Trollheart

No matter what age we are, I think it’s fair to say that almost all of us have grown up with comics. For most of us, they may have been our first introduction to reading, out of school. Technically speaking, the kind of comics I read at ages 7 - 9 say would not really qualify as reading: they had little dialogue beyond sound effects and a few words or explanations, and mostly I read them for the pictures. It was like a cartoon printed on paper (which is essentially what it was, really), a way to follow the action via pictures with some incidental words you didn’t have to bother too much with. Not the best way to be introduced to reading, certainly, but you kind of learned despite yourself. Certain words became known to you, and how certain phrases led to certain actions. Minimal stuff - we read them for fun, not to educate ourselves - but it was a start.

Like most kids my age, my first comics all dealt with funny, slapstick or way-out themes. I remember one in particular called Odd Ball, which was, if I recall, the adventures of a sentient ball, and another called Creature Teacher, concerning the efforts of a monster to teach a class of kids, for some reason. I remember he only had one eye. On a stalk. It was weird and of course it made no sense, but then that was the whole point with comics at that age: they didn’t have to make sense. They were usually better if they didn’t. Which is, I guess, why some parents looked down on them, and why older kids might disparage younger ones for reading such nonsense, when they themselves had moved onto more mature comics.

Mostly, my childhood consisted of reading about the exploits of characters like The Bash Street Kids, Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat, Billy Whizz and, of course, Dennis the Menace. These stories (such as they were) were harmless, anarchic in their way, as the kid figure(s) usually spent their time hassling or getting in trouble with adult figures, and usually losing. You could say the comics such as Whizzer and Chips, The Beano, Dandy and Beezer taught disrespect from an early age, but again it was mostly harmless, to quote Douglas Adams. It was all in good fun and there was usually a moral, this quite often being a simple message not to misbehave. Of course, this was mostly a boy’s market: comics were marketed to girls, but they were simpler - possibly more adult really - concentrating on boys, romance, perhaps fairy tales, that sort of thing. To my knowledge there never was a “funny” comic aimed at girls. I could find out soon enough that I’m wrong, of course - and equally obviously, I’m talking about the market here, in Ireland, or really the UK, as we did not have our own comics and relied on English imports - but I don’t remember my sister for instance reading anything like I did when a young age.

There was a small token effort to include girls in the funnies - Dennis the Menace had his female equivalent in Minnie the Minx - but by and large these were male characters doing male things in environments that girls were just not going to be interested in. No dolls, no horse riding, no swimming, cooking or whatever the hell young girls did back then, It was probably (can’t remember now) considered uncouth of girls to read boys’ comics, which would often be mildly crude, and not the sort of thing an impressionable seven or eight-year-old girl would be expected to be reading, or that her parents would want her to be reading. In that way, I guess girls’ comics grew up, or helped girls grow up, faster than ours did. While we were still guffawing about the antics of Ivor Lott and Tony Broke or Odd Ball, they were learning about romance and mystery.

But that’s how it was, both in Ireland and in England: girls and boys were almost a species apart, and until those hormones kicked in neither wanted anything to do with the other. Boys played rough boys’ games, girls skipped rope and played shop or with dolls. There were some games both sexes could play, but by and large they were kept apart by a mutual sense of disinterest in the pursuits of the other. And so this reflected itself in comics too. Where girls might even enjoy school, boys generally did not, and this was played out in the panels of the comics we read. Boys liked violence, loud noises, disrespect to adults, bikes and cars and all the sort of things they more or less continue to like when they grow to be men. Girls were more select in their tastes, and comic publishers in general were not interested in having their writers create those sorts of comics, leaving the “funnies” more or less a male-dominated area, both in its characters and in its readership.

Later, of course, as I grew up such comics no longer interested me, and I moved on to the kind of thing teenagers read: war comics, football comics, adventure comics and the slowly-emerging science-fiction and later superhero comics. These tackled their subjects much more seriously, had a lot more dialogue, and much less of the sound effects and tomfoolery. These stories had to mean something, usually had to teach something, even if it was again a simple message such as Germans are bad (generally the message taught through the British publishing houses that put out such titles as Warlord, Battle Picture Weekly and War Picture Library) or any kid can become a soccer star if they work hard enough. The latter a laudable message, the former less so, but a message nonetheless. These comics, rather than the “funnies”, as we called them, would have been the first impetus for me to think about writing myself.

Later I moved on to the newly-released 2000 AD, where the writing was top-class and the stories multi-layered and intricate, many running over several, even dozens of issues, a clever ploy by the publisher to ensure you kept buying every issue, or prog, as they were called. And then of course there was DC and Marvel, opening up a whole new world of superheroes, adventure and the concepts of right and wrong. At this point comics really became more what are termed today as graphic novels. In the early “funnies”, nobody had to be drawn that well. Most of the characters were caricatures - big noses/ears, shocks of hair, pimples, buck teeth - and bore little resemblance to anyone I knew (I mean, what the hell breed of dog was Gnasher anyway, and why did he look so much like his owner? Or was that the other way around?) while others were so way out they just could exist nowhere other than in the pages of a comic: Billy Whizz, with his elongated, lemon-shaped head, Korky the Kat and the aforementioned Creature Teacher.

But as we matured so did our tastes, and our tolerance for fantasy. We now wanted stories and characters we could identify with, even aspire to. War heroes. Space pilots. Footballers. Magicians. Superheroes. These people, while it could not be said in fairness that they prepared us for real life, did at least help us leave behind the zany madness of Bash Street, where every “slap-up meal” consisted of bangers and mash (sausages and mashed potato, to you Americans!) and cats walked around on two legs, or cowboys with unrealistic stubble ate cow pies. If you’re not British or Irish you won’t get these references, but don’t worry: this is just a freeform introduction, and we’ll be investigating all of these, as well as of course your own favourites, and looking at comics all over the world.

