Integrating Graphic Novels, Comic Books And Manga In Teaching

CONTENTS

Abstract 3

Introduction 4

1. The History of Graphic Narrative 5

1.1. From cave paintings to early forms of narrative art 5

1.2. Single-Frame and Multiple-Frame Narratives 10

1.3. Popular Prints and Caricature 17

1. 4. Graphic narratives around the world 27

1.5. Modern Art Graphic Narratives 33

1.6. The evolution of Comic magazines 40

1.7. The history of Manga 49

2. The Comic Book Industry 61

3. Teaching with Graphic Novels, Comics and Manga 64

Conclusions 65

Appendix 66

List of illustrations 67

Reference list 68

Abstract

“Once regarded as one of the lower forms of mass entertainment, comic books are today widely considered to be potentially capable of complex and profound expression as both literary and visual art forms.” — Nancy Dziedric and Scot Peacock, Literary Critics, 1997

Introduction

Being interested in and passionate about contemporary fairy tales,

1. The History of Graphic Narrative

1.1. From cave paintings to early forms of narrative art

It is difficult to date most of the paintings because of the conditions where they have been found, but the oldest works have so far been carbon-dated at between 25,500 and 27,500 years old. Though much of Paleolithic art is undecipherable to people today, a few ancient preliterate cultures have survived long enough so that some of their narrative art can now be partially understood. The most striking case is in the San rock paintings from South Africa, which were once falsely believed to be the work of a long-lost ‘‘Phoenician’’ civilization but were in the late 19th century actually discovered to be related to the mythology of the surviving San people of the Kalahari Desert (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Ancient Bushmen Rock Art in South Africa

Source: http://www.nature-reserve.co.za/bushmen-rock-art-south-africa.html

As researchers began to decipher the images on the rock and compare them to the San ethnographic record, it became evident that San rock art did not represent scenes from everyday life; instead, the paintings vividly represent a trance experience by a San healer or shaman. The San shaman comes out of trance at the end of a healing ceremony and relates to the others his trance experiences.

What makes this panel a fascinating example of narrative art is the way the various trance-experience symbols are inter-connected by a fine red line marked with white dots (Fig. 2). The line leaves the figure’s mouth and branches off, connecting animals and people; in a way, it appears as a rope winding between the legs or as a track through the wilderness. The lines that irregularly criss-cross the surface of the rock represent an aspect of San mythology called !gi, which is natural power that runs through all things. The line defines specific relationships and possibly suggests some form of transformation over time. Whereas it is impossible to determine how the trance events described in the paintings unfolded, it is possible to see that there are multiple symbols which appear as a constellation around a loosely defined center.

This particular kind of visual narrative strategy is called a simultaneous narrative because two or more different stories are overlapping each other and there is no fixed sequential order among the different narrative events. Such preliterate, or oral, societies as the San have cultural features that are distinctive from those of literate societies because they have ways to store and retrieve important cultural information without the aid of writing.

Rock painting was the source of another long-lived oral narrative art tradition in North America. The Plains Indians had for centuries painted ceremonial images on rock; then, just prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the 17th century, the rock art began to record biographic events. It is not known how the biographic rock art began, but it seems to be historically related to the westward migration of Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, and Plains Cree Indians in the mid-17th century. By the 1800s, all the Plains Indians were engaged in producing rock art; the most prolific were the Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyenne, and Sioux Indians. Drawn from the symbols of the ceremonial rock art, biographic rock art depicts such expressive events as battles, raids, and hunting scenes.

As in the Australian Aboriginal art, symbols that represent footprints or hoof prints are commonly used to describe the movement of people and animals.

In later images from the historical period, dotted lines represent the path of a bullet. Another very common feature in biographic rock art is the use of multiple representations as a way of recording the number of horses stolen or warriors killed. These tally images are typically represented separate from the action and are arranged in neat rows in order to provide a synchronic count of the results of the raid or war party.

Early forms of narrative art in literate societies

Much of the surviving early narrative art forms from the literate societies memorialized significant political events. Both the Egyptian pallet of Narmer (3200 BC) (Fig. 3)and the Assyrian Stele of Vultures (2525 BC) (Fig. 4) have images of brutally vanquished armies, which served to demonstrate the military superiority of the ruling power that commissioned the works. Although both narratives have common visual elements, more is known about the specific function and context of the Assyrian Stele of Vultures that was created to honor the victory of the state of Lagash over Umma. The Assyrian stele is different than the Egyptian pallet in that it has narrow lines that divide one side of the stele into two sections and the other side into four, showing the oldest example of narrative register lines, which were used to organize the images on the stele into a readable order. The narrative of the military campaign against Umma is spectacularly illustrated by figurative compositions carved in relief, arranged on the stele in accordance with the traditional system of registers. These depictions are distributed between the two faces of the stele, those on one side being 'historical' in significance, and those on the other 'mythological,' showing the deeds of men in the one case and of the gods in the other.

Register lines provide visual organization much like the lines on a page. They can also be found in ancient Egyptian art and as far away as the Mayan culture in Central America and the Southeast Asian Khmer culture in Ankor Wat. What all these civilizations had in common was the development of a written literature. Ancient texts usually came either rolled up as a scroll on a spindle or as a codex with pages of wood, parchment, or bark bound on one side or folded in a fanlike fashion.

The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (Fig. 5) was a scroll commonly placed in the tombs of high officials and pharaohs as a guide to the path from death to the afterlife. Because of the preservative qualities found in the sands of the Sahara, these texts are some of the oldest surviving texts in the world. Written on the woven and pressed pith of a common marsh plant, papyrus, Egyptian scrolls have survived from as far back as 1980 BC. The word ‘‘papyrus’’ literally means ‘‘that which belongs in the house,’’ referring back to its common bureaucratic use in ancient Egypt for cataloging inventories in warehouses.

Fig. 5. The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Source: https://sites.google.com/a/district6.org/humanities-2014

All along a papyrus scroll, which could be up to 30 feet in length, narrow columns between two and four inches wide defined the organization of the text and images. In what is now called the papyrus style, the illustrations were framed by the column registers, placing the emphasis on the figures and objects without detailed backgrounds.

With the slow advance of literacy through the classical world, a variety of more complex strategies for telling stories were devised.

1.2. Single-Frame and Multiple-Frame Narratives

Single-Frame Narratives

One of the early masters of narrative art was a black-figure-vase painter in ancient Greece by the name of Exekias (sixth century BC), who was renowned for his exceptional skill in selecting a single poignant scene that evoked the tragedy of the whole story. The design on the amphora by Exekias depicts the tragic moment when in the heat of battle Achilles meets the Amazon Penthesilea and kills her. This much is clearly evident in the design with the warrior queen at the mercy of Achilles, but a more nuanced look at the figures shows Penthesilea turning back to look at him. A fateful gesture, as Achilles falls in love with her; but it is too late for him to check his battle fury, and she dies by his hand.

In the example of the amphora by Exekias, a single scene describes the narrative action (Fig. 6); it is through the careful choice of the moment depicted that prior and future events are implied but not represented. Such visual narrative representations are called monoscenic because the painting represents a single event and there is no repetition of characters or later scenes to suggest the passage of time.

Monoscenic narratives require the reader to know the story well because there are few intrinsic visual clues to signify actions beyond the specific moment shown.

In discussing the way stories are represented, it is valuable to make a distinction between a story and a narrative. The particular choice of scene, the way events are ordered, the way the actions appear, all represent the narrative, which is how a story is shown or told at a particular time. The story is a larger and more amorphous category that includes all the related various narrative renditions of a tale that not only lets viewers understand what they are seeing but also allows them to compare this depiction with their memory of other representations and retellings. Artists create narratives out of our memories of stories. It is through their creative selection that the new narrative becomes a different, unique retelling that will, if memorable, shape future representations of the story.

Related to monoscenic representations are conflated monoscenic narratives, where more than one event is taking place though there is no repetition of characters or scenes.

This type of narrative is demonstrated in the Attic black-figure kylix by the painter of the Boston Polyphemos, ca. 550 BC. Across the outside of the kylix are represented several events from the part of The Odyssey (10.203–335) where the crew of Odysseus are given a potion that changes them into animals. This particular painting not only shows the transformation of the sailors but also depicts the escape of Eurylochos who warns Odysseus, and on the other side of the painting, the return of Odysseus armed and ready to confront the sorceress Circe. The use of conflation is a way of expanding the immediate narrative action to convey broader narrative meanings. By conflating the action to include Odysseus, the story is not just about the fate of the indulgent sailors but also conveys the sober intervention of their quick-thinking captain. (Petersen, 13)

The painting does not have formal boundaries that demarcate one event from another, but the viewer’s prior knowledge of the story makes it possible to sort out the various actions and to recognize the overall sequence of events.

