisions based on this imagistic feedback formed on our retina and processed
by our brain. It is rather obvious that a new medium, a visual form of
conveying information would be much more effective in telling a story, a form
that is universal and not bound by linguistic rules.
This
form of sequential imagery that emerged independently in different parts of the
world catered to the need of transmitting the message of the story to whomever
looked at the work, whether it is, in no particular order, Trajan’s column, the
Greek friezes, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the tomb frescoes of Thebes, Ghiberti’s
Bapstry doors, the stained-glass of Chartres or the Bayeux tapestry. The
employment of imagery to tell a story has been done later even by the Christian
church, through its Bibliapauperum,
being widely distributed in Europe and
targeting the illiterate.
This
early form of sequential art, although not yet a mass-medium, since they could
be seen only in one place (excepting the illustrated bible, which itself had
limited dissemination power), can be considered the precursor of what it is
known now as the ninth art, the comic book or the graphic novel. It is in this
period that societies all around the globe realize that, how newspaper Arthur
Brisbane would put it in 1911, a picture is worth a thousand words. This was,
and is, the fastest way of absorbing large amounts of data, transmitted through
a universal means of communication.
Although
the skill and work that was put in all of these early sequential works was
immense, many of these art forms didn’t quite survive as a continuous art, but
rather developed into something more durable and sustainable. It is with the
arrival of the next era that sequential art really becomes an art for the
masses.
2.2 The proto-comics
Technology
has always been pushed forward by the needs of society to overcome problems
that dragged their effectiveness down. It is this process of social learning
and application that created an environment which required language to
emerge—to solve communication problems—and later writing, another social
requirement that allowed messages to surpass the limitations of space and time
and make language more efficient.
The
invention of the printing press was the cornerstone of mass-media, allowing the
written language and images to be disseminated without any limitations
whatsoever, as long as the publishers had the money for the basic materials
required. With every step forward, other problems arose that needed to be
tackled. Now, with the power to convey information through writing anytime and
anywhere, the publishers needed their readers, in a world where much of the
people were illiterate. The free education movement that started in England
eventually resolved this problem, creating a large mass of literate, reading
people. This posed another hurdle for the publishers, which needed to ‘feed’
the masses with new information and tapped in their appetence for fiction.
Serialized fiction was common in the nineteenth century newspapers, but the
problem of time consuming reading sessions reappeared. The busy life of the
industrial era wasn’t an auspicious place for ‘wasting’ time in reading
something made up out of thin air when actual news was flying around in so many
papers of the time. A medium which can transfer the information immediately and
comprehensibly was needed.
Before
the American boom in the late 1800s, some pioneering works emerged in Europe:
Francis Barlow created A True Narrative
of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot (c.1682) as well as The Punishments of Lemuel Gulliver;William Hogarth created a set of
seven sequential images on “Modern Moral Subjects,” and also A Rake’s Progress (1726), which was
created at fist as a series of paintings with a common narrative, but later
engraved and transformed into a book. This is the period when the dialogue
bubble was developed, inspired by the medieval phylacter, that acted as a label—called a caption nowadays—which
either gave the name of the character or stated its purpose in that frieze.
 |
| Plate 39 of the book Histoire de Monsieur Cryptograme, by Rodolphe Topffer (1830) |
It is only around the 1820s that the form of the comic strip is arguably
established, through publications like The Glasgow Looking Glass, a satirical publication that is accredited
to have hosted in its pages the first ever modern strip, a comic with all the
modern elements: caption, speech bubbles, and serialized narrative. Rodolphe Töpffer
was among the first to actually conceptualize this art form, after creating
several sequential illustrated stories like Histoire de M. Jabot, Monsieur
Crépin, Histoire de M. Vieux Bois, Monsieur Pencil or Histoire
d'Albert, in Essay on Physiognomics:
To construct a
picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to
draw out every potential from your material—often down to the dregs! It does
not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is
it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent
some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory
whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a
book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense.”[1]
 |
| Topffer - autoportret (1840) |
Töpffer
is considered if not a father of the comic, at least the most notable precursor
of the art, and the first comic book author to have ever been read on American
soil, his book, with the English title The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, being published in a comic book format as
a supplement to a New York newspaper on 14 September 1842.
Around the same period, in Great Britain
the iconic Punch magazine was establishing as the most read humor and
satire publication. Similar magazines in Europe were Le Charivari and FliegendeBlätter,
while the U.S.
had Judge and Puck.
The satirical drawings gained the name cartoons,
which is used until the present day and it is the origin of the word comics,
due to the humorous nature of the drawings, that doesn’t define the art form
nowadays, but it is an important part of the industry.
2.3 The first fully fledged comic books
Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday is
considered to be the very first comic magazine named after and featuring a
regular character. This British publication is also cited by some historians of
being the first comic book ever using this modern format.
Although they were
comics in every aspect, the strips had yet to become books, which happened in
1934, when collections of already published strips were reprinted and bound as
a standalone magazine. This is the point where the Golden Age of the Comic
Books begins for the American public, an age at which we will largely refer
to in the following pages, being the biggest and most well-known industry in the
world.
[1]Translated by Weiss, E. in Enter: The
Comics, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln,
pp.4. (1969)
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