History of Graphic Novels: Ancient Times to 1920

Definition

Those who see the graphic novel as the culmination of a long history broadly define the term as a collection of sequential pictorial, symbolic, or other images intended to tell a story, communicate information, or elicit an aesthetic response. Sequentially imaged narratives from a wide range of cultures have been identified as precursors to the graphic novel.

Introduction

Some aficionados of graphic novels point to Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978) as the first such work; in 2003, Time magazine published an article entitled “The Graphic Novel Silver Anniversary” that, despite caveats, reinforced this date. Others have pointed out that Richard Kyle used the term in a 1964 newsletter, and as scholars explored the history of comic books, they began to find extended-form precursors published earlier in the century. Cognizant of the wide variety of themes treated by creators under the umbrella term of “graphic novel,” some analysts discovered less obvious forerunners created in earlier centuries, and, after in-depth analyses of the intentions and accomplishments of many graphic novelists, some historians have even traced the graphic novel’s roots to Paleolithic times.

Prehistoric and Ancient Precursors

Archaeologists and other explorers have discovered examples of the earliest art created by Homo sapiens in caves and other locations throughout the world. Using a variety of techniques, scientists have determined that these works, largely depicting animals, date to the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000-10,000 b.c.e.). Two of the most famous of these sites are the caves of Lascaux in southwestern France and Altamira in northern Spain.

Altamira, with its multicolored images of bison, horses, and other animals, has come to be known as the “Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic Art.” The images influenced later artists such as Pablo Picasso, who deeply admired them, and comic book artist Bernet Toledano, who created the Altamiro de la cueva series in the 1960’s. The nearly two thousand images in the Lascaux caves include animals as well as various abstract symbols. Spiritual, magical, and even astronomical interpretations have been proffered to explain some of the groupings, such as the famous Great Hall of the Bulls. Others theorize that certain collocations or overlapping of images might represent a hunting narrative.

Works of art from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome have also been cited as precursors to the graphic novel. At first glance, Egyptian hieroglyphs—sequences of images representing animals, humans, jars, water, and so on—would seem to imply some kind of narrative, but these glyphs actually stand for sounds in an ancient Egyptian language. On the other hand, the sequences of paintings found on papyri and tomb walls do tell stories, including how crops were harvested and boats were built. Similarly, the friezes and other decorated parts of Greek buildings sometimes include sculptural or carved depictions of stories from Greek mythology. In the Roman Empire, artists continued this tradition not only in public buildings but also in private homes and businesses. Early Christians adapted some of these methods in re-creating stories from the Old and New Testaments, for example, in panels on the sarcophagi of their dead.

The Middle Ages Through the Early Modern Period

Two new methods sometimes used to tell stories through sequential images came to prominence during the European Middle Ages: tapestries and stained glass. A tapestry is a cloth interwoven with varicolored, symbolic designs for decorative purposes or with biblical or historical scenes to tell a story. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, communicating through several hundred images and many words such important historical events as the Battle of Hastings.

Stained glass, used in medieval cathedrals, served both decorative and narrative purposes. Because many medieval worshipers were illiterate, the panels of stained-glass windows were often used to tell stories from the life of Christ or from the Old Testament. For example, the stained-glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral in England are often called the “poor man’s Bible,” since the artists used sequential sections to recount Old Testament stories as well as the birth, public life, passion, and resurrection of Christ as depicted in the Gospels.

The use of stained glass for narrative purposes continued through the Renaissance and into the modern eras. However, new narrative techniques came into prominence during the Renaissance. Several Renaissance artists notably engaged in a competition to depict the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac through sequential panels on the bronze doors of the baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, Italy. Other artists used fresco techniques to tell sequential stories from the Bible. During the High Renaissance, Michelangelo brought the narrative fresco technique to its peak in his Sistine Chapel depiction of the Christian story of salvation, from the creation of the universe to the Last Judgment.