Single-frame narrative art often arranges the figures into smaller groups, creating what is called visual nuclei that help define distinct moments in the story.

Greek narrative art developed this compositional strategy to a high degree, allowing for longer and more complex narrative arrangements along an unbroken frieze, as in the Siphnian Treasury (Dephi, 525 BC) and the Parthenon (Acropolis, Athens, 435 BC). Although both of these works are unbroken visually with actual frames, their sheer size and location—high up on top of large buildings—make it impossible to take in the whole narrative all at once. The north Siphnian Treasury frieze represents the mythic battle between the gods and titans over control of Mount Olympus called the Gigantomachy. (Petersen, 13)

The action does not represent a series of sequential events; rather, it depicts a number of thematically related scenes that are occurring more or less at the same time and thus represent a panoramic narrative. The groupings of figures define different nuclei in the composition, thereby allowing for more complex interaction between the figures locked in the battle and providing areas where the viewer’s eye can rest as it takes in one portion of the frieze at a time.

The frieze does not tell a sequential narrative but instead shows what has been called a progressive narrative, where there is no repetition of characters as the action unfolds like a parade. In this case, it is the viewer who moves to take in the event rather than the procession moving before the viewer.

In monoscenic, panoramic, and progressive narratives, the emphasis of the narrative is on the individual characters who are acting, not on the particular the actions the characters are making. In each of these forms of narrative art, there is no repetition of characters; therefore, the art focuses the viewer’s attention to what Meyer Schapiro called ‘‘being in state,’’ which he contrasted with narratives that have multiple character representations as ‘‘being in action.’’ With single-frame narratives where there are multiple representations of a character, the emphasis shifts toward the action itself as the viewer is shown what is happening. Narrative art with multiple representations of a character within a scene is called a synoptic narrative. This is beautifully realized in Sandro Botticelli’s (ca. 1446–1497) illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Fig. 7) commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici (1482–1490), where Virgil and Dante make their way alongside the damned in hell. Dante and his guide are repeatedly represented as they make their way through the levels of hell, whereas those souls in torment are fixed in their eternal condition. The colors, composition, and synoptic narrative style all vividly portray the different epistemological conditions between the living and the damned.

Fig. 7. Inferno XVIII, 8th Circle of Hell: Punishment of Panderers, Seducers – Illustration

to Dante’s Divine Comedy, ca. 1480.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)

The term ‘‘continuous narrative’’ has been broadly applied to a number of different kinds of narrative art, from Tommaso Masaccio’s Tribute Money (1427) to Trajan’s Column (113 BC). In both cases, multiple representations of characters exist, but the length and size of the frame vary considerably. Tribute Money is a single work within a longer series of frescos at the Brancacci Chapel that have a very clear frame that defines the action within a single scene.

Continuous narratives, on the other hand, emphasize the unfolding continuity of the scenes. Just as beads strung together cumulatively create a necklace, each scene in the unfolding continuous narrative is designed to impress on the viewer the complex progression of the whole journey.

The most famous continuous narrative in Europe is the Bayeux Tapestry (Fig. 8), which commemorates the Norman and English Battle of Hastings (1066 AD).

Fig. 8. The Bayeux Tapestry (detail)

Source: http://www.wga.hu/html_m/zzdeco/2tapestr/2bayeux/index.html

The impressive embroidery, done in eight different colors, spans more than 70 meters (230 feet) in length and contains as many as 50 different interconnected scenes. The Bayeux Tapestry relates the political motivations, battle preparations, and ultimately the humiliating defeat of the English. As in Trajan’s Column, there are symbolic references to the mythic past, which are intended to lend greater urgency and significance to the battle. Unlike the column in Rome, however, the reasons for the creation of the Bayeux Tapestry remain something of an enigma; the images stitched into the story sometimes reveal contradictory messages, which complicate the idea that the tapestry was commissioned merely to celebrate the Norman victory. (Petersen, 16)

The most common varieties of single-frame narrative art are monoscenic and synoptic. Both use a relatively small frame that allows the viewer to take in a few characters in a limited number of actions, and both are predominantly found in codex illustrations. Continuous, panoramic, and progressive narratives are all longer works that adapt well to scrolls that are unfurled one section at a time, or around a monument where the viewer moves from one scene to another (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9. Single-Frame Narrative Types: A Comparison

Source: Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels – A History of Graphic Narratives

by Robert S. Petersen

Multiple-Frame Narratives

The earliest and most common type of multiple-frame narratives are called cyclic narratives, where each picture in the sequence represents a unique scene and each subsequent picture is related through a common story or related story. The individual frames do not have a causal relationship—one action does not lead directly to another as it would in a comic book. Instead, each frame represents an autonomous moment in the overall narrative much like a series of monoscenic pictures.

The Temple of Zeus at Olympia (470– 456 BC) depicts the 12 labors of Herakles in the metopes. Each scene represents one of the labors, and all the scenes taken together represent the complete heroic accomplishments of Herakles, which will eventually lead to his apotheosis. (Petersen, 17)

Jocelyn Penny Small has pointed out that it was more important to classical artists and audiences to see the gist of what occurred rather than to see sequential accuracy. (Small, 562–75)

Cyclic narratives emphasize those general themes rather than the specific events of a story. They are more effective in summing up the idea behind the story than in telling the whole story from beginning to end. For this reason, they are often used as a didactic tool to reinforce the morals found in a story.

Cyclic narratives assume a temporal progression, where one picture is understood to precede another, but the meanings that can be derived from cyclic narratives are not limited to those linear temporal orientations.

Cyclic narratives are more dependent on words for comprehension than are linear narratives and are often used in book illustration alongside the text of the story, where they provide clarity and focus to the story. When a cyclic narrative appears by itself, as in the metope reliefs of Herakles (Fig.10), the story must be well known, or in the case of some traditions, the pictures become a tool for storytellers who provide the narrative details. Picture recitation, as it is commonly called, has existed for centuries in many parts of the world and has been chiefly responsible for the dissemination of some stories across the globe. Picture recitation provided an important link for communicating ideas from the world of literate society to that of preliterate society. Buddhist monks in many parts of Asia commonly employed picture recitation to carry moral messages to their followers, which helped disseminate Buddhist teachings across much of Asia. Buddhism was especially influential in developing narrative strategies because of the pedagogical character of its stories (jataka) that often spoke of the process of becoming enlightened. In Julia K. Murray’s analysis of ancient Chinese scroll paintings she observes that it was not the technology of the scroll that brought extended narratives to China rather it was the arrival of Buddhism that inspired longer narrative works painted on scrolls. (Murray, 17 – 31)

Literacy had allowed for new concepts in story organization and created the notion of ordered sequences of images; but for pictures to become an autonomous means for telling stories, the pictures needed to have a visual means to describe phenomena over time. Doing this required not just images ordered sequentially but also a way of conveying gesture and expression unfolding one moment to the next. This next advance in the visual language of graphic narratives would come about only with the invention of caricature and the development of a popular press. With these innovations in visual communication, artists would seek to capture the imagination of literate audiences by rendering urgent and outrageous stories that reenact the drama of a moment as if it were unfolding before their eyes.

1.3. Popular Prints and Caricature

Popular prints provided an important medium for the development of graphic narratives by encouraging greater diversity and complexity in the way stories could be told with pictures. Audiences of popular prints sought to be entertained, and so artists were pressed to create work that continually provided novelty at the same time as they remained accessible. The need for novelty encouraged artists to explore stories that were wholly original or drawn from current events, thereby expanding the range of topics in the popular press to more than was possible under religious patronage alone. Popular prints also encouraged the development of a visual language that would be self-evident and reward an audience’s continued engagement. The visual language of popular prints assumed many of the conventions for representing authority and depravity from the fine art world, but it also expanded that vocabulary to include new visual representations of voice, sound, and movement, as well as the graphic means to communicate asides, thoughts, and dreams.

A woodblock print of the Chinese Buddhist Diamond Sutra (dated 868 BC) is the earliest surviving print publication, and yet the intricate lines that reproduce the brushwork quality of the Chinese characters suggest that this was already a fully developed technology that had been in use for several centuries.

Despite the huge advantage China had in adopting print technology early in its history, the printing press was not intended to make information widely available; rather, it was used as a means to accurately reproduce long documents for official use. Early ambitious print productions included the entire Buddhist canon with more than 6,000 volumes. The total number of copies made of each volume remained relatively small because the publication was not intended for the general populace. Popular-print books in China remained a rare commodity for many centuries because the best quality ink, paper, and wood used for printing was under direct government control.

