From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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-	{{Template}}	+	#redirect[[comics#History]]
-	== History ==	+
-	===Early narratives in art===	+
-	[[Comics]] as an art form established itself in the late 19th and early 20th century, alongside the similar forms of [[film]] and [[animation]]. The three forms share certain conventions, most noticeably the mixing of words and pictures, and all three owe parts of their conventions to the technological leaps made through the [[industrial revolution]]. Although the comics form was established and popularized in the pages of [[newspapers]] and [[magazines]] in the late 1890s, narrative illustration has existed for many centuries.	+
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-	[[Rome]]'s [[Trajan's Column]], dedicated in 113 AD, is an early surviving examples of a narrative told through the use of sequential pictures, while [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]], [[Greeks|Greek]] [[friezes]], medieval tapestries such as the [[Bayeux Tapestry]] and illustrated [[manuscripts]] also demonstrate the use of sequential images and words combined to convey a narrative. In medieval paintings, many sequential scenes of the same story (usually a Biblical one) are simultaneously shown in the same painting (see illustration on the left).	+
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-	However, these works lack the ability to travel to the reader; it needed the invention of modern printing techniques to allow the form to capture a wide audience and become a [[mass medium]].	+
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-	===The 15th–18th centuries and printing advances===	+
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-	The invention of the [[printing press]], allowing [[movable type]], established a separation between images and words, the two requiring different methods in order to be reproduced. Early printed material concentrated on [[religion|religious subjects]], but through the 17th and 18th centuries they began to tackle aspects of [[politics|political]] and [[society|social life]], and also started to [[satire|satirize]] and [[caricature]]. It was also during this period that the [[speech bubble]] was developed as a means of attributing dialogue.	+
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-	William Hogarth is often identified in histories of the comics form. His work, ''[[A Rake's Progress]]'', was composed of a number of canvases, each reproduced as a print, and the eight prints together created a narrative. As printing techniques developed, due to the technological advances of the [[industrial revolution]], magazines and newspapers were established. These publications utilized illustrations as a means of commenting on political and social issues, such illustrations becoming known as cartoons in the 1840s. Soon, artists were experimenting with establishing a sequence of images to create a narrative.	+
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-	While surviving works of these periods such as [[Francis Barlow (artist)|Francis Barlow's]] ''A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot'' (c.1682) as well as ''The Punishments of Lemuel Gulliver'' and ''A Rake's Progress'' by [[William Hogarth]] (1726), can be seen to establish a narrative over a number of images, it wasn't until the 19th century that the elements of such works began to crystallise into the [[comic strip]].	+
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-	The speech balloon also evolved during this period, from the medieval origins of the ''phylacter'', a label, usually in the form of a scroll, which identified a character either through naming them or using a short text to explain their purpose. Artists such as [[George Cruikshank]] helped codify such ''phylacters'' as balloons rather than as scrolls, although at this time they were still referred to as labels. Although they were now used to represent dialogue, this dialogue was still used for identification purposes rather than to create a dialogue within the work, and artists soon discarded them in favour of running dialogue underneath the panels. The speech balloons weren't reintroduced to the form until [[Richard F. Outcault]] utilized them as a means of establishing dialogue within his works.	+
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-	===The 19th century: a form established===	+
-	[[Rodolphe Töpffer]], a Francophone Swiss artist, is seen as the key figure of the early part of the 19th century. Although speech balloons had fallen from favour during the middle part of the 19th century, Töpffer's sequentially illustrated stories, with the text compartmentalised below the images, were reprinted throughout [[Europe]] and the [[United States]]. The lack of [[Copyright|copyright laws]] at this time allowed such [[Copyright infringement|pirated editions]], and these translated versions created a market on both continents for similar works.	+