During the Reformation, Protestant artists used the woodcut technique to make multiple prints of sequential stories depicting the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope as the Antichrist. Lutheran artists such as Lucas Cranach told the story of Christ from a Protestant perspective. In the seventeenth century, Roman Catholic artists such as Peter Paul Rubens responded with narrative history pictures in a variety of media and formats, including large frame paintings, ceiling paintings, panels, and even textiles.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the English poet and artist William Blake reinvigorated the medieval illuminated book by creating a revolutionary blend of visual imagery and literary text that he hoped would purify human imaginations and rescue viewers and readers from the corruptions engendered by a soulless industrialized society. In Blake’s illuminated books, from Songs of Innocence (1789) to Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-1820), images are often dialectically interrelated to the text and serve as a conduit for the poet’s highly personal mythology, reminiscent to modern readers of certain contemporary graphic novelists.

From Short- to Long-Form Comic Books

Although the terms “comics,” “comic strips,” and “comic books” have been traced to the early twentieth century in the United States, historians have seen these forms as derivative of caricatures and cartoons of earlier centuries. According to several historians of comic books, Rodolphe Töpffer, a Swiss schoolmaster and the creator of Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (c. 1839), is the father of this genre. Published in English under the title The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck in 1842, Töpffer’s work is considered by some to be the United States’ first comic book. In forty pages of pictures and captions, the work tells of the amorous adventures of Mr. Oldbuck.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the first widely popular American comic books owed their origins to comic strips that were first published in the Sunday supplements of newspapers. Richard Felton Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, an exploration of an Irish immigrant youngster and the ethnic tensions he encounters in an urban setting, became a great success for the New York Journal. The strips were collected in book form as The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats (1896).

In the early twentieth century, hundreds of newspapers printed syndicated comic strips such as Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1907), which centers on the dreams of a child from a middle-class family. The styles of the comic-strip artists were sometimes influenced by such movements as Art Nouveau and cubism. Less sophisticated but more popular were the strips focused on family life from a broadly comedic perspective. Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids, recounting the escapades of mischievous German immigrant children Hans and Fritz, went on to become the longest-running comic in the United States. George McManus’s Bringing Up Father, which ran from 1913 to 2000, deals with the comedic conflicts between nouveau rich Irish immigrant Jiggs and his shrewish wife, Maggie. The strips were collected into books and also inspired a Broadway play.

Flemish artist Frans Masereel is often cited by graphic novelists as an influence on their work. He began to publish “image novels,” composed of expressionistic woodcuts, in Europe in the 1910’s. In such works as Mon livre d’heures (1919; Passionate Journey, 1922), Masereel dissects urban life and the state of the world in the post-World War I period. The German writer Thomas Mann compared the wordless Passionate Journey to a black-and-white film and praised the spiritual insights occasioned by the young protagonist’s journeys.

Distinctive for having a female protagonist, Russ Westover’s Tillie the Toiler comic strips began to appear in 1921. The stories concern the trials and tribulations of a young working girl and manifest an early feminist outlook. Tillie is often more clever, more insightful, and wittier than the male characters, though she exhibits the typical penchant of the flapper for fancy dresses and fascinating men. The strips were so popular that they were collected into several books and inspired two films. The comic strip continued to be published through the 1950’s.

Impact

The many styles, stories, and viewpoints found in the forerunners of graphic novels have explicit analogues and counterparts in contemporary examples of the form. Many modern graphic novelists have acknowledged their debt to such early works, and they have drawn on several of the works’ techniques and themes. Thus, creators have helped to unify the long history of developments that led from cave paintings with collocated images to the complex, often long, and creatively artistic form of the modern graphic novel.

Bibliography

Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Chronicles the development of the American comic book industry, beginning with the comics of the 1930’s and continuing into the Modern Age.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Uses the comic book format to explore the definition, language, and historical development of the comic book and the graphic novel.

Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels. London: Phaidon Press, 1996. Provides a history of the development of both mainstream and underground comics and graphic novels from the seventeenth century to the Modern Age.