Material culture: comic antecedents

The prehistory of modern popular graphics is presented most comprehensively in David Kunzle's History of the Comic Strip (Kunzle 1973: 1990). He lays out the European tradition clearly, particularly the origins of the competition for public attention between graphically abstracted and "realistic" approaches to visual narratives (Kunzle 1990: 348). During the 19th century, the widening distribution of graphics in daily newspapers and in illustrated weeklies replaced the topical broadsheet inherited from the 17th and 18th centuries. These demanded industrial forms, scales, and speeds of reproduction, which certainly had some effects on what the images looked like.

Kunzle (1990) establishes two wings for a spectrum of form and style of popular graphic narratives, with William Hogarth at one end and Rodolphe Töpffer at the other.

Hogarth transforms the traditional story-painting by creating and arranging them in deliberate series so that there is not only time and space depicted in the pictures, but also time and space implicit in the gaps between the pictures. He also take his oil paintings and transforms them directly into engravings for sale, the closest thing to mass-media pictorial distribution available 25o years ago. Hogarth's images are immediately visible, but only slowly legible. They are emblematic of pre-industrial mass media.

A century later, Töpffer's adventurous abstractions combine character studies and action in very spare but challenging code. Where there is a great deal to read within the borders of any of Hogarth's popular engravings, there is hardly anything to read in any single frame of Töpffer's. Hogarth's detail leaves the matter of transition in the mind of his viewer or reader. Töpffer's apparently wild panels structure the transitions, leaving the detail to be filled in by the reader. His (apparent) graphic simplicity is not yet emblematic of the era of the steam-powered presses, but it will be soon . . .

Coincidentally, both Hogarth and Töpffer published small illustrated treatises on the systematic analysis of people's faces, still important resource material for any caricaturist in training.

Once into the 20th century, there are numerous approaches to the material culture of comics. There are treatments of comic-strip and comic-book history that follow individual creators and studios and their biographical details. Both Americans and Europeans produce comic-book encyclopaedias with some regularity. Of the comic-image material on the Internet, most is promotional or biographical, and most often driven by publishers, fans and collectors of individual artists. Very little of this material looks closely at or analyzes the form and content of images themselves -- their aesthetics -- either in comparison to other arts or even to other comics creators.

In crude epistemological terms, there is considerable empirical scholarship in the field of comics in any given language and country, but there has been a conspicuous lack of analytical scholarship about comics themselves and their aesthetic and communicative scope in English, certainly in comparison to French.

Much of the most interesting and informed scholarly and analytical literature on comics, their cultural and artistic contexts in general, and on readers, writers and artists in particular, is European, and it would seem mostly in French. France and Belgium both claim to be the world centre of bandes dessinées, perhaps on account of having weathered the onslaught of American cultural imp0rts since the second World War. In any case, what is available in French about the material of comics seems many years ahead of what has been produced even very recently in English.

Foreign-language comics are not often translated into English, and most writing about comics never even crosses the ocean.

Analytical approaches to the inheritance and current state of comic art and aesthetics have been surveyed and elaborated by Couperie and Horn (1968 [a translation from French]), by Sabin (1993, 1996), by Harvey (1996), and by Carrier (2000). Currently, The Comics Journal may be about the only sustained source for information and criticism in English about comic aesthetics or about comics outside North America. In American empirical tradition, it relies on long and intensive creator interviews. Both its more general "aesthetic" and "foreign" coverage, while informative, is intermittent.

But TCJ has published considerable commentary and critical response to the most conspicuous aesthetic treatment of comics in the last decade (in English), Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993). And McCloud has held up his end of the debate in the pages of TCJ (Beaty et al. 1999), in his recent "sequel", Reinventing Comics (2000), and his very recent reinvention project on the Internet <http://www.scottmccloud.com>.

Scott McCloud's comic books about comic understanding may be the most provocative models for examining narrative settings. His writings (picturings?) have aroused debate because they have provoked critics and creators to articulate their own ideas about both his concepts and re-presentations. What he has done is to publish in English some of the insights that scholars have looked at in other languages for years (notably Thierry Groensteen), and carried forward veteran creator Will Eisner's own attempts to define graphic language graphically (Eisner 1985, 1995).

One of McCloud's core principles, based on Eisner, is that the conventions of comic presentation are directed to having the reader/viewer identify with one or another character in the story, and that the relatively simplified drawing styles of comics enable that process in ways that cinema or fine art (or less successful comics) do not. Critics have taken McCloud to task over that presumption (Harvey 1995; Beaty et al. 1999) because in their experience as diligent readers it looks a lot like the best drawing style and characterization can fail without a solid story -- and a solid story can transcend or even validate the clumsiest graphics, if it can find its own way to hold the reader's attention.

To give McCloud his due, the matter of reader or viewer identification is contested and unresolved in cinema and literary studies as well (Rowe 1999: 121; Phillips 1999: 143–48; Iser 1978: 139), where it is unclear whether being a spectator or even a voyeur is the same as being a "virtual" participant in the "action". In any case, a more detailed study of comics (in English!) might illuminate some of the troubling aspects of what Jules Prown would categorize as a "diversion" in material culture.

Next: What's so material about ink on paper?

