Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Two Histories of Spanish Comics
Friday, April 2, 2010
Le Groom Vert-De-Gris
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Muybridge and the Comic Strip
Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of humans and animals in motion made a world-wide stir in scientific and artistic circles and he went on the lecture circuit to explain his earth-shaking discoveries with the aid of a zoopraxiscope, which an English writer described as “a magic lantern run mad.” On 18 November 1882 Muybridge lectured on “The Romance and Reality of Animal Motion” for a packed house in a show sponsored by the New York Turf Club.
He illustrated his lecture by projecting his stationary photographs on a canvas screen and afterward, as a New York Times columnist wrote, “displayed the figure of the animal, first at a walk across the canvas, then pacing, cantering, galloping, and even jumping the hurdle. The effect was true to life, and the spectator could almost believe that he saw miniature horses with their riders racing across the screen.” He followed up with animations of a running bull, a goat, a deer, and a man, all walking, running, jumping, and in the case of the man, turning somersaults.
The first silent movie, “The Great Train Robbery,” was not produced until 1903, and the first animated cartoon was J. Stuart Blackton’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces,” in 1906, but comic strip artists were already anticipating animation in work done in the 1880’s and 1890's.
Below is another Frederick Burr Opper cartoon on caricature from Scribner’s circa 1883.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Charles G. Bush and the Comic Strip
Charles Green Bush, a contemporary of Homer Davenport’s, was born in Boston in 1842. He began contributing political cartoons to Harper’s Weekly in the 1870’s and in 1875 studied art in Paris with Léon Bonnat, the portrait painter before returning to New York in 1879 to continue at the Weekly. Both Harper's Weekly and Harper's Magazine were pioneers in the early use of sequential art in America, most importantly in the work of A. B. Frost.
Bush was not known for his comic strip work but in 1890 he drew a series of comics for Harper’s Weekly that show the influence of A. B. Frost, and, in the case of the animated ‘baseball’ strip, probably Eadweard Muybridge , whose photographic studies in human and animal locomotion (1878) had a seminal influence on both the cinema and the comic strip.
Charles Green Bush (1842-1909) illustrated Canadian writer James De Mille's novel The Lady of the Ice (1870), Adeline Dutton Train's Faith Gartney's Girlhood, (1891), and Rhoda Thornton's Girlhood by Mary E. Pratt.(1874). In his book The Political Cartoon, Charles Press argues that the first use of Uncle Sam in a cartoon was by Charles Green Bush on February 6, 1869 in Harper's Weekly, as Frank Weitenkampf showed in "Uncle Sam Through The Years : A Cartoon Record, Annotated List and Introduction," an unpublished manuscript in the New York Public Library, 1949, 24 pg. By 1900 Press states Bush was known as the "dean of American Political cartooning."
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Good Artists
Monday, March 22, 2010
Melchor Niubó, alias Niel
Friday, March 19, 2010
Los Caprichos
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Naissances de la bande dessinée
I think we can trace the beginnings of the change in perception to 1966 when the Smithsonian Institution put on an exhibit honoring 75 Years of the Comics, showing the growth and development of form in the newspaper strip. One year later an international exposition on comic strips and their creators was held at the Louvre hosted by Claude Moliterni, director of the French Society of Research in Illustrated Literature. The exhibition traced the evolution of figurative drawings from carved Trojan columns to space-age comic strips using slide projections and panel blow -ups of comics from America, Europe, Argentina and Mexico. Among the early pioneers in historical research was David Kunzle, with a massive two volume History of the Comic Strip (1973) which searched for precursors from 1450 to the late nineteenth century, and Denis Gifford’s Victorian Comics (1976) with its emphasis on British beginnings.
An impressive recent book on beginnings is Thierry Smolderen’s Naissances de la bande dessinée De William Hogarth à Winsor McCay, published in late 2009 by Les Impressions Nouvelles. Thierry Smolderen is a Brussels born scriptwriter, essayist, theorist and Professor at the European School of Visual Arts. His articles have appeared in the periodicals Les Cahiers de comics, 9th Art, and Comic Art and he has been writing scenarios for graphic albums since the eighties.
