The Routledge Companion to Comics

Frank Bramlett, Roy T Cook, Aaron Meskin, Frank Bramlett, Roy Cook, Aaron Meskin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317915379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This cutting-edge handbook brings together an international roster of scholars to examine many facets of comics and graphic novels. Contributor essays provide authoritative, up-to-date overviewsof the major topics and questions within comic studies, offering readers a truly global approach to understanding the field. Essays examine: the history of the temporal, geographical, and formal development of comics, including topics like art comics, manga, comix, and the comics code; issues such as authorship, ethics, adaptation, and translating comics connections between comics and other artistic media (drawing, caricature, film) as well as the linkages between comics and other academic fields like linguistics and philosophy; new perspectives on comics genres, from funny animal comics to war comics to romance comics and beyond.

The Routledge Companion to Comics expertly organizes representative work from a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, literature, philosophy, and linguistics. More than an introduction to the study of comics, this book will serve as a crucial reference for anyone interested in pursuing research in the area, guiding students, scholars, and comics fans alike.

Part IHISTORY AND TRADITIONS

1Origins of Early Comics and Proto-Comics

M. Thomas Inge

DOI: 10.4324/9781315851334-3

Throughout its nearly century-long existence, The New Yorker has been a major contributor to the comic arts through its exemplary devotion to publishing single-panel cartoons. In its final issue for the year 2014, a cartoon by Mick Stevens neatly proposed one theory about the origins of comic art. A Neanderthal couple, who appear to be primitive artists, have just finished a sketch on the wall of their cave of two stick figures who seem to be arguing. The female says to the male, “Maybe it needs a caption,” and lettered into the drawing is a caption announcing “IT BEGINS …” (Stevens 2014).

The joke may well simply be that this is the beginning of the eternal arguments that lie ahead in human history between couples. Or it could be a reference to the age-old argument about whether or not The New Yorker invented the single-line caption cartoon, as is sometimes claimed. But it also suggests that the comics may have begun when the drawing itself began to mimic and satirize human actions and called for words to be complete. In any case, many of those who have written about the comics have felt it necessary to take the beginning far back into human history.

Ancient Antecedents

This was clearly the attitude of the organizers of the National Arts Club who mounted what must have been the first public exhibition devoted to the display of original comic art at the American Institute of Graphic Art in 1942. The exhibition was chronicled by Max C. Gaines, then president of All-American Comics and frequently credited as the founder of the American comic book, in an article for Print: A Journal of the Graphic Arts with the title “Narrative Illustration: The Story of the Comics.”

Gaines began, “It seems that Little Orphan Annie isn’t an orphan after all. Her ancestors include Sumerian army men whose exploits are celebrated in tablets burned under desert sands, and Nile women of far-off centuries whose daily lives are enshrined in ancient picture tales” (Gaines 1942: 25). Describing the arrangement of the exhibition, Gaines moved back in time to drawings on cave walls, and then moved forward through various presumed antecedents to the comic strip and comic book: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian mosaics, ninth-century Carolingian manuscripts, eleventh-century Japanese Kozanji scrolls, fifteenth-century printed block books of the gospels, and on down through the great caricaturists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He concluded with discussions of the popular strips of his day, and the comic books, Funnies on Parade and Action Comics.

Ever since Gaines, historians of comics have found it necessary to establish this noble lineage through a discussion of these ancient precedents. Partly, this has to do with the general sense of inferiority from which all comics have suffered—the notion that they lack the aesthetic qualities of traditional art and literature. It is a way of saying that comics are by no means the first efforts to tell stories with words and pictures, and such efforts occupy a respectable place in our cultural history. But it also results from a serious effort to discern the qualities that make comics special, and by going back to their antecedents, perhaps we can begin to establish the artistic and formal features that make them so powerful and appealing in the present.

What Is a Proto-Comic?