One of the earliest popular-print stories was the Twelve Confucian Tales of Filial Piety (Fig. 11), which first appeared in written form in the Yuan Dynasty (1279– 1369 AD). All 12 tales appear on a single page, with each story represented by a single medallion that sums up the moral message. In each case, a devoted son goes to great lengths to honor and care for his parents: in one instance, the son sells himself into slavery to pay for his parent’s funeral; in another tale, he carries his mother on his back to escape war and famine. The pictures describe only a few choice details and, like most cyclic narratives, rely on a reader’s prior knowledge of the action to make sense as a story.

Fig. 11. Illustrations of the Ladies' Classic of Filial Piety (detail),

Song Dynasty, depicting the section "Serving One's Parents-in-Law"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_piety

One of the oldest-surviving European woodblock fragments is dated between 1370 and 1380. The French ‘‘Bois Protat’’ block, as it is called, represents a small portion of a scene of Christ on the Crucifix and was most likely used for printing portable fabric altars rather than printing on paper. The fragment shows a group of three men below the right side of the crucifix, and emanating from the mouth of the frontmost figure is a phylactery, or scroll used to represent speech. The beginning of the scroll touches the mouth of the figure, and the sentence in Latin flows outward and eventually upside down toward Christ, visually linking the patron with the Crucifixion. The visual link the scroll creates between the speaking patron and Christ was an effort to convey the power of human speech to assert relationships even when it compromised the legibility of the words.

The representation of scrolls in paintings first appears as an adaptation of Greek and Roman ‘‘Honor Cloths,’’ which were draped behind authors as a sign of their eminence and later were understood as a visual sign for someone being an author. Thus, the idea of the scroll is not a record of past events but a vehicle for an original expression, a way of conveying the first utterance.

The earliest popular printed materials (broadsheet) followed the biblical illustrative traditions and were designed to appeal to Christian pilgrims who wanted a modest means to remember a particular saint or Christ’s Passion.

The Swabian print from the mid-15th century depicting The Tortures of St. Erasmus is an early example of a broadsheet commemorating the penitent suffering of a saint. The print organized the episodes as a series of 12 images, arranged in a grid, which focus on the nine different brutal tortures enacted before the saint’s final beheading. The cyclic narrative–style pictures, like the 12 labors of Herakles from the classical world, describe a well-known story in a formulaic manner; thus 12 sufferings were often attached to a saint’s story regardless of his or her actual biography.

Synoptic narratives, where a story unfolds in several directions across a unified background, often employed letters or numbers to help the reader link portions of the picture to an accompanying text. This strategy is seen in the Bavarian print Origin and Character of the Swine Who Call Themselves Jesuits (1569), which is read back and forth from the top to the bottom according to the accompanying letters.

Fancy scroll-like phylacteries were in evidence until the mid-18th century, when they were replaced with simpler and less convoluted shapes. The simpler shapes allowed for more text to appear in the print, but they also point to changing ideas about speech and texts. Interpreting the meaning of these changes is difficult because they constitute hundreds of years of artistic and cultural change, but it may be safe to say that they reflect the loss of medieval associations of voice and authorship with the scroll and the development of new allegorical associations. A seminal moment in that shift took place in 1720, when wild financial speculation brought about the catastrophic economic failure of the South Seas Bubble in Britain, which became a major subject for political and social commentary in satirical prints. In one print called ‘‘The Bubblers Medley’’, (Fig. 12) there appears what might be the first instance of a round-ended, bubblelike emanata. The artist’s intent was to make a satirical comment on the fanciful speculation that men indulged in at coffee shops by representing their speech in the shape of ephemeral bubbles.

Fig. 12. ‘‘The Bubblers Medley, or a Sketch of the Times Being

Europe’s Memorial for the Year 1720.’’

Source: Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels –

A History of Graphic Narratives by Robert S. Petersen

Evidence of satirical drawings, especially animals foolishly acting like people, have appeared from at least the time of the ancient Egyptians; but the wide popular enjoyment of grotesque and distorted portraits, exemplified by the term ‘‘caricature,’’ is a uniquely modern phenomenon.

Caricatures first emerged in the Italian Renaissance and flourished thereafter mostly as a consequence of changing attitudes about the nature of art and the role of the artist in society. A caricature drawing represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the artist and the subject being represented.

The unique vision of the artist is an essential component of the work. In this manner, caricatures embody an artist’s vision; but it is not just the uniqueness of the creator’s vision that matters as much as how the drawing reveals some inner truth of the subject. The distortions the artist applies are not arbitrary or merely humorously added features—a big nose, for example—but to work as caricature must possess a sense of unmasking the true or real subject.

An older variety of caricature, the grotesque, parodied social classes or occupations such as peasants, apprentices, and lawyers, and commonly conflated these roles with less noble animals like pigs, foxes, and sheep. Or, as in the case of Dürer’s illustrations for The Ship of Fools, foolscaps applied to anyone was a sure marker for being an idiot. Another strategy was to introduce demonic features, horns, bulging eyes, and fangs, which further distanced the figure from a recognizable human form. These grotesque images differ from the modern caricature in that they do not identify a unique personality but, rather, try to reduce a human figure to a lowly type.

The English word caricature was originally a French word based on the Italian caricare, which meant ‘‘to exaggerate, load, or burden.’’ Some of the first drawings to be called caricatures date back to the Italian Renaissance, and it is ironic that some of the most brilliant masters of humanist naturalism were also some of the first to experiment in caricature. Early caricatures (Fig. 13) by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Agostino Carracci (1557–1602), and Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) were used as amusements for the artists themselves, grotesquely parodying the pretensions and foibles of portrait sitters.

Fig. 13. Leonardo da Vinci, Five caricature heads, after 1490, pen and ink on paper, 18 x 12 cm.

(Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice)

Source: Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels – A History of Graphic Narratives by Robert S. Petersen

Leonardo’s tiny drawing of five heads from the 1490s has his characteristic delicacy of line contested by the crude, withered countenance of the monstrous characters. The absurd vanity of the old woman on the lower left is heightened by the way her hair is done in a girlish braid and by the small flower pressed against her withered bosom. (Petersen, 32)

It is widely thought that the Carracci brothers were the first practitioners to gain public notoriety for their caricatures. Although none of the original drawings have survived, many of their students became notable caricaturists who initiated a thriving market for these distorted humorous drawings.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) made caricatures fashionable in Rome, but it was Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674–1755) who really excelled in the art and built his career on more than 2,000 documented caricatures of people from daily life and notable social figures. These caricatures were not published or widely disseminated to the broader public, but they were a part of the trade in humorous portraits among elites.

In northern Europe, artists were experimenting in social critique through caricature, most notably in the work of Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and later Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569), both of whom studied the homespun and quotidian manners of the day to make paintings that were both fantastic and startlingly real. Each painter was a master of the animated and distorted facial expressions that captured the vibrant passions of his subjects.

Despite a thriving underground market for caricature drawings in Italy throughout the 16th century, caricature as a visual style did not move into the popular press in Europe for over a century. There were a few notable exceptions, among themthe work of George Townshend (1724–1807), who published loose and expressive caricatures of fellow members of society and government; but despite their momentary popularity and the shocking sensation they caused, they failed to generate a large number of imitators.

The reason for this long delay in adopting the visual strategy of caricature was partly the dominant notion that caricature violated the ‘‘world of resemblances’’ by distorting the relationship between a real thing and how it was represented. (Rauser, 26)

The emblematic strategy for satirizing someone would be to make the person look foolish by putting the individual in the company of devils or having the individual vomit or defecate on him- or herself. Caricature directly challenged the unity and order of the world by foregrounding subjective and idiosyncratic ideas over social conventions and understood meanings.

As Amelia Rauser has pointed out, the emblematic notion of satirical prints finally fell aside with the satirical prints of the British macaroni fashions of the early 1770s. In these popular prints, the rakish youth of London were shown flaunting decorum by adopting an Italian fashion of exceedingly eccentric dress and powdered wigs that towered above all others like a huge plate of noodles. In the anonymous 1774 satirical print ‘‘What is this my son Tom,’’ (Fig. 14) a middle-class father can scarcely recognize his macaroni-styled son. The print includes a humorous rhyme beneath it that concludes, ‘‘If thus the Taste continues Here, what will it be another Year?’’ The macaroni fashion was about celebrity and self-invention and pointed to a transformation in British society from one that focused on maintaining received social roles to one that was starting to accept a more fluid notion of social mobility and identity.

The new popularity for caricature in Britain captured what Oscar Wilde would say a century later about gossip in high society: ‘‘The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’’ Although the caricatures were unflattering representations, they were memorable and indicated the level to which someone had entered society. To a certain degree, caricature and the macaroni fashion both emphasized the uniqueness of individuals over their capacity to conform to societal expectations. The broader change in society that would emerge from this realization—to which the macaroni fashions were mere symptoms—was that the true essences of things were not those qualities that were reducible to absolute types; they were instead the eccentric fleeting gestures and idiosyncratic qualities that embodied the notion of a person’s distinct individuality in his or her caricature.