I of course was a child of the very late sixties (born 1963) and early seventies, so the comics I started on were a long way from being the first in the world. You can go back to the 1940s and 1950s for the popular pulp fiction comic books such as Suspenseful Tales and Amazing Stories, and further even, to the 1920s and 1930s* where comics began as newspaper strips. The history of comics goes back quite a way, and as I said earlier encompasses about a hundred years* of drawing, writing and development.

You know the deal by now I’m sure. In this journal I’ll be going right back to the very origins of comics, looking at how they developed over the last hundred* years or so, the differences between different countries and cultures, our favourite and least favourite characters, and how some of the comics we loved as kids grew out of the restrictions of the flat page and walked right onto the silver screen, or maybe the small one as comic characters translated to movies and television. We’ll also be looking, in time, at the growth and expansion, some might even say explosion of the graphic novel, where writing and drawing comic books has become not only an art but a true cultural phenomenon. We’ll see how the first crude line drawings gave way to full-colour illustrations of such beauty and complexity as to rival the greatest of the Old Masters (yeah not really), accompanied by writing so profound and deep that it can be read almost as a novel itself (really). We’ll be checking out the careers of some of the best - and lesser known - in the business, from artists and writers to the considered lowly letterers and inkers, the editors and the publishing houses, small and large, and how things have changed over time for comics.

I’m sure it will be no surprise to anyone to hear that we’ll be following a timeline, trying to parallel the development of comics on both sides of the Atlantic, as for once I don’t think (though I may be wrong, we’ll see) that in this area either America or the UK had the lion’s share, or that one followed the example of the other, but that the two markets grew - while in different stylistic directions of course - more or less at the same time.

So come with me now, back to the days of your childhood, or hell, dig into that comic collection you’ve been saving for a special time, and let’s go explore the history of comics.

* Oh hell no: in my initial research I've found the history goes MUCH further back than that!

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Chapter I: Parents of the Picture Strip:
The Original Comics Creators

Before we begin, I'd like to give my thanks to and acknowledge the immensely helpful archive of historical and political cartoons at www.lambiek.net; basically almost all of the early cartoons I'm featuring here are taken from their site.


It’s hard to know exactly how far back to go to begin our history. As in that of animation, wherein I discounted - though acknowledged - paintings on ancient vases which seemed to show a sequence of motion as being not the sort of thing I was talking about when I spoke of animation, so here too we can, if we wish (and we don’t) go all the way back to ancient Egypt, Greece or Babylonia, where clay tablets show pictorial representations yadda yadd yadda I don’t care. I have no wish to disrespect either these artists or their creations (though they're long dead, what do they care?) nor those who point to them as the earliest examples of cartoons or comics. I probably agree with them. It’s just that that kind of thing is so far outside what I’m talking about that it would be like writing a history of music and starting with cavemen blowing into hollowed out bones - while it’s very true indeed that this can be seen as the very beginnings, the origins of what we know as music, it doesn’t have much to do with the blues, jazz or even classical music. Not really.

Anyway, whether you agree or not, this is where I draw the line. There were, to my knowledge, no ancient representations of Andy Capp in Greece before Christ, no ancient Egyptian Snoopy, and evidence has yet to be uncovered that shows a figure eerily like Judge Dredd in Mesopotamia, so while those figures may be technically comics, they’re not part of what I consider the history of comics. Or to be fairer, they are, or they may be, but I’m not interested in them. And I doubt you are either. So where do we go from here? Well, the next timeframe Wiki gives me is the sixteenth century, but here it’s citing artists such as Bosch and Brugehel and Hogenberg, and how their paintings can be considered comics. Well maybe they can, but I don’t think any kids my age wanted to stare and laugh at The Garden of Earthly Delights, and it certainly doesn’t have any speech balloons in it, so no, not for me. We move on.

To paraphrase something Troy McClure once said, flash forward to seventeenth century France but again we’re talking here of painters, and I really think the thing that characterised, if you will, comics was its mass media distribution. In an age where the vast majority of people couldn’t even read, comics by themselves were never going to take off. The printing press was only invented in the sixteenth century, and then used primarily to distribute pamphlets, mostly of a religious or political nature (or both), and though there may be undiscovered woodcuts of Little Lulu or Archie around, nobody has found them yet. So we’re looking at the very least at the nineteenth century I believe.

Here I’d also like to make a distinction between cartoons and comics. I don’t know whether it’s an accepted one, or even right, but I’m using it. I consider cartoons (in a drawn sense, as in, on a page or at least a piece of paper) which utilise only one drawing - caricatures, political cartoons etc - separate from comics, which to my mind and for the purposes of this journal covers any sequence of drawings pointing towards some sort of conclusion, in other words, an actual set of actions that have a result. A man climbs stairs wearily and a piano falls down on him from the top floor. A cat chases a mouse. A van tips over as it takes a corner due to a heavy load. A man and a woman meet and go to the cinema. In short, I believe a comic - as opposed to a cartoon - should tell a story. It may be brief, it may not even be funny, but it should follow some sort of basic narrative.

So the likes of the cartoons in say the New Yorker, clever as they may be, would not for me fulfill the criteria of being comics. Gary Larsen’s Far Side cartoons would not be comics. A political caricature of Napoleon drawn in 1784 and posted on a church wall would not be a comic. But a three-panel sequence showing Andy Capp asleep on the sofa and then falling off, would be. As would a three-panel “adventure” with Mandrake the Magician, though the former is humorous and the latter very much not so. Both of these of course are newspaper strips, but we’ll be getting into them in due course. For now, I just want to explain how I’m defining comics as opposed to one-panel or one-drawing cartoons.