What constitutes an early or proto-comic is a difficult question. In fact, given the variety of forms and technical methods the artists employ, there can be no single satisfactory definition beyond the simple fact that they largely display a visual/verbal balance of some kind. Rather, it is a matter of identifying in the proto-comics certain features found in our familiar comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels—such things as panels, a narrative structure, sequential action, word balloons, the relative importance of words and pictures, onomatopoeia, and the potential for stretching all of them in new and experimental directions. Luckily, the work of identification has been pretty much done already.

Some scholars have located the origins of the comic strip in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in European broadsheets, large poster-like printed sheets of paper with a singlepanel illustration on one or both sides. They were often religious in their subject matter but occasionally journalistic and even humorous. Usually depicting one scene, they sometimes formed story narratives of four or more sequential panels (Kunzle 1973). By the eighteenth century, word balloons were not uncommon, especially in the illustrations in the increasingly popular periodicals that largely replaced the broadsheets. With the development of humorous journals and comic almanacs in the nineteenth century, cartoons and comic drawings found a suitable and welcome home in their pages. The artists often used strip-like sequential drawings that fell into patterns similar to modern comic strips (Kunzle 1990).

Engravings as Graphic Narratives

Perhaps the most important and influential prototypes of early graphic narratives were the remarkable series of etchings and engravings produced by British artist William Hogarth (1697–1764), beginning in 1732 with A Harlot’s Progress, composed of six sequential engravings, followed by A Rake’s Progress (1735, eight engravings), Marriage-a-la-Mode (1745, six engravings), Industry and Idleness (1747, 12 engravings), and Four Stages of Cruelty (1750, four engravings). The progress of the narrative usually moves from innocence to debauchery and cruelty, and even to death, and the stories are told entirely through rich and carefully detailed drawings.

The scenes portrayed are not simply to be glanced at, however, but require full attention and study. There are no narrative guides and no spoken words within the pictures, so the story is implied entirely in the visuals. The narrative emerges only after a careful evaluation of the most minute details and continuous rereadings of each engraving. They prove to be highly charged documents that reveal enormous amounts of information about the mores, customs, ethics, and politics of the eighteenth century (Smolderen 2014: 3–23).

Insofar as the engravings establish a narrative sequence, and relate the trials and tribu lations of a central identified character, one can argue that they can be considered prototypes of the comic strip. In that they reflect an ironic and judgmental attitude toward the hypocrisies and ethical incongruities of the times, and portray human nature from a humorous perspective, they can be considered comic. Also, the printing technology allowed for a fairly wide distribution among the reading public. But they lack any balance between words and images, the wedding of picture and prose, that most consider a necessary characteristic of the comics form. What is indisputable, however, is the powerful influence Hogarth had on all efforts to tell stories through pictures in all visual narrative to come, including comics.

The Father of the Comic Strip

Another seminal figure in the development of graphic narratives was Swiss schoolteacher, writer, painter, and cartoonist Rodolphe Topffer (1799–1846). Working out of his own imagination, because he had no known examples or models, he began to publish in 1833 a series of volumes composed of sequential pictures with captions at the bottom of each page. Beginning with Histoire de M. Jabot (1833), he would produce six more of these adult picture books between 1833 and 1846, each recording the satirical adventures of an individual or a traveler in pursuit of understanding, a place, a profession, or some advancement in society (Kunzle 2007).

Perhaps they were partly inspired by The Sorrows of Young Werther, a series of prose novels published by Johann Goethe (1749–1832) from 1774 to 1808. This was the beginning of the Bildungsroman, or novel of education. Topffer knew Goethe, and it was in fact Goethe who first encouraged the young schoolmaster to publish his picture books. Topffer came to call them “histoires en estampa,” which may be translated as either “engraved novels” or “graphic novels” (Topffer 2007: xiv). Topffer’s style was more open and free-flowing than that of Hogarth and the British engravers, and there was a kind of joyous pleasure in the satire of Topffer that the others lacked. But the reader must still rely mainly on the pictures, and there is little integration of image and text. Nevertheless, Topffer has been nominated “the father of the comic strip” (Kunzle 2007).