Fig. 14. ‘‘What is this my son Tom’’ [sic], published by R. Sayer & J. Bennett, 1774. (British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress)

Source: Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels – A History of Graphic Narratives

by Robert S. Petersen

1. 4. Graphic narratives around the world

Graphic Narratives in Japan

China had developed the printing press before Europe did, but because of the way printing was employed by the government, there was a limited popular press. Such was not the case in Japan; for although Japan had adopted Chinese print technology along with many other aspects of writing and government in the Nara period (710–794), it developed a vibrant popular print culture. Combining this print culture with a rich tradition in storytelling and an indigenous brand of caricature (toba-e), Japan would lead the way to produce some of the most innovative graphic narratives that catered to a highly literate audience.

Picture recitation first appeared about the mid-eighth century in Japan with the arrival of Buddhist itinerant storytellers from Central Asia. Picture reciters carried scrolls (emaki) with drawings depicting both the rewards in the Buddhist cosmology for those who aspired to live a life of virtue and the punishments for those who rejected the Buddhist path of moderation. The emaki scrolls were brought to the emperor’s court, where they were adapted to create a distinctly Japanese form of narrative art that emphasized expressive clothing, gestures, and nuanced awareness of social customs. The most famous of these early hand scrolls was the Genji Monogatari Emaki (Fig. 15) illustrating The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 973–ca. 1014).

Illustrations of The Tale of Genji establish the bedrock of what defined the women’s-style painting (onna-e), where faces were rendered with extreme economy and the viewer peered into the scene from above. The contrasting men’s style painting (otoko-e) demonstrated a greater Chinese influence and tended to be monochromatic, or only lightly colored, with the focus more on natural figures that had a greater range of expression. The men’s-style painting dominated the popular Buddhist narrative tradition of picture recitation, called etoki, which began in the Muromachi period (1338–1573), flourished during the Edo period (1615–1868), and is still occasionally performed today.

Unlike the earlier monoscenic narrative art of The Tale of Genji, in the etoki scrolls the emphasis was on representing the story with pictures that were more closely linked in a continuous fashion, emphasizing a sense of movement and transformation over time. The narrative of the story was largely written at the beginning or end of the scroll with only small amounts of narrative and character speech written among the illustrations. The storyteller (etoki hoshi) would use the written text on the scroll as the framework for the story, which would be subtly amended to suit the audience at hand. Unlike in other parts of Asia, where picture recitation was predominantly a memorized oral performance with only a rudimentary text, Japan’s picture recitation was a more a vocalized literature where the written source was given more development but nonetheless retained qualities that were designed to be read aloud.

Another important distinction in Japanese visual culture was the use of caricature to represent celebrities. Caricature had wide popular appeal in Japan, especially during the Edo period when woodblock prints depicted the notable figures of the teahouse district. These works became broadly known as ukiyo-e, or ‘‘images of the floating world,’’ so called for the euphoric and unattached fantasies that the district inspired, but also because the teahouse district in Yoshiwara was literally a makeshift city built over a swamp outside of the city of Edo. The Yoshiwara district provided a powerful counterpoint to the otherwise regimented and orderly lives of the city’s inhabitants. Early prints were sold to visitors to Yoshiwara as souvenirs of their favorite geishas, sumo wrestlers, and kabuki actors; as these personalities became well known in the district, their appearances were refined and abbreviated to a few expressive lines to reveal their striking beauty or humorous countenance.

Early Graphic Narratives in Britain, Switzerland and France

Graphic narratives first appeared in the early 18th century in Britain. British publishers at the time were only negligibly profitable and could hardly compete with better-quality imports from Germany and the Netherlands. This situation dramatically changed with the work of William Hogarth (1697–1764), who transformed the fledgling craft into a professional industry and was able, furthermore, to straddle the worlds of fine art, writing, and printmaking in ways few artists at the time could.

The first copyright act for written works, the Statute of Anne enacted in 1710, protected an author’s work for a period of 14 years after first publication. Thereafter, the publication was regarded as belonging to the ‘‘public domain’’ and could be reproduced by anyone without having to compensate the original author. In 1730, Hogarth produced a series of engravings called A Harlot’s Progress, which proved phenomenally popular; but as he argued successfully before the British Parliament, much of the profit for his work had been lost to more cheaply produced pirated imitations. Once the Statute of Anne had been extended to printed pictures, Hogarth resumed his work with the publication of a series called A Rake’s Progress (1733), which secured his fame and made him quite wealthy (Fig. 16).

Fig. 16. William Hogarth: A Rake's Progress, Plate 2: Surrounded By Artists And Professors, Engraving, 35.5 x 41cm

Source: Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels – A History of Graphic Narratives

by Robert S. Petersen

Like the kibyoshi in Japan, Hogarth’s works had established an important step toward modern sequential graphic narratives, but they did not achieve the structure of dramatically linked sequential narratives, where the actions flowed, one to another, in closely related moments. It would take yet another 100 years for that idea to come to fruition.

Some British Masters of Caricature that should be mentioned here are: James Gillray (1757–1815) who rushed headlong into caricatured excess. In his print entitled Presages of the Millennium (1795), the Tory leader William Pitt personifies naked Death riding a wild mare and wielding a flaming sword as he crushes his enemies before him. For Gillray, the politics of the day were merely the two planks he used to prop up his passion, and it is for this reason that his work continues to enthrall. Toward the end of his storied career, with failing eyesight, Gillray went insane and had to be cared for by his longtime publisher, Hannah Humphrey; Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), a caricaturist who became well known for his series of plates entitled The Schoolmaster’s Tour (1809); George Cruikshank (1792–1878) who successfully revived Hogarth’s moral stories in pictures with a very popular series on temperance called Bottle (1847), which was soon followed by The Drunkard’s Children (1848).

Across these three masters of caricature, an important change in the form of graphic narratives in Europe occurs. Gillray and his generation of artists had developed a wide range of expressive forms to visually communicate speech, which included everything from the medieval, fancy, scroll-like phylacteries to the simpler, round-ended emanata. The visual forms of speech were allegorical in nature and created an additional layer of commentary on the action by appearing as either bubbles, animal tails, wispy smoke, explosions, vomit, or banners blowing in the wind. By the 1820s, virtually all text had been removed from within the picture and placed below in descriptive paragraphs where the dialogue was placed in quotation.

The Swiss schoolmaster, novelist, and amateur painter Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) devised an original format to encourage his students to be more engaged by their reading. Rather than use the typical visual strategy of employing one picture per scene, he used several images per page set apart by smaller frames (Fig. 17). By doing this, he created for the first time a montage, a way of describing a single idea over several closely linked pictures, as if one were seeing the action unfold in a play. So, what began as a schoolmaster’s pastime for his pupils eventually became the impetus for the modern comic strip.

Töpffer also utilized for the first time different-sized panels on the page to suggest different kinds of narrative pacing; for example, giving the impression of an action building in intensity or dissipating through meaningless repetition.

The novelty of this narrative construction is Töpffer’s greatest and lasting achievement, for it introduced a sense of momentum through more specific causal relationships between the pictures.

Töpffer employed this new method of constructing a graphic narrative just at the time that musical notation in Europe took its modern form with vertical lines (bar lines) to mark off the metrical units or tempo. Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel invented the metronome in 1812, and tempo notation began to appear in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven by 1817—all this, 15 years before Töpffer began to draw his first graphic narratives, or what he called histoires estampes, ‘‘printed stories.’’ The impact of musical notation is also seen in one of Töpffer’s early stories where Mr. Jabot dreams of mazurka music and, in what must be one of the first times ever in a graphic narrative, musical notation is used to represent the sound of music.

Such better artists as Cham (Améedée de Noé, 1819–1879), Nadar (Gaspard- Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910), and Gustave Doré (1832–1883) from France attempted to improve upon Töpffer’s innovation, but with much less success.

Doré began at a young age to draw picture stories based on the layout of Töpffer’s picture stories. As an autodidact, by age 15 Doré had an exclusive contract with the most prestigious of caricature publishers in Paris, Gabriel Aubert and Charles Philipon (1800–1861). Doré also innovated with the picture-story format and began to cut figures off within the frame, giving the scene a greater sense of animation. Some of Doré’s early experiments formed the basis of his first published works, beginning with The Labors of Hercules (Les Travaux d’Hercule) in 1847.