Which brings us back to the timeline. 1633 gives us “gruesome scene and war atrocities during the Thirty Years War”. Well it’s hardly a comic, is it? 1667 we have a possible contender in Romeyn de Hooge (1645 - 1708) who drew political satirical cartoons, often in some sort of sequence, yet to me, no. I can’t consider this (though many apparently do) even a proto-comic; the drawings are a little too realistic and there’ s no real story here, unless a real-life event is being depicted. Not, for me anyway, the spirit of what came to be comics. Another possible name we can look at is Francis Barlow (1626 - 1794), an English painter who did create one of the first sequenced cartoons, the depiction of Titus Oates’ attempt to blacken the name of Catholics in what became known as the Popish Plot, gone into at some length in my History of Ireland journal.

General note for the future: some of these pictures are bloody huge, and I'll be damned if I'm going to resize and reupload them, so I'm spoilering the larger ones, as they skew the text.

Like this one.

This one surely has some claim to being the first ever comic, even if it is in essence a political satire/message. So much, then, for the nineteenth century being the birth of comics. Shows what I know. It was actually written as accompaniment to a ballad, named A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot, so possibly that might go against it, but It has pictures, text and even speech balloons, and does tell a story. It was published in 1682, so that could be the starting point. Have a look above and judge for yourself, but I think it’s next to impossible to ignore or discount this work, and most comic historians (that’s people who study the history of comics, not historians who tell humorous stories!) seem to be agreed on the point.

This followed in fact his previous work, The Cheese of Dutch Rebellion (1672) but this is a single large picture (with other, smaller ones radiating off it) and though it does have speech balloons and text, I would consider this more a political cartoon, a one-frame deal, whereas the other one very much fulfils my own criteria for a comic. Is Francis Barlow, then, the father of comics? I don’t know; if he only drew this one, maybe not, maybe. Let’s see who else we can turn up. Looks like that’s it for the seventeenth century, so on into the eighteenth we go.

William Hogarth is the one we’re looking at here, and the old master created several painting which “follow a sequential order”, this would not have been something available to the common man or woman (unless through a gallery, and I don’t think too many poor people visited - or would be allowed into - those at that time) so I would discount those. But then there’s a political cartoon he made in 1724 called A Just View of the British Stage or Three Heads are Better than One, which does use speech balloons and text. Again though it is a single picture, and as I say above, very much a political cartoon, so it doesn’t get the nod from me.


Then there’s a husband and wife team, Matthew and Mary Darly, who produced a whole lot of cartoons, almost all satirical and mostly political, but again the ones I see or the ones that are described all seem to be one panel. They do feature speech balloons and have been described by some as proto-comics, but not in this journal, son. So that’s 1757 - 1773, then it’s over to Austria to meet Joseph Franz von Goez (1754 - 1815), a playwright from Vienna who in 1783 published what has been called the first graphic novel. But don’t get excited: it’s not an undiscovered Batman or episode from Watchmen: this was merely a graphical representation of his own play, Lenardo und Blandine: ein Melodram nach Bürger. Looking at it though, I can see it’s a series of plates, as it were; single graphical representations that do lead, I assume, through the story of the play, but aren’t in what I would call what we came to know as the comic strip format. I won’t post the pictures, as there are too many and there’s no real point, but here’s a link if you want to check it out.
https://konkykru.com/e.goez.1783.len...landine.1.html

With a far better claim, in my humble view, than any of them is Thomas Rowlandson (1757 - 1827), who produced, as far as I can see anyway, the first sequence of drawings that come anywhere near what we would see in newspaper strips hundreds of years later. His first effort was entitled Two New Slides for the Magic Lantern, drawn as supposed to be used in the fad of the day, the aforementioned Magic Lantern, an ancient ancestor of the film projector and even the motion picture camera, and satirising the government of the time.

Even better is The Loves of the Fox and the Badger, which introduces anthropomorphic characters (the two politicians being satirised shown as a fox and a badger) at least a hundred years or more before cartoonists would even contemplate such a thing. Not only that (there is some anthropomorphism in the previous drawing too, though minimal) he also uses, possibly (I’d have to check) for the first time in any cartoon drawing, thought balloons as well as speech balloons. These of course would become wildly popular in comics and cartoons, as a way of differentiating between when a character was saying something and when he, she or it was thinking it instead. Trailblazing, indeed. I think he has to get my vote.


Meanwhile, you might be amused to hear that even in 1790 the Swedes were producing porn, albeit crudely drawn and for private sale only (which surely did nothing to hurt his profits) by Carl August Ehrensvärd (a count, no less) and Johan Tobias Sergel. Their “sequential drawings” depicted parties and sexual behaviour. Oh my!

A man who cannot be ignored in any discussion of comic art is John Gillray (1756 - 1815), known as one of the “Big Three” of eighteenth century cartoons, along with George Cruikshank and William Hogarth. Though most of his work does not fulfil my criteria - the bulk of it is one or two panels, often a “before and after” idea, which I don’t personally consider a comic per se - he did produce John Bull’s Progress which, in addition to being one of the first I’ve seen in colour with more than two panels, is an early - perhaps the earliest, or certainly one of the earliest anyway - examples of what would become known as a “text comic”.