His work would have a very direct influence on American comic art and popular culture through the translation and publication of his third book, Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1837), as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, published on September 14, 1842, as a supplement to an issue of the literary periodical Brother Jonathan. Its popularity led to several editions, at least four issued between 1849 and 1888. This has now been called the first comic book to be published in the United States (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 349). This holds true, of course, only if we consider Obadiah Oldbuck indeed a comic book. Assuming that we do, then the first comic book to be both created and published on U.S. soil may have been Journey to the Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags by James and Donald Read in June of 1849. It was similar in format and clearly inspired by Topffer’s Obadiah Oldbuck (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 353). Many other such volumes would follow in the US and establish a tradition of such comic picture books.

Following the commercial success of Topffer’s books in Europe and America, George Cruikshank (1798–1872) published in England several picture books of his own, such as The Bachelor’s Own Book (1844) and The Bottle (1847), the latter a widely popular diatribe against the evils of alcohol. In the humorous vein was The Tooth-Ache (1849), a remarkable fold-out volume that relates its comic story in a series of panels that stretch out for over seven feet (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 350).

Wilhelm Busch and the Kids

Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), German poet, painter, and cartoonist, began to publish in the 1860s in local magazines sequential picture stories, sometimes without words altogether, but most frequently with captions in verse. These then were collected into picture books. One series was about two mischievous children named Max and Moritz who played calamitous and sometimes murderous practical jokes on people—a widow, a tailor, their teacher, an uncle, a baker, and a farmer. In the final two stories, the boys are covered in dough and baked in an oven, and then thrown into a gristmill to be ground to bits and eaten by the miller’s ducks. While the pictures fully convey the story, the captions in verse in trochaic pentameter have their own witty and satiric style of humor. They display the influence of German fairy tale and folklore in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm rather than contemporary literature.

The book, published as Max und Mauritz in 1865, caused some concern among readers and parents who found its grim sarcasm and dark humor unsettling. It sold slowly but soon gained traction for its humor and social satire and would continue in print edition after edition until the present. Among the many languages into which it was translated was English, and it appeared in the United States in 1871 as Max and Maurice: A Juvenile History in Seven Tricks from the Robert Brothers publisher in Boston. Numerous reprints and new editions would keep the book in print down to 1902, including a knockoff and badly redrawn version of one chapter published in 1879 as The Adventures of Teasing Tom and Naughty Ned with a Spool of Clark’s Cotton, a promotional item for Clark’s Cotton Company (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 359–360, 364).

Busch’s small book had a widespread and profound influence wherever it appeared, with numerous imitators copying its broad and child-oriented but mordant humor in cartoons, picture books, and comic strips. Its most important connection with comics history in the US came from its direct influence on the creation of the early comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids, which began December 12, 1897. While undocumented, the story goes that Rudolph Block, editor of the New York Journal, gave a copy of the book to cartoonist Rudolph Dirks with instructions to create for his paper a comic strip about two similar boys out to create havoc and defy authority. While Hans and Fritz, as Dirks called them, were not quite as hellish as the originals, they sustained sufficient interest for the feature to become one of the longest-running strips in comics history. The Germanic background and folkloric qualities of Busch’s tales were replaced by an unidentifiable island, while the characters all spoke in a German accented English. The notion that comic strips were primarily invented for immigrants who knew little English is belied by The Katzenjammer Kids’ success. One had to know correct English to understand the broken English spoken by Hans and Fritz.

As the nineteenth century moved toward its close, the continued publication of books such as those of Topffer and Cruikshank, and the increasing number of comic periodicals and humor anthologies, which included panel cartoons, made it a rich period in the history of European and American humor, not to mention the emergence of Mark Twain as...