Jeremy Dauber - American Comics: A History

AMERICAN
COMICS

A HISTORY

Jeremy Dauber

To Talia

A marvelous miss, who I know will become a wondrous woman

O ur story starts, appropriately enough, with a bang: the whizz of shells, the crack of gunfire. And an artist crouching beneath them, getting it all down. Thomas Nast may no longer be a household name; but during his lifetime, he shaped the course of a war and set fire to the American imagination, and the themes his story illuminates sound familiar to anyone appreciating comics. Humble origins leading to remarkable successes. Surprising leaps (if not in a single bound) of artistic ambition. And, yes, weaknesses: with great power, great responsibilityand Nasts precedents werent all good ones.

Nast, like so many others in our story, was an immigrant. His father was forced to leave Germany in 1846 due to his socialist stances; Thomas was six, and his eye became attuned to politics early. He got his first job at fifteen (another theme: autodidacts and early starters) from another recent, and recently successful, immigrant, Frank Leslie, who was creating a new, expanded role in America for drawn pictures with wordscomics, for now and for short.

Making images that imparted a message is an impulse as old as human civilization; juxtaposing them sequentially, so that the mind put them together to tell a story, is almost as old. Proponents and propagandists have dated sequential art making, and thus proto-comics, back to cave paintings; if that feels somewhat dubious, feel free, as some have, to substitute Egyptian tomb paintings, Greek book rolls, Roman tabulae, Mayan ceramic art, Mexican codices, Japanese woodblock booklets, or the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Norman Conquest.

Thats a contentious, and narrative-oriented, definition: comics fans and scholars argue about where to draw the line, pun very much intended. Are comics sequential? That definition excludes all single-panel entrants, from political cartoons to The Family Circus. Are words necessary? Many great comics dont have them. Perhaps we ultimately define comics as, in one critics words, objects recognized by the comics world as comics, ostensibly tautological and also correct. (Theres general consensus, for example, that childrens picture books arent comics, despite meeting the criteria set out in many of the definitions.) But juxtaposition of text and image have been crucial, if not strictly essential, to the history of sequential comic storytelling.

Which took a sharp turn with the development of the printing press. Broadsides, or broadsheets, which reached their height in Western Europe and its colonies between 1450 and 1800, often featured an image or series of images with separated text above or below. Printing allowed these images wide circulation; newly invented movable type created separability between word and image not necessarily available to the creators of illuminated manuscripts or woodcuts. Broadsheets could feature general religious instruction or more topical moral polemics: Martin Luther employed caricatures extensively in his campaign against Catholic authorities. (He particularly liked 1521s The Passionale of Christ and Anti-Christ, thirteen pairs of woodcuts juxtaposing episodes from Jesuss life with less admirable papal activity.)

The Catholics did the same, producing a strip during the Thirty Years War entitled Martin Luther, Doctor of Godlessness, Professor of Villainy, Shameful Apostate, God-Robbing Husband, and Author of the Augsburg Confession. And no one forgot the Jews: early broadsheets featured anti-Semitic iconography and false charges of ritual murder. Salacious crime reporting was popular early on, too: broadsheets were frequently hawked at early modern public executions. (That the sheets required advance preparation meant that artists impressions were, well, inaccurate in detail.) the images now produced, often by anonymous toilers, ranged far and wide, high and low.

Representations of miracle plays jostled for popular attention with Mr. Punch and the commedia dellarte. William Hogarths eighteenth-century sequential copperplate engravings mixed caricature and human comedy with moral message; he claimed he endeavoured to treat my subject as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, and men and women my players. Are his Harlots Progress (1732) and Marriage A-la-Mode (17431745) comics?

Hogarths successors spanned the Continent. Fellow Britons included James Gillray, whose John Bulls Progress took a similar route; in Spain, Goya cartooned. Nineteenth-century Frenchman Honor Daumiers caricatures of King Louis Philippe earned him prison time and, later, the role of political cartoonings patron saint. Paul Revere took Franklins lesson to heart: his 1770 cartoon of the Boston Massacre strongly influenced anti-British recruitment. Both remind us of colonial readers visual vocabulary and facility, and of the fertile, if sometimes unconscious, ground for comics reception in America.

Our focus now switches to a vision-impaired Swiss prep school teacher named Rodolphe Tpffer (17991846). Tpffer, the University of Genevas chair of rhetoric and belles lettres, always dreamed of being a serious artist, but it was the doodlings and little follies done for his and his students pleasure that assured him immortality.

Tpffers comics arrived in America around the same time Nast was getting off the boat. The year 1842 saw New Yorks Wilson and Company, specialists in popular paperback romances, produce The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, reprinting a bootleg British translation of a Tpffer album. At forty pages, printed on both sides of the paper, measuring eight and a half inches by eleven, Oldbuck looked more like todays comic books than anything previously published. England, as in so much else in that first American century, was the model, and British immigrant Frank Leslie looked to his former homelands illustrated magazines, particularly its humor magazines.

The Victorians were illustration bashers. They were seen as requiring too little effort, encouraging laziness and, ultimately, moral collapse. But this was a visceral response to the illustrated magazines explosive success. The most famous, 1841s Punch, had developed a reputation almost as much for its illustrations as for its satire. (A leading contributor was the iconic Alice in Wonderland illustrator John Tenniel; Dickenss great illustrator George Cruikshank refused to join, finding the satire too personal.) Two years later, Punch helped give those illustrations a new name.

The Palace of Westminster, home of Parliament, had been destroyed in an 1834 fire; the new palace, the building we know today, was still under construction. Queen Victorias newish consort, Prince Albert, president of the Royal Society of the Arts, sponsored a competition to elicit fresco designs for the new building. Some publicly exhibited entries were pasteboard sketches, referred to by the French term of carton. Many were, apparently, less than ideal; Punchs parodies launched a series of similar satiric drawings, eventually known, after their origin, as cartoons.

Leslie brought America the cartoon-heavy magazine model in the 1850s with Frank Leslies Budget of Fun and the Jolly Joker