This seems to be an attempt to separate those comics or drawings or caricatures or cartoons which use speech balloons (or no words at all I suppose) from those which utilise text under each picture explaining what is going on, or which contain the dialogue in the text. You can see how this one seems to present both sides of war (sort of in a similar manner to twentieth-century movies such as Born on the Fourth of July), as in the first two frames John Bull (the English soldier) is depicted marching off to glory, but in the third frame his family are suffering from poverty and about to lose their home, while in the fourth he returns minus a leg. The glory of war indeed. Cutting stuff.

There’s also Democracy, or, A Sketch of the Life of Buonaparte, an eight-panel drawing mocking Napoleon, and, published as it was in 1800, making it one of the first, if not the first, comic cartoons of the nineteenth century. There were others too: A Rake’s Progress at University (1806) parodies Hogarth’s series of paintings from the previous century; Elements of Skating (1809) pokes fun at people trying to skate, while his largest works, Hollandia Regenerta (1796) and The Life of William Cobbett - Written by Himself (1809) I can’t find images for.

Gillray is acknowledged as one of the biggest influences on British art, influencing such giants as William Charles, Robert Crumb, Ronald Searle and Gerald Scarfe, and to be fair, we really owe it to the guy to look a little more into his life, because he was, from what I read, a very interesting and engaging character who came to a very sad end. He seems to have been the original enfant terrible, a man who did not give a fuck who he offended, whether that was Napoleon or his own king. In fact, he went out of his way to offend the British royal family, caricaturing the then-recent wedding of the Duke of York to the Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia, and when King George III professed not to understand the drawing (though the Duke was fuming about it) he then pushed further by caricaturing His Majesty himself, ridiculing both his weak eyesight and his grasp of history.

Gillray had a tough, tough upbringing. His father was an “outdoor pensioner”, whatever that is, and sent him and his brother to a very strict boarding school. So strict, in fact, that his brother died under the administration of corporal punishment (I guess read, beaten or caned to death) at the tender age of eight. No legal or criminal action seems to have been taken against the school, so go figure. But naturally this made James cynical and eager to expose the hypocrisy and injustice of the world, which he did through caricature and cartoons. He pioneered a whole new way of drawing cartoons. Where before, artists had done their best to emulate actual people who could both be recognised and looked as real as possible, Gillray began exaggerating aspects of people - large, grotesque faces with warty noses, bulging eyes, tongues lolling out, puffed cheeks and twisted, contorted bodies, most aspects of which were metaphors for something. Corpulent men would represent greed or indolence, the “fat cats” growing fatter while the poor starved, while tax collectors would be shown as red-faced with bags of money stuffed in their pockets.

He used crude toilet humour - literally. In one of his plates, titled National Conveniences (1796), four different people, four different nationalities, are shown using the toilet in very different ways. He also used, if not pioneered, speech balloons within which were comedic dialogue, satire and mocking wit, and there was plenty of room for good old racism and xenophobia in his cartoons, his first ever being called Paddy on Horseback (1779). I can’t find it, but I somehow doubt it was complimentary to the Irish! Because he mocked the rich and championed the plight of the poor, Gillray was popular with and beloved by the working class, and they understood his cartoons in a way that class had not been able to, or wanted to, comprehend those of previous political satirists. He drew and wrote about the issues they cared about, and they identified with him, and saw him as a kind of champion. His cartoons were so popular that they sold outside of England, even more so after his death.

He even managed to piss off the Church - and survived the experience - while also lampooning the political party of the day. A two-for! Even a cartoon in which he wished for the overthrow of the monarchy could not end his career, such was his popularity, although the Prince of Wales wanted the cartoon banned and destroyed. But Gillray, while an indefatigable enemy, was also a useful ally when it came to attacking the country’s enemies, at least with the pen if not the sword. He gleefully went to work taking the rise out of Napoleon, mercilessly mocking his size by drawing him as a dwarf or midget with a huge hat, and in one sketch, The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (1803), he uses Jonathan Swift’s dialogue while a miniature Napoleon is held in the palm of King George, who looks at him with interest through a telescope. This mocking of the emperor of France helped demystify him and knock holes in his legend; it’s hard to be that afraid of someone when they’re being made fun of.

Mind you, the English didn’t escape his satire even during the Napoleonic Wars, as in another of his cartoons, The Plumb-Pudding in Danger (sic) (1805) Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger is sitting at table with the tiny Napoleon as the two of them carve up the world between them. These cartoons had their effect. Cooling his heels in his first exile on Elba in 1815, Napoleon said “Gillray’s depictions of me did more damage than a dozen generals.” High praise for the man and his skill, and for the reach of his fame both as a cartoonist and a satirist. Gillray is even credited with the popular nickname for Napoleon, derived from his surname, of “Boney”, in 1803. He is also responsible for the graphical representation of a character first mentioned in a pamphlet and story of 1712, and alluded to by his contemporary Hogarth, John Bull. Gillray was the first to actually bring this character to life, first as an actual bull, then later as a man, the visual representation of England, later to be linked of course with one of the most famous ever Britons, Winston Churchill.

Attended by bouts of alcoholism, Gillray’s health began to deteriorate in 1805, and by 1810 he had finished his last ever work, Progress of the Toilet which, though it sounds like his old satirical caricatures, bears none of his wicked humour or twisted warped figures, and is basically a three-plate rendering of a woman dressing in the morning. Shortly after this final work he tried to take his own life, his eyesight failing, then slipped into madness, believing himself to be the painter Ruebens. On June 1 1815 he died, the man he had all but helped to defeat fighting his final battle at Waterloo eighteen days later as Napoleon was decisively routed by the Duke of Wellington.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

The next one up is another Englishman, and like Gillray he wasn’t afraid to satirise and lampoon the English gentry, including the king himself. Richard Newton (1777 - 1798) as you can see, died young, at the tender age of only twenty-one, and he was another who used rude toilet humour in his drawings, though he differs from Gillray in that he also supported the cause of the abolition of slavery through his cartoons. Again, like his more famous contemporary, a lot of Newton’s work was on single panel drawings, which, even though they used speech balloons, don’t for me qualify as comics, but mere cartoons. However he did also draw sequential ones, which certainly do.