Naissances de la bande dessinée (“The Many Births of the Comics”) studies the parallel growth, and world-wide diffusion of influences, from the days of William Hogarth to the modern baroque stylings of Winsor McCay. Smolderen starts with Hogarth, and rightly so, as he was the originator of commercial reproducible caricature in Britain and strongly influenced Rodolphe Töpffer and George Cruikshank, the two giants whose experiments would have the most influence on the practitioners of 19th century comic art. Hogarth’s Harlots Progress was sold by subscription for one guinea, and the buyer was supplied with a bonus in the shape of an illustrated ticket. Hogarth’s famous pictorial dramas had a tremendous effect on the nascent novel, the drama, book illustration, sequential caricature, and even social reform.
Smolderen's most surprising claim is that Töpffer, contrary to Kunzle’s theory of him as “Father of the Comics,” had no interest in promoting the modern comic strip, that instead he invented the form in order to ridicule G. O. Lessing’s theory of poetry as a sequential art, which was put forth in The Laocoon: or the Limits of Poetry and Painting: “The rule is this, that succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.” Töpffer’s ironic use of sequential graphics was meant to expose the fallacies of Lessing’s ideas, and Töpffer showed little interest in the comic albums produced by those artists he influenced.
Naissances de la bande dessinée investigates the role played by various media in the organic development of the comic strip; in novels, the romantic gestures of the stage melodrama, the rise of book illustration, photography, magic lanterns, and the cinema. George Cruikshank’s spectacular use of sequential illustrations in Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard was inspired by the pictorial drama of William Hogarth, and turn of the century comic strips by A. B. Frost were influenced by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies in human and animal locomotion.
The book is illustrated throughout with examples of sequential art drawn from all corners of the globe. Samples from all the major actors are presented in sharp focus reproductions: Töpffer, Cruikshank, Cham, Dore, Grandville, Caran d’Ache, Doyle, Oberlander, Christophe, Frost, Sullivant, Outcault and McCay. The whole is so information rich that it comes as a surprise to find it weighing in at a mere 144 pages.
Smolderen’s book is a graphic reminder that the comic strip was not the invention of the American comic supplements at the turn of the century. The comic strip was the result of a century (possibly more) of world-wide experimentation by artists and writers with a mass appreciative audience drawn from every class of society. There was very little that was original to the comic supplements. Comic strippers like Frederick Burr Opper and F. M. Howarth had been supplying comic journals with sequential art since the 1870’s, the format of the Yellow Kid followed Hogarth and Cruikshank, the Katzenjammer Kids were borrowed from the German bilderbogen of Wilhelm Busch, and even Little Nemo’s technicolor dream-world had been anticipated by the artists of Quantin’s l'Imagerie artistique of the 1880’s.
The comic strip was the result of a continuous diffusion of world theory, experimentation, and technology from the days of Hogarth to the present. The history of the comic strip is a world history and we can only hope that Naissances de la bande dessinée and other essential works of European comic scholarship will someday be translated into English for the education and enjoyment of North American audiences. Strangely enough my search of Google blogs and newspapers for English reviews of Naissances de la bande dessinée was a dismal failure, not one English language review could be found.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Sketches by Seymour
Sketches by Seymour were published between 1834 and 1836 in detached prints at 3d. each, by Richard Carlile, radical publisher of Paine’s Age of Reason. Seymour was paid 15 shillings per drawing. Carlile sold the copyright and lithographic stones to Henry Wallis, picture dealer and engraver, who retained the copyright and passed on the stones to G. S. Tregear of 96 Cheapside, London, who transferred the drawings to steel and published them in 1838 in 5 bound volumes.
Seymour is best remembered for instigating “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.” In 1836 Charles Dickens agreed to write the text to accompany comic prints by Seymour. Sales were slow, and the illustrator shot himself to death after the second number, but by the fourth number things had improved and Dickens was a household name in England.
The cover illustration at top is from Volume 4 of Tregear’s version in steel-engraving. The illustrations below are from volume One. And I wonder if the corpulent cricketer in No. 8 below was the original inspiration for Dickens famous Fat Boy from Pickwick.
