The Earliest Comics

Tweet

My next public talk is on comics and graphic novels and these are my notes on the early days of comics. Comic book imagery is as old as art itself. A comic is defined as use of sequential multiple images to convey a sense of movement and narrative. We gleam a lot of our knowledge of cavemen from cave art. Neolithic cave art sets out depictions of the hunts, either for religious rituals before setting off, or in celebration of the hunters coming back with plenty of meat. The pictures become their own written language. The only difference between that and a comic is that you can’t turn the pages or put it in your pocket to read it later. Egyptian hieroglyphs often relate a story as a guide book. Pyramid tombs were adorned with comic book instructions for the dead to follow to make their way to the afterlife. The Bayeux Tapestry relates the history of the battle in sequential art imagery. One section shows the passing of a comet at the time of the battle – We now know that this was Halley’s Comet, which comes round every 76 years. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is in many ways a comic strip, though obviously a very serious one, covering many Biblical scenes. Here Adam & Eve tempted by the Serpent in Eden is immediately followed by an image of them being banished from Eden after God has caught them. Other images bring many biblical highlights to life including the crucifixion and the Apocalypse. Artists often did preliminary sketches for their larger works, especially for expensive frescoes where they had to often get the details right straight away unlike mistakes on canvas that they could easily paint over. These stand-alone drawings were known as cartoons, even if the subject matter was quite serious. Punch magazine started calling its one panel satirical sketches cartoons in 1843. Many magazines and newspapers around the World followed suit. It was a Swiss artist called Rodolphe Topffer who first started drawing multi-panelled cartoons, combining some explanatory text with stories told over thirty to forty pages, each page with about six panels. The stories were a huge success. Though originally called, in French, The Story of Mr. Wooden Head, American newspapers renamed them The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck and they became a best-seller in 1842. Topffer hadn’t intended to sell the comics at all. He wrote them to amuse hi friend, but fortunately, the German dramatist and poet, Goethe, author of Faust, talked him into going commercial. Other comic book pamphlets began to appear and magazines like Judy, a rival to Punch, in Britain, started running a regular multi-panel strip about a character called Aly Sloper, a drunken con-man who would do anything for his next beer, including pretending to be a blind-beggar. His success meant that for the first time, people were buying a magazine just for one popular feature – the cartoon strip. Comics were here to stay. Arthur Chappell