		Ephemeral landscapes: material culture The sources of "modern" comics

`back to the beginning of MATERIAL CULTURE MODELS` `check out some of the REFERENCES`		The prehistory of modern popular graphics is presented most comprehensively in David Kunzle's History of the Comic Strip (Kunzle 1973: 1990). He lays out the European tradition clearly, particularly the origins of the competition for public attention between graphically abstracted and "realistic" approaches to visual narratives (Kunzle 1990: 348). During the 19th century, the widening distribution of graphics in daily newspapers and in illustrated weeklies replaced the topical broadsheet inherited from the 17th and 18th centuries. These demanded industrial forms, scales, and speeds of reproduction, which certainly had some effects on what the images looked like. Kunzle (1990) establishes two wings for a spectrum of form and style of popular graphic narratives, with William Hogarth at one end and Rodolphe Töpffer at the other. Hogarth transforms the traditional story-painting by creating and arranging them in deliberate series so that there is not only time and space depicted in the pictures, but also time and space implicit in the gaps between the pictures. He also take his oil paintings and transforms them directly into engravings for sale, the closest thing to mass-media pictorial distribution available 25o years ago. Hogarth's images are immediately visible, but only slowly legible. They are emblematic of pre-industrial mass media. A century later, Töpffer's adventurous abstractions combine character studies and action in very spare but challenging code. Where there is a great deal to read within the borders of any of Hogarth's popular engravings, there is hardly anything to read in any single frame of Töpffer's. Hogarth's detail leaves the matter of transition in the mind of his viewer or reader. Töpffer's apparently wild panels structure the transitions, leaving the detail to be filled in by the reader. His (apparent) graphic simplicity is not yet emblematic of the era of the steam-powered presses, but it will be soon . . . Coincidentally, both Hogarth and Töpffer published small illustrated treatises on the systematic analysis of people's faces, still important resource material for any caricaturist in training. Once into the 20th century, there are numerous approaches to the material culture of comics. There are treatments of comic-strip and comic-book history that follow individual creators and studios and their biographical details. Both Americans and Europeans produce comic-book encyclopaedias with some regularity. Of the comic-image material on the Internet, most is promotional or biographical, and most often driven by publishers, fans and collectors of individual artists. Very little of this material looks closely at or analyzes the form and content of images themselves -- their aesthetics -- either in comparison to other arts or even to other comics creators. In crude epistemological terms, there is considerable empirical scholarship in the field of comics in any given language and country, but there has been a conspicuous lack of analytical scholarship about comics themselves and their aesthetic and communicative scope in English, certainly in comparison to French. Much of the most interesting and informed scholarly and analytical literature on comics, their cultural and artistic contexts in general, and on readers, writers and artists in particular, is European, and it would seem mostly in French. France and Belgium both claim to be the world centre of bandes dessinées, perhaps on account of having weathered the onslaught of American cultural imp0rts since the second World War. In any case, what is available in French about the material of comics seems many years ahead of what has been produced even very recently in English. Foreign-language comics are not often translated into English, and most writing about comics never even crosses the ocean. Analytical approaches to the inheritance and current state of comic art and aesthetics have been surveyed and elaborated by Couperie and Horn (1968 [a translation from French]), by Sabin (1993, 1996), by Harvey (1996), and by Carrier (2000). Currently, The Comics Journal may be about the only sustained source for information and criticism in English about comic aesthetics or about comics outside North America. In American empirical tradition, it relies on long and intensive creator interviews. Both its more general "aesthetic" and "foreign" coverage, while informative, is intermittent. But TCJ has published considerable commentary and critical response to the most conspicuous aesthetic treatment of comics in the last decade (in English), Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993). And McCloud has held up his end of the debate in the pages of TCJ (Beaty et al. 1999), in his recent "sequel", Reinventing Comics (2000), and his very recent reinvention project on the Internet <http://www.scottmccloud.com>. Scott McCloud's comic books about comic understanding may be the most provocative models for examining narrative settings. His writings (picturings?) have aroused debate because they have provoked critics and creators to articulate their own ideas about both his concepts and re-presentations. What he has done is to publish in English some of the insights that scholars have looked at in other languages for years (notably Thierry Groensteen), and carried forward veteran creator Will Eisner's own attempts to define graphic language graphically (Eisner 1985, 1995). One of McCloud's core principles, based on Eisner, is that the conventions of comic presentation are directed to having the reader/viewer identify with one or another character in the story, and that the relatively simplified drawing styles of comics enable that process in ways that cinema or fine art (or less successful comics) do not. Critics have taken McCloud to task over that presumption (Harvey 1995; Beaty et al. 1999) because in their experience as diligent readers it looks a lot like the best drawing style and characterization can fail without a solid story -- and a solid story can transcend or even validate the clumsiest graphics, if it can find its own way to hold the reader's attention. To give McCloud his due, the matter of reader or viewer identification is contested and unresolved in cinema and literary studies as well (Rowe 1999: 121; Phillips 1999: 143–48; Iser 1978: 139), where it is unclear whether being a spectator or even a voyeur is the same as being a "virtual" participant in the "action". In any case, a more detailed study of comics (in English!) might illuminate some of the troubling aspects of what Jules Prown would categorize as a "diversion" in material culture. Next: What's so material about ink on paper?
		Back to top

The sources of "modern" comics