Sketches in a Shaving Shop (1794), shows different men all wanting to be shaved, and while it does not use speech balloons (the text being sort of suspended above the characters’ heads like ghostly writing floating in the air) and there is no actual narrative here, you can still look at them and see the very precursors to later comic strips. Similarly, Samples of Sweethearts and Wives (1795) makes fun of the gentler sex at their least gentle, women when they are drunk. Whether this was meant to be a commentary on the disgrace of women being inebriated in public or not I don’t know, but given what I’ve read about these guys I would say no: Newton was just using their behaviour as a way to send up society and show them that, to be crude, no matter what they thought, their shit did indeed stink.

His other comics/cartoons include Progress of a Player (1793) which shows the trials and tribulations of a struggling actor on the road to hoped-for fame, Contrasting Husbands (1795), showing two different sides of the English husband (and wife), Progress of a Woman of Pleasure (1794) cataloguing the fall of a servant into destitiution and inevitably prostitution, and Clerical Alphabet (1795) which roundly mocks the clergy. He was, I think, the first satirist or cartoonist to use the figure of Death in his cartoons, as he does in Undertakers in at the Death (1794). Few if any of these cartoons use speech balloons, the text either written underneath the pictures or floating above the characters.

Typhus was one of many terrible diseases prevalent in the eighteenth century, largely down to the completely unsanitary conditions people lived in and the general lack of personal hygiene, and it was this which done for Richard Newton, struck down in his twenty-first year, just as he was beginning to make a name for himself. Perhaps somewhere, the Grim Reaper was laughing as he drew his caricature.

It’s over to Holland next, where the Dutch artist and poet Willem Bilderdijk created an eight-panel story for his young son, a humorous narrative called Hanepoot in 1807, though this was a private venture, not sold or published, only seeing the light of day almost two centuries later, in 1977, where it was recognised as one of the first examples of a Dutch cartoon.


As the nineteenth century gathered steam then (not literally, not yet, but later) and works of Gothic fiction, vampire fiction and horror all came onstream, it seems comics began to emerge a little more, as we have a slew of artists and even the very first magazine in the world dedicated exclusively to comics and cartoons.

William Charles (1776 - 1820), a Scot living in the USA, is credited with bringing the British style of political satire to America, with caricature and speech balloons, and how cool is it that a man born in the year of American independence should end up spending most of his life there? Charles did mostly one-panel cartoons, but he did illustrate Tom, the Piper’s Son (1808) with sequential cartoons which use speech balloons. In 1810, François Aimé Louis Dumoulin (1753 - 1834) published a series of drawings based on the Daniel Defoe novel Robinson Crusoe, thereby becoming the first comics artist from Switzerland, and Thomas Rowlandson, whom we met earlier, continued his career with perhaps the first real “adventure series”, that of Dr. Syntax, which sees, I think for the first time in comics or cartoons, the same character used in three different drawing sequences.

This begins with The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812) and continues with Dr. Syntax in Search of Consolation (1821) and finally The Third Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of a Wife (1822). Technically speaking, and to stick to my own rules here, these aren’t comics as we understand them. They do have multi-panels but there are no speech balloons, hardly even any text, as they are based on books by William Combe. But they are really important to the development and history of comics for other reasons. For one, they are one of the first cartoons which, as i said above, feature the same character in different stories, and years apart. Second, they are the first cartoons to lead to a line of merchandise: hats, coats, mugs, puppets, all sorts of things were produced to capitalise on the popularity of Dr. Syntax. Finally, they were the first English cartoons to be translated into other languages for consumption in other countries.

Rowlandson did use other characters - John Bull, Johnny Newcome, Mary Anne Clarke - in continuation drawings prior to Dr. Syntax, but none were as popular and almost all were single panel drawings. And far, far, away, so far most people in England or even Europe could hardly even imagine it, in the distant land of Japan, Hokusai Katsushika (1760 -1849), usually just known as Hokusai, was pioneering new techniques in cartoons and laying the early foundations of what would become manga comics. In fact, the word manga in Japanese means sketch, and Hokusai first used it in a total of fifteen collections of his work he called Hokusai Manga, or Sketches by Hokusai which have had a massive influence, not only on later Japanese and other Asian artists, but many in the west too, including giants such as Van Gogh and Whistler.

Hokusai, unlike other contemporaries in the west, did not work with pencil and paper initially but with wood and chisel, making his comics on woodblocks, his most famous work, The Great Wave or The Breaking Wave off Kanagawa, shown above Japan’s most famous artwork. He himself was dismissive of his own talent, claiming "From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing."

In a Japan cut off from the western world, and where outside influences were forbidden, Hokusai nevertheless managed to make contact with smugglers who had managed to import into the country the banned art works from Europe, and he learned all he could from them. In a weird kind of full circle, Hokusai being influenced by the west became the west being influenced by Hokusai. Ouroboros or what? He was one of the first, perhaps the first Japanese artist to move away from the popular style of depicting figures such as samurai and geisha girls, and to concentrate on landscapes in particular, inspired by the great European painters of the time. He also began including normal working people in his works, something that had not been done up to then. He created a whole seismic shift in the way Japanese art would be approached and executed, and certainly, if not the father of manga, can be considered surely its grandfather.