Fig. 17. Histoire de Monsieur Cryptogame (Rodolphe Töpffer)

Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodolphe_T%C3%B6pffer

1.5. Modern Art Graphic Narratives

For most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modern art that emerged in Europe avoided narrative as a relic of the 18th-century art academies that had been the exclusive arbiters of taste. The general rejection of narrative in modern art happened just as popular narrative illustration in commercial publications was growing by leaps and bounds. The gulf between these two worlds is characteristic of the changing relationship between modern artists and the general public, but it is also indicative of the ambivalence modern artists had toward mainstream tastes and values. However, there were a few isolated artists who worked in opposition to the prevailing nonnarrative modernist ideals of art; for those few, narrative art offered an opportunity to invent new storytelling modes that dramatically questioned the visual formation of meaning.

William Blake (1757–1857) lived through the American and the French revolutions and saw his role as artist not as the purveyor of fixed classical truths but as a prophetic visionary communicating his unique Christian based mythology (suffused with the philosophy of the Enlightenment) and the artistic aims of romanticism. At the center of his mythology were creator ‘‘Eternals’’ who represented spiritual aspects of the body of Christ and symbolically mirrored aspects of his own unique print processes, which — according to Blake — was revealed to him by the spirit of his deceased brother. (Petersen, 56)

The exact process Blake used to create his prints is still something of a mystery; it evolved to a certain degree over his lifetime, but it was a distinctive combination of techniques that were augmented later with hand painted ink and watercolor, making each print a reproduction of his original drawing yet a unique work of art. Blake called this process ‘‘illuminated printing,’’ indicating that he saw this method as a mixture of the medieval traditions of hand-painted or ‘‘illuminated’’ books and modern print technology.

What lay at the heart of this process was a manner of rendering a drawing directly on a metal plate so that his own brush and pen marks were reproduced in the print. Print technology at this time was primarily a two-part process whereby an original drawing would be transferred to metal or wood and then the engraver would cut away, or acid etch, the surface so that it recreated the image. By rendering directly on the metal plate, Blake sought more control of the print process so he would not be compromised through collaboration or possibly leaves himself open to censure because of the revolutionary nature of his poetry and images.

The act of writing in Blake’s creative process is connected to the idea of prophecy. Most engravers were trained, as was Blake, to write backward so they could include small amounts of text into their prints. Blake developed this skill to a high degree and was able to write out in reverse dozens of pages of text in delicate italic script. With this technique, he was free to mix words and pictures in imaginative ways, and so the character and style of the words composed an organic whole with the pictures. Despite the strong visual unity between words and pictures, Blake often added ironic commentary and complexity through the use of contrasting symbols and words to engage the reader’s imagination. In his most ambitious project, Jerusalem (1804–1820), Blake shows himself as a miniature scribe writing backward on a scroll that unfolds across the lap of the sleeping giant Albion, who represents both England and all humankind. That the print shows the text backward meant that Blake actually wrote the text forward on the metal plate; thus, the appearance of backward writing represents the idea of the original prophetic voice just as Blake would have written the message.

Blake maintained this iconographic code at the same time as he subverted it through playful inversions. This approach is especially evident in one of Blake’s early illuminated books, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1793), where Blake set out to describe a cosmology where heaven represents reason, or passive and consuming forms, and hell represents energy, or active and creative forms.

Blake was the forerunner of a new kind of publication, the art book, which sought the form of the book as a medium for creative expression. Art books were not books about art, however, but were themselves works of art which could be distributed among a wider audience.

In the early 19th century, metal-plate etching for commercial publications was increasingly being replaced by wood engraving and lithography, both of which allowed for faster and more efficient means of print reproduction. By midcentury, there began a revival of older forms of print technology now being employed by artists to create original works. Odilon Redon (1840–1916) trained with one of the leading artists in the new etching revival, Rodolphe Bresdin (1825–1885), and later took up lithography as a way to capture the sketchy dark voids that defined his dreamscapes. With lithography, Redon found a medium that responded to his emotional and visionary temperament, which sought to metamorphose past literary symbols and metaphors to represent a subjective interior world of dreams. The first of Redon’s lithographic collections, called In Dreams (Dans le réve, 1879) (Fig. 18), cemented his reputation as the ‘‘Prince of Dreams’’ and catapulted him into the public eye. The black-and-white images had the quality of chalk and charcoal drawings that showed nearly empty landscapes with bodiless heads that had large luminous eyes looking upward as if in revelation. Redon wrote that he sought to give ‘‘life to creatures of dreams, improbable beings [fashioned] according to the laws of the probable.’

The expressionist painter George Grosz (1893–1959) was also widely known for his vivid caricatures of the corruption and social decay during the Weimar Republic in Germany (1919–1933).His caricatures appeared in a number of left-wing political newspapers and magazines and were first compiled into a book, The Face of the Ruling Class (Fig. 19), in 1921.

One new technique for visual quotation that Grosz employed was the use of collage, where advertisements and commercially printed materials were cut and pasted into his drawings for ironic effect.

The idea of making collage art, cutting and pasting existing images together to create a wholly new image, came into its own under the Dada art movement, where it had been employed to disorient and divest images of known meanings and introduce ironic commentary on the new juxtapositions.

One of the last to undertake ambitious narrative projects was Max Ernst (1891–1976). Between 1929 and 1934, he created two long series of collage works compiled and published into books, which employed Victorian romance and scientific illustrations to suggest stories with mythic and alchemical themes. Ernst used collage for a more deliberately dramatic effect: he and his fellow surrealists explored the psychological and dreamlike impact of the Dada collages, which rendered literal interpretations absurd and opened up the composition to disturbing and evocative images. Ernst was inspired by the 19th-century illustrator J. J. Grandville to create bizarre images that had an internal visual logic that displayed an uncanny truth. To achieve this affect, he worked hard to make the individual cut-out images in the collage appear as seamless as possible, first by carefully cutting and assembling the pieces so that at first glance the image appears plausibly realistic, but also through photographing and mechanically reproducing the collages so that none of the cut edges or layered surfaces appeared in the reproduction.

In the first series of collages, entitled The Hundred-Headed Woman (La femme 100 têtes, 1929) (Fig. 20), there were titles for the collages that suggested a deliberate sequence of action, as, for example, ‘‘The failed immaculate conception,’’ ‘‘The same for the second . . . ,’’ and ‘‘. . . and the third time failed.’’ Regardless of their titles, nothing in any of these collages suggests an actual continuation of an earlier action. (Stokes, 199)

There was no immediate successor to Ernst’s surreal collages, and graphic narrative experiments soon all but disappeared from the modern art movement.

One of the few major artists to engage in narrative art during World War II was Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), who created a pair of etchings to support the anti-Fascist movement in Spain.

Picasso created the images so they appeared right to left on the print. This disturbing backward reading heightens the sense of confusion. Picasso was working on sketches for his mural Guernica (1937), which was titled after the name of a small town in Spain that suffered a brutal aerial bombing by the German forces supporting Franco. The close resemblance to disfigured characters in the mural is indicative of the broader shift in Picasso’s work toward establishing a more emotional core in his abstract figures.

The other major narrative artwork born of the pain and suffering brought on by the rise of fascism was Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? A Three- Color Operetta (Leben? oder Theater? Drifarben Singspiel) of 1942 (Fig. 21). An autobiographical story depicts Salomon’s coming of age and follows the lives of her aunt (after whom she was named), mother, and grandmother as they each succumbed to depression and suicide. Salomon (1917–1943) learned of her aunt’s and her mother’s suicides only in 1939, when she was 22 years old, after she experienced her grandmother’s suicide. Salomon called her work a ‘‘three-color operetta’’ and quite literally used only three primary colors (yellow, red, and blue) and white (no black) to create a vivid palate reminiscent of Postimpressionist painters who were at the time reviled in the fascist-controlled art academies in Germany. She imagined her paintings as a visual operetta where music plays a critical role in defining the emotional tenor, meaning, and physical form of the paintings. Notes that accompany most of the paintings make frequent references to musical passages by Beethoven, Bach, Shubert, Weber, Bizet, and other composers.

Salomon used several different narrative techniques, none of which resembled any kind of comic art of the day but were instead more aesthetically akin to a film, with suggestive cropping and framing of the figures in a cinematic fashion.

Fig. 21. Life? or Theatre? – collage, Charlotte Salomon, 1940-42, gouache,

(Image courtesy of the Charlotte Salomon Foundation, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam)

Source: Rediscovering Charlotte Salomon by Jeannine Cook, Feb 22, 2015

1.6. The evolution of Comic magazines

In the 19th century, graphic narratives ultimately came into being in their current form: dramatic sequential action organized into brief moments shown in panels across the page.

Comics were a byproduct of the newly emerging mechanized world. Not only was mass production critical for its wide dissemination, but also mechanization played a key role in establishing new ideas about time, space, and movement.

Weekly newspapers from early in the 17th century had evolved into biweekly and in a few instances triweekly publications by the century’s end.