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-	In 1843 Töpffer formalised his thoughts on the ''picture story'' in his ''[[Essay on Physiognomics]]'': "To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material — often down to the dregs! It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a [[pun]]. You must actually invent some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense."	+
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-	In 1845 the [[Editorial cartoons|satirical drawings]] which had regularly been appearing in newspapers and magazines gained a name: [[cartoons]]. The British magazine ''[[Punch magazine|Punch]]'', launched in 1841, referred to its 'humorous pencilings' as cartoons in a satirical reference to the [[Parliament of the United Kingdom|Parliament]] of the day, who were themselves organising an exhibition of cartoons, or preparatory drawings, at the time. This usage became common parlance, lasting into the present day. Similar magazines containing cartoons in continental [[Europe]] included ''[[Fliegende Blätter]]'' and ''[[Le Charivari]]'', while in the U.S. ''[[Judge (magazine)|Judge]]'' and ''[[Puck (magazine)|Puck]]'' were popular.	+
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-	1865 saw the publication of ''[[Max and Moritz]]'' by [[Wilhelm Busch]] by a German newspaper. Busch refined the conventions of sequential art, and his work was a key influence within the form, [[Rudolph Dirks]] was inspired by the strip to create ''[[The Katzenjammer Kids]]'' in 1897.	+
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-	It is around this time that [[Manhua]], the [[China|Chinese]] form of comics, started to formalize, a process that lasted up until 1927. The introduction of [[lithographic]] printing methods derived from the [[West]] was a critical step in expanding the form within China during the early 20th century. Like Europe and the United States, satirical drawings were appearing in newspapers and periodicals, initially based on works from those countries. One of the first magazines of satirical cartoons was based on the [[United Kingdom]]'s ''Punch'', snappily re-branded as ''"The China Punch"''. The first piece drawn by a person of Chinese nationality was ''"The Situation in the Far East"'' from [[Tse Tsan-Tai]], printed 1899 in [[Japan]]. By the 1920s a market was established for palm-sized picture books like [[Lianhuanhua]].	+
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-	In 1884, ''[[Ally Sloper's Half Holiday]]'' was published, a magazine whose selling point was a strip featuring the titular character, and widely regarded as the first comic strip magazine to feature a recurring character. In 1890 two more comic magazines debuted to the British public, ''[[Comic Cuts]]'' and ''[[Chips (periodical)|Illustrated Chips]]'', establishing the tradition of the [[British comics|British comic]] as an [[anthology]] periodical containing comic strips.	+
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-	In the [[United States]], [[Richard F. Outcault|R.F. Outcault's]] work in combining speech balloons and images on ''[[The Yellow Kid|Hogan's Alley]]'' and [[The Yellow Kid]] has been credited as establishing the form and conventions of the comic strip. Although this view is being revised by current academics, who are uncovering many other works which combine speech bubbles and a multi image narrative, the popularity of Outcalt and the position of the strip in a newspaper is credited as being the driving force of the form.	+
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-	===The 20th century and the mass medium===	+
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-	The 1920s and 1930s saw further booms within the industry. In China a market was established for palm-sized picture books like [[Lianhuanhua]], while the market for comic anthologies in Britain had turned to targeting children through juvenile humor, with ''[[The Dandy]]'' and ''[[The Beano]]'' launched. In [[Belgium]], [[Hergé]] created the ''[[The Adventures of Tintin|Tintin]]'' newspaper strip for [[Le Petit Vingtième|a comic supplement]]; this was successfully collected in a bound album and created a market for further such works. The same period in the United States had seen newspaper strips expand their subject matter beyond humour, with action, adventure and mystery strips launched. The collection of such material also began, with ''[[The Funnies]]'', a reprint collection of newspaper strips, published in tabloid size in 1929.	+
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-	A market for such comic books soon followed, and by 1938 publishers were printing original material in the format. It was at this point that [[Action Comics 1|Action Comics#1]] launched, with ''[[Superman]]'' as the cover feature. The popularity of the character swiftly enshrined the superhero as the defining genre of American comics, and although the genre fell out of favour in the 1950s, the 1960s saw it re-establish its domination of the form until the late 20th century.	+
