Comics Studies

A Guidebook

Charles Hatfield, Bart Beaty

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813591438
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the twenty-first century, the field of comics studies has exploded. Scholarship on graphic novels, comic books, comic strips, webcomics, manga, and all forms of comic art has grown at a dizzying pace, with new publications, institutions, and courses springing up everywhere. The field crosses disciplinary and cultural borders and brings together myriad traditions. Comics Studies: A Guidebook offers a rich but concise introduction to this multifaceted field, authored by leading experts in multiple disciplines. It opens diverse entryways to comics studies, including history, form, audiences, genre, and cultural, industrial, and economic contexts. An invaluable one-stop resource for veteran and new comics scholars alike, this guidebook represents the state of the art in contemporary comics scholarship.

Part I

Histories

1

Comic Strips

Ian Gordon

Comic strips belong to the larger continuum of comics art: from single-panel cartoons to broadsheets and comics magazines and papers to albums and graphic novels to webcomics and more. There is no distinct aesthetic that isolates the comic strip from these other forms. Strips may be best described as a particular form of comics that appears regularly, usually daily or weekly, and tends to tell stories or gags in a short series of sequential panels. Typically strips convey speech via balloons and feature a continuing cast of characters; however, what constitutes a comic is a fluid mix of visual, textual, and panel arrangements, and it is possible to omit one or two of the common elements and yet still have a comic strip. Placing strips on the broader continuum of comics art may finesse this problem by allowing a certain looseness of definition (while still, of course, eliding the issue of just what constitutes comics art). Given the difficulty of defining just what makes something a comic strip, it is better to move away from definitions based purely on formal properties and think instead in terms of political economy. Indeed, defining comic strips as appearing regularly and with continuing characters is already one step in that direction.

Approaching strips through their political economy makes sense because this sort of comics art owes its development to a specific set of historical circumstances. Akin to Michael Newman’s comments on the indie film, comic strips cohere as a category not only through “a set of industrial criteria or formal or stylistic conventions” but more importantly as “a cluster of interpretative strategies and expectations.”1 In the case of comic strips, these expectations and habits were formed under rapidly changing conditions; in Britain and the United States, strips developed out of earlier forms of comics at a time of great social change. For instance, both London and New York experienced rapid population growth between 1850 and 1900: London more than doubled in size, while New York increased sixfold. The accompanying development of newer and cheaper printing technologies ushered in new types of magazines and newspapers that reached much larger audiences than had prior publications. Comics played an important role in attracting and retaining this new audience. The creation of railway transportation networks also contributed to the development of comics, and the different types of spatial relations in which this happened arguably led to distinct sorts of strips. In Britain, for instance, the relatively smaller distances were quickly spanned, and so the press took on more of a national character than in America, where greater geographic distances meant that cities, though now linked in an emerging national market, still retained a more localized press.2 In the United Kingdom, the development of Board Schools between 1870 and 1902 increased literacy rates. Meanwhile, the United States, which began moving toward a public school system as early as 1830, had a very high literacy rate by the 1890s, with over seventy-five percent of the population in the densely inhabited northeastern states able to read.3 In Britain, Alfred Harmsworth, better known by his later title as Lord Northcliffe, understood these changes in literacy and developed a line of publications that included Comic Cuts—and, later, the array of newspapers that earned him his title—to appeal to this newly empowered readership.4 Comic strips then were present at the birth of a community of new readers imagining new senses of themselves and the body politic to which they belonged. As the historian Eugene Weber has noted, in France, this process of spreading a national culture through print transported by railways was somewhat delayed, for it was only after the First World War that newspapers like Petit Journal, with its illustrated supplement, began to circulate more broadly through the country.5

From Töpffer to Ally Sloper

The association between the bustling unfolding of economic modernity and the sort of regulation it required—trains, for instance, need organization, such as in timetables; indeed, it was the railroads that established the time zones in the United States—is what shaped the career of the pioneering comics artist Rodolphe Töpffer, according to comics historian Thierry Smolderen. Töpffer is widely regarded as the father of comics art because of his series of comic albums that developed many of the techniques familiar to modern readers of comic strips and comic books. Smolderen argues that Töpffer deliberately used sequential panels and diagrammatic representations in order to tie the form of his satire to the very object of his ridicule: the sort of “generalized formatting” contained “in works on theatrical gestures, manuals on manners, and technical encyclopedias.”6 This sort of reduction of difference to standardization was part and parcel of the coming age, as handmade artisanal craft gave way to industrial production.7 Ironically, in the format of his satire Töpffer invented something perfectly suited to the broad object of that satire. Smolderen considers the satirical impulse of comics artists the saving grace of the form, while pointing out that once strips were introduced to newspapers, comics “turned decisively against their creator[s] . . . [and] contributed to the rhythms and the routines of the urban and industrial world.”8