He also painted what I assume must have been at the time the largest single artwork, certainly the largest portrait ever, in the 200-square-metre The Great Daruma in 1804, which he created with buckets of ink and a broom. His work with manga began when he was 51, as a way of quickly teaching students how to draw, with the manual Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing in 1812, which was an instant hit. Though his own epitaph was typically humble and self-deprecatory - “If only Heaven will give me just another ten years - just another five more years - then I could become a real painter” - the best tribute to the man comes perhaps from one of the Old Masters, when Degas himself noted of him that "Hokusai is not just one artist among others in the Floating World. He is an island, a continent, a whole world in himself."

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And back across the sea we go, back to merry old England, where the final of the “Big Three” was George Cruikshank (1792 - 1878), who was something of a child prodigy, already helping his father Isaac illustrate his cartoons by the time he was thirteen years old. Although he wanted to go to study at the Royal Academy, Isaac taught him at home, and George followed the same path as his contemporaries in satirising political parties and yes, good old King George himself, though this time George IV, who, as the Prince of Wales, had been so upset with James Gillman. Now he was in the crosshairs himself, and even went so far as to bribe Cruikshank not to caricature him, but to no avail. Seems these artists did not give a flying fuck. Fair play to them.

Cruikshank illustrated satirical text written by William Hone, the most interesting being The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder (1820), which was an fourteen-panel depiction of the scandalous love affair between the king’s wife and an Italian soldier, cleverly constructed as a ladder, with each sequence beginning at the bottom of the drawing and progressing up through to the top image, each labelled with a word ending in -ation, e.g. degradation, consternation… anyone remember INXS? After accepting bribes from the king not to ridicule him any more, Cruikshank turned to book illustration, and worked with some of the great authors such as Milton and Thackeray, and finally with the great Charles Dickens himself.

But like his fellows, Cruikshank was a pioneer of comics, drawing sequential strips complete with speech balloons and even, in one, The Preparatory School for Fast Men (1849), using title cards to show the passage of time. An earlier strip, Gent, No Gent and Regent (1816) goes after his favourite target, George IV, while Comic Alphabet (1836) is more gentle, depicting the alphabet in humorous ways.

His largest work however, outside of illustrating books, came in the form of The Tooth-Ache (1849), a six-page (not panel now, page) comic depicting the tribulations of a man with a sore tooth.

When he illustrated William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839), an account of the life and incarceration and finally death of the famous thief, he used a ten-panel drawing to show Sheppard’s escape and a six-panel one to show his execution.


Unlike our friend James Gillray, he was not a supporter, but in fact an opponent of abolition, and became a fanatical advocate for temperance, having been previously a notorious alcoholic. Oh, there’s nothing worse than a reformed smoker, is there, unless it’s a reformed drinker! And he was both! His moralising would not sit well with many, as he rewrote fairy tales such as Cinderella and Puss-in-Boots in order to preach his own high-handed message of temperance and abstinence. Yeah, ruin it for the rest of us, why don’t you? His pontificating and judgemental stance turned out to be hypocrisy though, as when he died in 1878 it came to light that he had had no less than eleven illegitimate children with his maid, the last born when he was, wait for it, 82! The dirty old bastard!

One of the first I can see to feature an anthropomorphic animal as its main character was Allen Robert Branston (1778 - 1827) in his The Comical Cat (1818) which shows, among other things, a cat at table, standing on its hind legs on the chair cutting up its food, doing a handstand and playing cards with a dog. However as this was all carved in wood I can’t consider it a proper example of any sort of comic. Interesting though.

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The Glasgow Looking Glass/The Northern Looking Glass (1825 - 1826)

Though it lasted less than a year (in which time it was considered by the editors expedient to change the name) The Glasgow Looking Glass holds a place in history as the very first publication in the world to feature only cartoons, which therefore makes it pretty much the first comics magazine. Launched by cartoonist James Heath, lithograph printer Thomas Hopkirk and his print manager, the interestingly-named John Watson on June 11 1825, The Glasgow Looking Glass lampooned local and national politics, with a strong bias on those matters which might appeal more to a Scottish audience. Despite changing its name and trying to broaden its target audience a mere three months into its life, becoming the Northern Looking Glass in August, the magazine failed to catch the public interest and sold poorly, folding before its one-year anniversary on April 3 1826.

Heath resurrected it four years later, with publisher Thomas McLean, under a new name: McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Caricatures (sounds like Herschel Krustofsky’s Clown-related Entertainment Show, doesn’t it?) or The Looking Glass. This time the two aimed higher, looking to sell to a better class of reader, and were rewarded with a four-year run. For all its very limited success though, the (let’s just call it this okay) Glasgow Looking Glass did start a custom later to be picked up by comics whole-heartedly, the serialisation of stories across several issues. This of course gives one the incentive, even the imperative to buy the next issue, lest they miss some important part of the story.

Heath began the rather dully-titled Embarkation: Voyage of a Steam-boat from Glasgow to Liverpool, which did exactly what it said on the tin, but is notable for using self-referential comedy, as in it a passenger is drawn reading the magazine in which his strip is published, the Glasgow Looking Glass. The second serialised story is The Morbiade, more interesting at least as it’s about a riot and its consequences. The magazine is believed to have been the first comic to use the words “to be continued” at the end of the sequence, both as a marketing tool to sell the next issue and to assure readers the story was not over. Its most celebrated story though came in the fourth issue, with the History of a Coat, perhaps the first cartoon to feature an inanimate object as the main character.