The first step in the advance of modern publishing in the 19th century was the development of cast-iron printing presses and cheaply manufactured paper. With these innovations, there began a gradual widening and deepening of literacy across Europe and the United States that was spread further by urban population growth and education reform.

One of the key technical developments in printmaking at this time was wood engraving, which used sturdy end-grain blocks of wood that were incised with delicate lines that closely resembled pen-and-ink drawings. The chief advantage of wood engraving was that it allowed pictures to be printed at the same time as the metal-typeset words, making it possible to reproduce images thousands of times without wearing out. The heavier pressure applied to the block also allowed for larger and more dramatic use of solid black in the pictures, which can be seen in the increasing use of silhouette and dark shadows. Wood-engraving blocks were also better able to withstand the pressure of the new steam-powered typeset press that first appeared in the 1830s and could reliably churn out thousands of prints in a few hours.

Despite the advantages of wood engraving, the French satirical magazines stayed with lithographic printing for much of the 19th century. Part of the appeal of lithography was the quality of line and more expressive use of blacks and grays.

Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) has become the acknowledged master of caricature and satirical lithography who produced more than 3,900 lithographs in the 40 years he worked for La Caricatura, Charivari, and other publications edited by Charles Philipon. His early work demonstrated a plasticity of expression that wildly caricatured the leading politicians of the day, making them appear petty and deceitful. (Petersen, 75)

Following the caricature magazine format developed in Paris by Philipon, translations and adaptations of his Charivari publication appeared in Lyon as well as in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. In 1841, the Journalists Henry Mayhew, Mark Lemon, and Stirling Coyne joined in a new collaborative publishing venture with the engravier Ebenezer Landells, and the printer Joseph Last to found Punch Magazine (Fig. 22), which was originally subtitled ‘‘The London Charivari’’ even though it had no connection to the French publication. The primary title, Punch, was based on the name of the offbeat lead character in the Punch and Judy puppet theater that entertained middle- class audiences along seaside resorts.

Fig. 22. John Leech, ‘‘Cartoon No. 1: Substance and Shadow,’’ Punch, June 24, 1843

Source: Petersen, Robert, “Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels – A History of Graphic Narratives”

Punch used wood-engraved illustrations in its publication, economically allowing it to insert illustrations more liberally throughout.

According to R. C. Harvey, what had before been called ‘‘Punch’s pencillings’’ soon became known as ‘‘Punch’s cartoons,’’ and finally, simply ‘‘cartoons.’’

Between 1820 and 1850, British publishers such as James Catnach produced the least expensive and most widely circulated publications, collectively called catchpenny prints, penny bloods, or blood and thunders for their histrionic depiction of violent crime and natural disasters. These illustrated magazines were often only a few dozen pages long and could easily be folded into someone’s pocket for casual perusal, giving rise to the market for ‘‘pocket literature.’’ Each publication typically compiled a variety of short illustrated and sensational stories that could provide brief moments of diversion.

The fictional serialized stories that made Charles Dickens famous were broadly imitated in much cruder fashion in the penny bloods. The story of the murderous barber Sweeney Todd (1878) grotesquely characterized the angry desperation of the lower classes and the unscrupulous greed of the upper classes. There began an outcry against these publications for corrupting British youth, despite the fact they were never intended to be read by children.

In 1796, Jean-Charles Pellerin (1756–1836) set up a printing shop in Epinal, France, and began producing broadsheets especially designed to appeal to young readers called Imagerie d’Epinal (Fig. 23). Each large page told a complete story in a deeply abridged cyclic narrative style. The original format early in the 19th century included four equal-sized frames per page which gradually increased in complexity to include either a three-by-three or four-by-four grid of images by the late 1840s. Until the introduction of color lithography in the 1850s, these illustrations were originally hand stenciled with two or three colors. Each of the 16 pictures was captioned with a brief statement that explained the action. The simplicity and directness of the presentation invited early readers to become engaged in the story through the vivid graphic details.

Fig. 23. Jean-Charles Pellerin, ‘‘Don Quichotte,’’ Imagerie d’ _ Epinal, no. 36, ca. 1880.

(Humoristic Publishing Co., Kansas City,Missouri)

Source: Petersen, Robert, “Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels – A History of Graphic Narratives”

An academic painter who trained in Antwerp and Munich, Busch began to publish illustrated rhymes for local publications (bilderbogen) in 1858. His work became enormously popular after he published a series of short comical episodes about two naughty boys, Max and Moritz (1865). Busch, like Töpffer before him, used a rounder, more flowing line in his caricatures, which simplified the anatomy and exaggerated expressions, gestures, and postures. Busch went further to flatten the figures with even less shading, letting the outline of the figure convey the movement. This technique gave his pictures an elastic quality that further emphasized the action.

Looking back over the past century, many commentators have noticed the similarity between Busch’s comic creations and the agonistic antics of the cat-and-mouse team Tom and Jerry, as well as Sylvester and Tweety, Road Runner and the Coyote, and many others—where the physical world is injected with equal doses of justice and irony to game the laws of physics, make light of graphic pain, and ultimately celebrate the crushing defeat of the aggressor. (Petersen, 88)

But what about the British comic magazines? Following on the popularity of Punch Magazine, a number of humor magazines, including Fun (1865), Judy (1867), and Funny Folks (1874), tried to break into this intensely competitive market with even less expensive and more heavily illustrated publications. To accomplish this, they relied more on advertising, promotional gimmicks, and the creation of reoccurring comic characters.

For example, Dr. Syntax had been used to sell other goods; but beginning with the character Ally Sloper (1867), reoccurring characters became a widespread synergistic marketing strategy that would define a whole new role for comics into the next century.

Ally Sloper (Fig. 24) inspired so many later characters, from W. C. Fields to Andy Capp. Charles H. Ross invented the Ally Sloper character for the magazine Judy, but it was his wife Marie Duval, who first built the character Ally Sloper into a popular phenomenon.

Fig. 24. Marie Duval and Charles Ross, ‘‘En Route for Suez,’’ Judy, December 1, 1869.

Source: Petersen, Robert, “Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels – A History of Graphic Narratives”

The success of Punch Magazine in London was not lost on publishers in other parts of the world, and soon imitators cropped up all across the former and current British Empire. The magazines Judge (1871), Puck (1876), and LIFE (1883) became the first to sustain some measure of profit and stability in the United States. In these magazines, words and pictures danced around each other in lively and innovative ways. For the most part, graphic narrative sequences were either without words or the narrative text was placed below the image. On rare occasion, comics used emanata to convey dialogue; but as the cartoonist Jimmy Swinnerton recalled:

‘‘It was not the fashion to have balloons showing what the characters were saying, as that was supposed to have been buried with . . . Cruikshank.” (Walker, 9)

Palmer Cox (1840–1924) immigrated to the United States from a Scottish settlement in Quebec and eventually arrived in New York in 1875 to look for work as an illustrator. In 1883, in the pages of one of the leading children’s magazines, St. Nicholas (1873–1940s), Cox introduced the first comic story about Brownies—a Scottish variant of fairy lore—in a piece called ‘‘The Brownies’ Ride,’’ where he captured the mildly mischievous antics of a small tribe of Brownies taking a farmer’s horse cart for a midnight joyride.

The Brownie franchise quickly grew to include several books: The Brownies: Their Book (1887), Another Brownie Book (1890), and The Brownies at Home (1891), followed by eight more titles by 1906.

A leisure-oriented "Sunday supplement" began in the New York Herald as early as 1841. As competition increased, newspapers strove for evermore attractive means to lure readers. By 1890, 250 papers had Sunday supplements filled with as many extravagant and comical illustrations as the newspaper could afford.

The introduction of high-speed rotary color presses was first used at the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1892. By 1894, the Inter-Ocean Weekly had a section especially for children that featured a variation on Cox’s Brownies called The Ting-Ling Kids by Charles Saalburg (1865–1947). It was there Saalberg printed cartoons by Richard Felton Outcault (1863–1928), who would go on to create the comics phenomenon known as the Yellow Kid (Fig. 25).

The Yellow Kid, who would later be called Mickey Dugan, anchored the page and typically stared blankly back at the reader with an idiotic smile. On his bold yellow shirt was written his voice in a broken street pidgin. … For this comic, Outcault dropped his typical single-frame format for a series of frameless pictures where the Yellow Kid talks with a phonograph. Just as before, the Yellow Kid’s voice first appeared on his shirt, but this time the "voice" of the phonograph floated out from the horn in bubble-shaped emanata. At the end of the comic, the Yellow Kid falls over in shock as a parrot pops out from inside the phonograph. The Yellow Kid’s final words no longer appear on his shirt but now emerge from his mouth as a speech bubble. (Petersen, 97)

Fig. 25. Richard Felton Outcault, "The Yellow Kid and His New Phonograph," Hogan’s

Alley, New York Journal, October 25, 1896

Source: Harvey, Robert C., Brian Walker and Richard V. West. 1999. Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip. University of Washington.