If Töpffer shaped the emerging form of comics, the work he produced was nonetheless not comic strips (in the familiar sense) but rather self-contained comic albums. Smolderen identifies the appearance of this sort of material in newspapers as the moment that the form took on a particular characteristic somewhat contrary to the vision of Töpffer. To be sure, newspapers were important, but before comic strips arrived on the newspaper page, one comic showed the way that this art fit the emerging urban and industrial world. The character Ally Sloper, as Roger Sabin has shown, appeared in various British publications beginning with Judy in 1867, and his adventures were almost certainly the first significant comic strip. By 1884, Sloper appeared in the eponymous Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday—his own comic weekly, which, as Sabin shows, depended on aggressive cross-marketing promotion. The art was comic strip–like, the character continuing and promoted through an array of products.9 The fact that Sloper appeared in a weekly rather than a daily newspaper reflects the different lines of development of newspapers in Britain and in the States. Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday was certainly circulated on a mass basis, selling up to 340,000 copies a week by one account.10

Moreover, the character appeared across media. While a comic strip can be a strip without spawning a character that moves beyond print, the key early strip characters, those that shaped the form, almost all had more than a print incarnation. Sloper, through a variety of merchandise, reached beyond print into the daily lives of his audience. As Sabin points out, the character demonstrates Martin Barker’s notion of a contract between reader and text, a contract that, in Barker’s words, entails “an agreement that a text will talk to us in ways we recognise. It will enter into a dialogue with us. And that dialogue, with its dependable elements and form, will relate to some aspect of our lives in our society.”11 With Sloper, this sort of contract with the reader expanded beyond the confines of the printed text to include reprints of the Judy strip, a relish sauce, cigars, liver pills, bicycles, ties, and musical instruments. We know Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday was meant for rail commuters because—and this is somewhat grim humor—promotional advertisements offered a reward to victims of rail accidents if a copy of the latest issue of the comic was found on the deceased—the contract with readers almost extended to an insurance policy, the premium being regular purchase of the comic!

Sabin describes this as Sloper “transcending his role as a vehicle for humour and becoming associated with, in particular, the rise of leisure consumerism.” Sloper appealed to an emerging lower middle class who came into being because of the very changes that produced comics; the growing industrialization of society that inspired Töpffer’s satire also enabled the production and distribution of comics on a large scale. As Sabin explains, “Sloper was developing as a ‘brand,’ and as ever the cultural role of brands was to respond to the zeitgeist.”12 I would suggest, however, that Sloper did not so much “transcend” his role as intimately tie different roles together in ways that not only were mutually reinforcing but indeed laid down a template for an emerging culture of consumption. Sabin’s ambivalent use of “brand” indicates uncertainty regarding whether we should view comic strips as defined by their political economy rather than, or as much as, their formal properties. Ally Sloper was a comic strip, but either it was so much more—a brand—or the nature of the comic strip at this time was such that the comic was more than what appeared on the printed page. A comparison with the American comic Hogan’s Alley—home of the “Yellow Kid” and often erroneously called the first comic strip ever—supports the latter contention.

The Yellow Kid

Touted as the first comic strip by many comics fans and scholars (Americans in particular), Richard F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley was no such thing. Before Ally Sloper, and even before Töpffer created his works, the short-lived Glasgow Looking Glass, first published on June 11, 1825, had carried a series of sequential narrative illustrations spread over several issues that would meet a formalistic definition of a comic strip.13 But this comic floundered for lack of a sufficient audience. Likewise, distinctive comic figures such as Thomas Rowlandson and William Combe’s Dr. Syntax had been widely popular and given rise to numerous associated products. What made the “Yellow Kid” comics the first strip in so many people’s view was the distinctive character and its regular appearance in a newspaper—qualities more to do with the political economy of the feature than its formal properties. The Yellow Kid first appeared in protean form in a panel cartoon within the illustrated humor journal Truth on April 15, 1893, and then again more clearly, though not yet fully formed, on June 2, 1894, under the heading “Feudal Pride in Hogan’s Alley.” By the time of his third appearance, again in Truth, on February 9, 1895, the Kid was clearly recognizable as the character that would go on to appear in the New York World and then the New York Journal. But even in the Kid’s first colored appearance in the New York World (May 5, 1895), under the title “At the Circus in Hogan’s Alley,” his distinctive nightshirt that was later to give him his name was not yet yellow. Indeed, Outcault did not ever refer to the Kid as the Yellow Kid during the feature’s run at the World. Moreover, for the duration of its run at the World the comic was a single panel—or page rather, typically filled to bursting with typeset text as well as a giant comic illustration. Nor did word balloons, another supposed hallmark of comic strips, appear very much. How the Yellow Kid became a comic strip, then, is no simple tale of author’s intention and the invention of a form.

On January 5, 1896, the Kid appeared in the World with his nightshirt colored yellow. Thereafter he became known as the Yellow Kid. Outcault himself did not use the term until much later that year. Again here, much as Sabin argues for Ally Sloper, a contract existed with the reading audience, and in the Kid’s case, it was they who named the character. Even with a name, though, the Yellow Kid was still not a comic strip, at least in the conventional sense of appearing regularly in panels. Unlike A...