Macabre humour proliferated in An Essay on Modern Medical Education, which shows students at a medical university mucking about, digging up corpses, stitching bodies back together, experimenting, watching skeletons walk through the corridors; all very darkly satirical, and maybe not without a note of truth in there somewhere. It is noted as being one of the most gruesome cartoons written at the time, quite graphic in the visceral depictions of body parts, experiments and even soldiers being sewn back up and sent back out onto the battlefield, surely some sort of comment on the pointless loss of life in war?


As the Looking Glass closed its doors forever, across the Channel a French magazine was rising which would mirror it in some ways. I don’t know if it was the first French satirical magazine (probably not) but La Caricature morale, politique et littéraire may very well have been the first magazine in that country to collect together political and moral cartoons. It did a whole lot better than its Scottish counterpart, running in total for thirteen years and constantly and ferociously lampooned the French king Louis Philippe. You know, given that the magazine could only be founded after relaxation of the French censorship laws following the July Revolution (what? I don’t know: pick up a history book! You want me to do everything for you?) it may just be possible that this was the first satirical magazine in France. Or not. Anyway it was a mixture of articles and cartoons, so not, I would think, an actual comic magazine like its Scottish contemporary, but it did give rise to one of the men who is acknowledged as all but a father of the comic.

But before we get to him, this is interesting. Despite the lax censorship referred to a moment ago, it seems La Caricature, as it was usually known, pushed the king too much and was seized no less than twelve times, its editor thrown in jail and fined, and the magazine forced to close in 1835. Undaunted though, it was back open for business three years later, so my contention that it ran for thirteen years is incorrect - a thirteen-year period broken by a three-year one, so ten in all. Still very impressive. It seems William Makepeace Thackeray had something to say about the furore the magazine created:

Half-a-dozen poor artists on the one side, and his Majesty Louis-Philippe, his august family, and the numberless placemen and supporters of his monarchy, on the other.... The King of the French suffered so much, his ministers were so mercilessly ridiculed, his family and his own remarkable figure drawn with such odious and grotesque resemblance, in fanciful attitudes, circumstances, and disguises, so ludicrously mean, and so often appropriate, that the King was obliged to descend into the lists and battle his ridiculous enemies in form.

You know, I’m not sure whether he was siding with or against La Caricature there, but he surely must have been thinking of his own king, George IV, who had been in a similar situation with the likes of Cruikshank and Gillray, though he had been less successful.

Honoré Daumier (1808 - 1879) was a sculptor and a painter, but in 1830 he joined the staff of La Caricature, where a year later he was to draw his most famous and controversial cartoon, which depicted King Louis Philippe as a pear. Challenged on this, he drew a four-panel cartoon which showed the king transforming into a pear in stages. Eager to depose the hated monarch, the republicans grabbed the image and used it to mercilessly insult and depict the king on walls and in pamphlets. The cartoon, Les Poires (the Pears, duh) has become one of the most iconic political satirical cartoons of all time. It says here.

But there was a darker, more serious side to his work too. In 1834 he drew a cartoon commemorating the bloody suppression of a protest, during which people were murdered in their own homes, including a baby killed. His sketch, Massacre de la Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834 so pissed the police off that they confiscated the original lithograph stone and a year later press freedom in France was abolished. You just have to love this guy though. Even thrown in prison for insulting the king, he continued to write articles and draw cartoons, telling everyone he was doing so “just to annoy the government”.

He attacked the corrupt legal system in Le Gens de Justice, works so relevant still that they are often used by lawyers and judges and hung in courts of law, and he was a champion of the poor, like it seems many cartoonists of this era (and later) were, and continue to be. Yet you would have to think that few if any of these early cartoonists were paid well or made a living, as we have multiple reports of alcoholism, debt and poverty attending their lives. Daumier was no different; spent time in prison as mentioned but also struggled with debt and at one point had all his furniture confiscated to pay what he owed. You can’t help but think that the royal court may have had some hand in this - or at least tacitly approved it - given how much of a thorn he and his compatriots had become to Louis Philippe. Who would have thought merely drawing funny pictures could make you such an enemy of the state?

Still, like some of his peers he was not above (or below) mocking the ordinary man, if only gently. Similar to Gillray’s’ Elements of Skating and Newton’s Sketches in a Shaving Shop, his Les Baigneurs (1847) mocks people trying to swim. Perhaps harking a little towards Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick, his 'La Journée du Célibataire (1839) follows the adventures of a bachelor and was published as a text comic in a similar publication to La Caricature, La Charivari, while Les Mésaventures de Mr. Gogo, (1838) appeared in yet another short-lived magazine.

There don’t seem to have been any happy endings for cartoonists or caricaturists or nascent comic artists around this time, and Daumier was another whose life ended badly, and pitiably. Sliding into financial ruin he lost his eyesight and was completely blind by 1873. Having refused the Légion d'Honneur three years previously, he died a pauper in 1878. After his death there were tributes from noted admirers. Famous novelist Charles Baudelaire named Daumier "one of the most important men, not only of caricature, but also of modern art." His colleague Henry James said: "It [presumably his art/caricature/cartooning] attained a certain simplification of the attitude or gesture which has an almost symbolic intensity. His persons represent only one thing, but they insist tremendously on that, and their expression of it abides with us."


Another caricaturist who worked at the same time as Daumier was Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (1803 - 1847), who was usually known simply as J.J. Grandville, Jean-Jacques or just Grandville. His specialty was anthropomorphic animals, using the bodies of humans topped by animal heads, in an interesting style certainly. Whereas later illustrator Beatrix Potter would dress her animal characters, but retain their animal characteristics (squirrels would have bushy tails, paws and claws would still be used) Grandville seems to have obscured or omitted all animal traits below the neck, covering them in gentlemanly clothing or female dresses.