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-	In Japan, a country with a long tradition for illustration and whose writing system evolved from pictures, comics were hugely popular. Referred to as [[manga]], the Japanese form was established after [[World War II]] by [[Osamu Tezuka]], who expanded the page count of a work to number in the hundreds, and who developed a filmic style, heavily influenced by the Disney animations of the time. The Japanese market expanded its range to cover works in many genres, from juvenile fantasy through romance to adult fantasies. Japanese manga is typically published in large anthologies, containing several hundred pages, and the stories told have long been used as sources for adaptation into animated film. In Japan such films are referred to as [[anime]], and many creators will work in both forms simultaneously, leading to an intrinsic linking of the two forms.	+
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-	During the latter half of the 20th century comics have become a very popular [[Comic book collecting|item for collectors]] and from the 1970s American comics publishers have actively encouraged collecting and shifted a large portion of comics publishing and production to appeal directly to the collector's community.	+
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-	Writing in 1972, Sir [[Ernst Gombrich]] certainly felt Töpffer to have evolved a new pictorial language, that of an abbreviated art style, which worked by allowing the audience to fill in gaps with their own imagination.	+
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-	The modern double usage of the term ''comic'', as an adjective describing a genre, and a noun designating an entire medium, has been criticised as confusing and misleading. In the 1960s and 1970s, underground cartoonists used the spelling ''[[Underground comix|comix]]'' to distinguish their work from mainstream newspaper strips and juvenile comic books; ironically, although their work was written for an adult audience, it was usually comedic in nature as well, so the "comic" label was still appropriate. The term ''[[graphic novel]]'' was popularised in the late 1970s, having been coined at least two decades previous, to distance the material from this confusion.	+
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-	In the 1980s comics scholarship started to blossom in the U.S., and a resurgence in the popularity of comics was seen, with [[Alan Moore]] and [[Frank Miller (comics)|Frank Miller]] producing notable superhero works and [[Bill Watterson]]'s ''[[Calvin & Hobbes]]'' being syndicated.	+
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-	In 2005 [[Robert Crumb]]'s work was exhibited in galleries both sides of the Atlantic, and ''The Guardian'' newspaper devoted its tabloid supplement to a week long exploration of his work and idioms.	+
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-	The invention of the [[printing press]], allowing [[movable type]], established a separation between images and words, the two requiring different methods in order to be reproduced. Early printed material concentrated on [[religion|religious subjects]], but through the 17th and 18th centuries they began to tackle aspects of [[politics|political]] and [[society|social life]], and also started to [[satire|satirize]] and [[caricature]]. It was also during this period that the [[speech bubble]] was developed as a means of attributing dialogue.	+
-		+
-	William Hogarth is often identified in histories of the comics form. His work, ''[[A Rake's Progress]]'', was composed of a number of canvases, each reproduced as a print, and the eight prints together created a narrative. As printing techniques developed, due to the technological advances of the [[industrial revolution]], magazines and newspapers were established. These publications utilized illustrations as a means of commenting on political and social issues, such illustrations becoming known as cartoons in the 1840s. Soon, artists were experimenting with establishing a sequence of images to create a narrative.	+
-		+
-	While surviving works of these periods such as [[Francis Barlow (artist)|Francis Barlow's]] ''A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot'' (c.1682) as well as ''The Punishments of Lemuel Gulliver'' and ''A Rake's Progress'' by [[William Hogarth]] (1726), can be seen to establish a narrative over a number of images, it wasn't until the 19th century that the elements of such works began to crystallise into the [[comic strip]].	+
-		+
-	The speech balloon also evolved during this period, from the medieval origins of the ''phylacter'', a label, usually in the form of a scroll, which identified a character either through naming them or using a short text to explain their purpose. Artists such as [[George Cruikshank]] helped codify such ''phylacters'' as balloons rather than as scrolls, although at this time they were still referred to as labels. Although they were now used to represent dialogue, this dialogue was still used for identification purposes rather than to create a dialogue within the work, and artists soon discarded them in favour of running dialogue underneath the panels. The speech balloons weren't reintroduced to the form until [[Richard F. Outcault]] utilized them as a means of establishing dialogue within his works.	+
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-	{{GFDL}}	+

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Revision as of 23:53, 1 January 2012

1. redirectcomics#History