As the narratives of daily comics continued to incrementally evolve over the years, artists invented hundreds of characters that peopled large imaginary worlds.

1.7. The history of Manga

The influence of the Hindu Heroes

In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, the advance of European and American colonialism brought about broad social and cultural upheavals in India, China, and Japan. This contentious period also introduced into Asia modern graphic narratives, including Western-style caricatures, cartoons, and comics.

Following the well-known formula established by Punch Magazine, British expatriates introduced Western-style humor magazines with the Indian Charivari in Calcutta (1873).

An interesting feature of early Hindu political cartoons was the willingness to represent Hindu gods in secular ways. In 1874, the comic magazine Basantak had the powerful British police commissioner Sir Stewart Hogg depicted as the boar-headed avatar of Vishnu, Varaha. The cartoon not only made fun of Hogg’s name but also parodied Hogg’s godlike powers to bestow gifts to the wealthy while crushing underfoot the common Hindu. There was also the humorous depiction of Durga, the goddess of death, who is usually seen bare chested, sporting Victorian dress and walking on a smiling prone babu who seems to be enjoying his degradation at the hands of a woman. This cartoon was intended to make fun of the new propriety laws that dictated proper dress codes. The willingness to use Hindu religious iconography in topical political commentary served two purposes: first, it supplied a vast arena of shared symbolic meanings that were well known to Hindus; but second, the meanings were more cryptic to the British and less likely to provoke censorship.

One of the early political cartoonists in India was Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938), the nephew of Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, who in the late 1910s and 1920s published biting social satires and caricatures.

Following Indian independence in 1947, comics slowly began to appear more regularly as the country regained its stability. Lee Falk’s The Phantom was one of the popular imports to be repackaged in India by Indrajal Comics, published by the Times of India under the editorial direction of Anant Pai (b. 1929).

Badahur (Hindi for ‘‘the courageous one’’) by Abid Surti first appeared in 1976 and was an early attempt at creating an indigenous superhero. The character Badahur had a distinctive modern Indian look of blue jeans and a saffron homespun shirt (kurta), which gave him the symbolic force of Western proletarian pragmatism coupled with Hindu nationalism.

Indrajal Comics, which published The Phantom along with Badahur and a few other superhero titles, eventually closed shop in the early 1990s. The primary reason stated by the management was lack of profits because of competition from TV.

The 19th and 20th century graphic narratives in China

As China struggled to throw off feudalism, these disruptions were also felt in changes to traditional print culture. When lithography first appeared in Shanghai in the late 1860s, it provided a means for cheaper and faster printing, which, in turn, made individual prints and small books accessible to a much wider audience than ever before. The impact of lithography on China was more dramatic than its appearance in Europe some 60 years earlier because the technology that arrived was fully developed and far in advance of any existing print technology in China.

Although lithography did not entirely replace woodblock printing, the dominance and cultural significance of the older technology was quickly on the wane.

Lithographic illustrated stories began to appear in print as early as the late 1890s in China. The typical format consisted of relatively small, pocket-sized publications bound on one side so they were easy to carry. These illustrated ‘‘little books’’ (xiaoshu) proved widely popular among the urban lower classes, but they were shunned by established booksellers. Instead, xioshu established itself as popular entertainment, commonly sold or rented in market stalls or on the street outside theaters just as chapbooks had been in England a century before.

By the mid-1920s, the growing sales of illustrated stories attracted more established publishers and the length and quality of the publications began to improve dramatically.

Western-style satirical cartoons and caricatures first appeared in The China Punch (1867) by British expatriates based in Hong Kong. The China Punch (Fig. 27), much like the British magazine it imitated, provided conservative nationalist views in a humorous and satirical manner. Though written in English, the magazine served as a prototype for other humor magazines with different political agendas and audiences.

In 1925 in the magazine Literature Weekly, Feng Zikai (1898–1975) introduced a beautiful fusion of Song Dynasty–style painting and contemporary elements in a series of cartoons entitled Zikai Manhua (Fig. 28). By titling his work as manhua, or ‘‘impromptu sketches,’’ Feng used an 18th-century Chinese literati term that had become popular a century earlier in Japan as manga.

Fig. 28. A manhua by Feng Zakai: as the years passed…

Source: “Feng Zikai et le manhua”, par Yohan Radomski, 15 juin 2013

The first successful manhua magazine, Shanghai Sketch, appeared in 1928 as a slim eight-page tabloid with four pages dedicated to two-color-lithographed manhua drawings. With 3,000 copies a week in circulation, Shanghai Sketch developed a few serial characters, including Ye Qianyu’s Mr. Wang, who first appeared in 1928.

A critical turning point in all Communist Chinese art was the Cultural Revolution (1965–1976), which viciously attacked all art not explicitly endorsed by Communist Party propaganda officials, led most visibly by Lin Biao and Mao’s fourth wife, the former Shanghai actress Jiang Qing (1914–1991). The Cultural Revolution was significant for elevating the cult of Mao. All pretenses to historical accuracy or traditional conformity were laid aside, and every artistic production had to sing the praise of Mao at a fever pitch. Older works were banned or radically altered so that they would conform to the new exaggerated style that allowed for no nuance regarding the Communist cause.

As a devout Buddhist and a scholar of classical literature, Feng Zikai was increasingly out of place in Communist China and, near the end of his life, quietly endured the pains of the Cultural Revolution when hundreds of his original drawings and paintings were destroyed and he was branded a ‘‘counterrevolutionary.’’

At the death of Mao in 1976, the Cultural Revolution came to an end.

Between 1978 and 1987, lianhuanhua (a palm-size picture book of sequential drawings found in China in the early 20th century.) returned in popularity. At its peak, Lu Fusheng (b. 1949) created The Phoenix Hairpin (Chatou Feng) (Fig. 29), 1983, which explored in 72 painterly scenes on silk a story about Lu You (1125– 1210), the great Southern Song Dynasty poet.

The invention of Manga

During the Edo period (1603–1867), Japan had long maintained its isolation from the rest of the world. After the subsequent collapse of the restoration of Emperor Meiji in 1867, Japan pursued an ambitious plan for modernization that would transform it from an agrarian society into a world power in less than 50 years. Through that era of turmoil and transformation, the new comics industry, inspired by Western- style caricature and satirical prints, was a mix of Old World aesthetics and new modern forms.

An eccentric correspondent for the London Illustrated News, Charles Wirgman (1835–1891), was the first to bring comics ashore. One year after his arrival in Japan in 1863, Wirgman abandoned his original employer from Britain, and self-published Japan Punch (Fig. 30), which was released more or less monthly until 1887. Each 10-page issue was produced in the same manner as traditional woodblock prints, which had been available in Japan since the early 16th century.

Wirgman settled permanently in Japan, became quite proficient in Japanese, and over time played an important role in defining the character and purpose of comic magazines in Japan.

George Bigot (1860–1927) was another influential foreigner in the early Japanese comic industry. He introduced the French Imagerie d’Épinal comic style in his publication Tôbaé, which appeared biweekly from Yokohama starting in 1887.

The title, Tôbaé, was the traditional Japanese word for comic caricature (toba-e), which in the magazine was represented as a character appearing much like the French commedia character Pierrot, who would from time to time appear inside the editorial cartoons to give his own ironic opinion of matters.

It was only in the 1920s when comics in Japan took the now commonly used term ‘‘manga’’ derived from the Chinese term ‘‘manhua.’’ Rakuten Kitazawa (1876–1955) created some of the earliest serialized comic strips that were called manga and went on to become one of the premiere comic artists in Japan and one of the few who can boast having a museum dedicated to his work.

Kitazawa used colloquial speech and gesture to communicate sight gags featuring two country bumpkins lost in the big city. Kitazawa’s great popularity came about through his work on the color comic magazine Tokyo Puck, which he founded and edited from 1905 to 1912. … With a circulation of more than 100,000, Tokyo Puck was an astonishing success. (Petersen, 128)

Japanese comics followed American trends and increasingly became oriented toward children’s themes. Translation of American comics reprinted in Japanese magazines began in 1923 with George McManus’s Bringing Up Father and then quickly expanded to include such American strips as Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals, Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, and Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat.

Fig. 30. Rakuten Kitazawa, Tonda Haneko (Miss Haneko Tonda), 1928.

The rise of military power in Japan and the subsequent Pacific War had a devastating effect on popular print publications. Emerging from this period was a growing popular trend in picture recitation (kamishibai) and rental kiosks (kashihonya), both of which allowed alternate means to circulate cheaply produced graphic stories to a wide audience.

The live kamishibai performances were conducted by a solo performer who rode about on a bicycle and set up a little stage attached to a small case over the rear wheel. The kamishibai performers used a series of individual cards printed with sensational stories set in a frame and revealed the pictures, one after another, as they told the stories. Performers also used clapper sticks or drums to announce the show and add a dramatic flourish to their sensational and humorous stories. The performance was free, but the people who stayed to hear the story bought a candy from the performer after the show.

Kamishibai during World War II owed a great deal to earlier silent films from the 1920s that employed performers (benshi) to recite all the dialogue live before the audience, in a manner that was similar to the famed bunraku puppet theater of Osaka.

Following the Pacific War and the growing availability of television in the 1950s, kamishibai quickly waned in popularity, and many of the artists and publishers moved into the growing comic book industry.

The Golden Bat soon appeared as manga and eventually became a live-action movie in 1966 and an animated TV series a year later, which helped spread its fame outside of Japan where it also proved popular across Latin America, Italy, and Australia.

Post–WorldWar II mangaka (manga artists) were more interested than their predecessors in exploring a cinematic style that captured actions and characters that were closer to urban life. Tatsumi and other mangaka were well aware of what was happening in American comics and developed a contrasting style that had a tighter integration of words and pictures. In action scenes, they would reduce the number of words and background details to allow the action to be read more quickly. Tatsumi called this approach the ‘‘synchronization of panel and time”. (Tatsumi, 625)

A few inexpensive manga publications were also available for purchase; these manga were called ‘‘red books’’ (akabon) for the tacky red ink they used on their covers. They were produced by small publishers looking for a niche in the market, and they were created mostly by young artists trying to break into the comics’ trade. Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) began as one of these red book artists and would eventually have such a profound influence on the direction of manga that he would earn the moniker the ‘‘God of Manga.’’

With more than 150,000 pages of manga drawings and 600 titles to his credit, Tezuka created whole new genres and challenged what was believed possible within the medium. His great ambitions were evident in his first major success in 1947, New Treasure Island (Shintakarazima) (Fig.31) – 250 pages of drawings. (Power, 78)

But what about girls’ manga?

In early manga directed to young women (shōjo manga) in the 1940s, the ideal woman defined by male authors and artists was a generic vision of tidiness and self-sufficiency that was pretty or cute (kawaii) but did not have the natural grace or stunning glamour that accompanied the idea of womanly beauty.

Osamu Tezuka invented shōjo manga stories that had more action by introducing a more dynamic leading female character, Princess Sapphire, in his series called Princess Knight (Ribon no Kishi, 1953–1956) (Fig. 32).

The group of women who really transformed the genre, however, became known as the ‘‘Magnificent Forty-Niners’’ (‘‘Hana no nijuunyo nen gumi’’), a reference to the coincidence that they all were born about the same year, in 1949. The list of names varies to some degree, but it invariably includes the luminary artist Moto Hagio (b. 1949), along with such other notables as Riyoko Ikeda (b. 1947), Yasuko Aoike (b. 1948), Toshie Kihara (b. 1948), Ryoko Yamagishi (b. 1947), Minori Kimura (b. 1949), and Yumiko Oshima (b. 1947) among others.

In the early 1970s, these women began publishing works that reflected on the tumultuous transformation of Japanese society by examining new gender roles that obscured clear delineations between men and women, explored a greater range of relationships involving sexuality and intimacy, and gave the female characters a more active role in defining their goals and determining their own fates. Shōjo manga also expanded the literary and visual vocabulary of manga, quoting classical Japanese poetry, and employing a distinctive visual quality.

Unlike boys’ manga (shōnen manga), which often renders realistic details in complex environments, shōjo manga depends more on evocative designs to render the characters’ interior worlds.

As the Magnificent Forty-Niners matured, so did their manga, introducing manga intended for older women (josei manga) that have expanded the market and kept readers engaged in manga well into their adult lives.

The most significant driving force for growth and diversity in manga has been the rise of self-published manga, or doujinshi, where fans create parodies or spin-offs of well-known work but also delve into more experimental material than do the mainstream publishers. Both male and female manga artists who self-published small editions began forming clubs, or circles; these circles first came together to trade and swap on December 21, 1975, at Comiket (Comic Market) in Tokyo.

Japanese animation (anime) had been making inroads into American markets since the 1960s; but because of the complexities of translation, Japanese manga began to appear in the United States only in the 1980s. The first translation was a heavily abridged version of Keiji Nakazawa’s autobiographical story of the bombing of Hiroshima, I Saw It (Hadashi no Gen, 1982) (Fig. 33), translated and edited by Leonard Rifas and Educomics.

Because of the very derivative nature of manga, the strangeness faded as readers persisted in figuring out the coded visual language of peculiar expressions, of nose bleeds, of foaming mouths, and eventually were quite comfortable reading the panels backward.

Once manga fans in America adopted the visual code, many began to learn to draw the manga way, creating hybrid comics called amerimanga, and for a few, the final challenge was to learn enough Japanese to translate their own.

2. The Comic Book Industry

The comic book is fundamentally a medium through which any number of people could potentially communicate, but the comics that are most recognized are those that reach large audiences through mass distribution.

Traditionally, the power to make mass-produced comics has been centralized in the hands of a select few corporate entities—those with the capital to hire the talent, pay to subcontract the printing presses, arrange for widespread distribution of their publications, advertise their sales, etc. As we can see, electronic forms of distribution like the internet have challenged the traditional methods of publishing and distribution that have characterized comics for the last several decades.

The three interacting stages of the media industries have been composed of: production – refers to those entities that make the media messages, distribution – deals with those in the business of transporting the comics from the printing presses to the various outlets that sell them, and exhibition – includes all the retail outlets where comics are for sale.

Production

Artisan cartoonists can craft a small series of comic books or an entire graphic novel that they can exert full creative control over, rather than relying on an editor to assign portions of the production to other specialists. As Mark Rogers notes:

“artisan production has tended to produce comics more varied in scope and more interesting aesthetically. Industrialized production is limiting in and of itself” (Beyond, 88–89).

There have been many comics publishers over the past eight decades, though through time the market has been increasingly consolidated into a limited number of leading ones.

In the American comics scene, production is characterized as an oligopoly, a climate in which a few competitors control most of the field, with the majority of sales concentrated in a pair of major publishers: Marvel Comics and DC Comics. Together the so-called Big Two” command more than 70 percent of the comics market.

Marvel Comics is the publishing division of Marvel Entertainment, Inc., a publicly traded corporation engaged in movie production (Marvel Studios), toy manufacturing (Toybiz), and licensing of its characters on virtually every consumer product imaginable. Marvel began in 1939 under publisher Martin Goodman and published comics under a number of names, including Timely in the 1940s and Atlas in the 1950s, until finally settling on Marvel Comics in the 1960s.

Marvel’s chief competitor is DC Comics, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers Entertainment, which is itself a part of Time Warner Company—the largest media conglomerate in the world. Warner Brothers is famous for its presence in film, animation, television, and home video production.

The “DC” seal had appeared on covers for decades, in homage to the company’s Detective Comics series, the first comic book magazine to have a dedicated theme.

Distribution

Comics have found their way from the printing presses into the hands of eager readers through two systems of distribution: the mass-market distribution, and the Direct- Market Distribution.

3. Teaching with Graphic Novels, Comics and Manga

Conclusions

When recounting what contemporary pieces of writing bring new

Appendix

List of illustrations

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Reference list

Jocelyn Penny Small, ‘‘Time in Space: Narrative in Classical Art,’’ Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 562–75 (print)

Robert S. Petersen, Comics, manga, and graphic novels : a history of graphic narratives, Praeger – An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, Santa Barbara, California (2011): (13 – ) (print)

Julia K. Murray, ‘‘Buddhism and Early Narrative Illustration in China.’’ Archives of Asian Art 48 (1995): 17– 31. (print)

Amelia F. Rauser, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints, University of Delaware Press Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 26. (print)

Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, ‘‘Odilon Redon: The Image and the Text,’’ in Odillon Redon: The Prince of Dreams, 1840–1916, ed. Douglas W. Druick (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994), 137.

Charlotte Stokes, ‘‘Collage as Jokework: Freud’s Theories of Wit as the Foundation for the Collages of Max Ernst.’’ Leonardo 15, no. 3 (1982): 199–204.

R. C. Harvey, ‘‘Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image,’’ in Language of Comics: Word and Image. ed. Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 77.

Brian Walker, The Comics: Before 1945, ed. Brian Slovak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 9.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, A Drifting Life (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly Press,

2009), 625.

Natsu Onoda Power, Osamu Tezuka: God of Comics and the Creation of Post–

World War II Manga (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 78.

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