Unfortunately, he too came to a sad end, suffering badly from mental problems, and dying at the age of 44.

Brief mention must also be given to the already-nodded-at La Charivari which, though not exclusively a comic magazine, did provide work for many of the more famous French cartoonists and illustrators, but more importantly must be one of the oldest and longest-running of its type, at least in its own county, as it ran well into the twentieth century, from 1832 - 1937, and was in fact the forerunner of the most famous of them all, the English magazine that dominated and tortured English and foreign politics all through the nineteenth century, Punch.

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Rodolphe Töpffer (1799 - 1846)

And now we come to the man who is universally acknowledged by comic historians as the father of comic artists. You’ll forgive my omitting the umlaut from his name from here on in, as I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep pasting in one word. Born, as you can see, in an auspicious year, on the very cusp of the new century, Topffer was the first ever Swiss comic artist and, despite an eye defect which initially prevented him from drawing, would almost single-handedly invent the medium of comics as we know them today. What was different about his work compared to, say, Daumier, Gillray or Rowlandson, you ask? I’m glad you did ask, because I was asking the same thing, and I got the same answer, the one I’m now going to give to you.

Here it is.

I should probably really say, here they are, because not only were there several important differences, but Topffer’s cartoons were unlike anything that had been produced anywhere before, in the world. First, he didn’t use colour; all his drawing were on white paper in black pen. All were hand-drawn, none featured any political, royal or literary character; all were his own original creations. His comics all followed very clear narratives, text following on from text and picture from picture, leading the reader through the story. His figures were not realistic but stylised. He even invented a new drawing technique, autography, which involved drawing on special paper which was then reversed and traced onto a lithographic stone.

He produced seven different series: Histoire de M. Jabot (created in 1831, first published in 1833), Monsieur Crépin (1837), Les Amours de M. Vieuxbois (created in 1827, published in 1837), 'Monsieur Pencil' (created 1831, first published 1840), Le Docteur Festus (created 1831, first published 1846), Histoire d'Albert (1845) and Histoire de Monsieur Cryptogame (1845). I believe I recognise the second-last there, but will keep my counsel for now. Some of you may also. Quite aware of what he was creating, Topffer even wrote books and essays in which he explained and defended his techniques to a world perhaps sceptical to a new approach to cartoons, and used to the overly flamboyant and exaggerated colour depictions of his predecessors.

Initially though, Topffer was drawing only for himself, and it was famous poet Goethe who convinced him to publish them, though sadly the author of Faust died before he could see how popular his friend’s work would become. As is ever the case with genius though - and more to the point, genius that sells - there are always those ready to rip you off, and so bastardised copies of Topffer’s work were produced by German and French artists, as well as ones in Holland (Netherlands) where his fame lasted all the way to 1972, where a TV series was produced based on one of the spin-offs. And no, it wasn’t the same Albert as on the Genesis album Duke, so my bad there.

Topffer showed that there was a real appetite for comics outside of satirical magazines, and his drawings were published in several magazines and serialised, written specifically for public consumption, and indeed a translated version of Les Amours de M. Vieuxbois, renamed as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, was the first comic in history to sell in the USA. I can’t find any specifics about his death, but I think we can assume he did not die in poverty, and given no mention is made of the usual alcoholism or madness, hopefully he just died of natural causes (although he does seem to have died at an early age so maybe not) and peacefully.


Another Swiss comics artist, though he practiced and became famous for his art in Sweden, was Fritz von Dardel (1817 - 1901). A regular at the court of the Swedish king, Charles XV, he was of course hardly going to be satirising his patron, but instead concentrated on depicting life in Sweden and at the court, though in a sympathetic manner rather than a satirical one.


The mid-to-late nineteenth century was a time when political humour magazine began to flourish in England. Titles like Bell’s Life in London (1822 - 1866) and The Age (1825 - 1846) had whetted the public’s appetite for sharp political satire in cartoon form, but these were newspapers, not at all dedicated to cartoons and certainly not comics. The closest to an actual satirical journal seems to have been Figaro in London (1831- 1839), based on the French humour magazine of the same name, and which led, through its editor, Henry Mayhew, to a name which would loom large over English society, politics and humour for a century or more.


1841 saw a major event in comics history, as the English satirical magazine Punch was published. The brainchild of Henry Mayhew, journalist, playwright and reformist, and Ebenezer Landells, a wood-engraver and illustrator, it was to become the voice of the people over the next 100 years, mercilessly taking to task politicians, kings and queens, celebrities, nobles and trends and fashions with a sharp wit and keen eye for the risible in society. Mayhew did not stay with the publication very long, leaving it after four years, and though it would become incredibly influential in English politics over the next century, initially it failed to capture the public interest until Landells sold to a large publishing house who also handled someone called Dickens, and were able to invest more capital into producing it properly with the new printing techniques just coming into operation.

While Rodolphe Topffer may have been the world’s first real comic artist and virtually invented the medium as a mass appeal venture, Punch can claim the honour of coining the term we’re all so familiar with today. When making some sketches on cardboard for murals which were to be hung in the Houses of Parliament in 1843, the sketches were referred to as cartoons, from the Italian cartone, a term which Punch then used for its political drawings, and which became so popular and well-known that it was soon attributed to any comical drawing, and later of course to animated ones.

I’m not that familiar with Punch, only know of it through its reputation and through some quotes I used or read in other research, but I have the feeling it didn’t run actual comic strips, like its French counterpart, more single cartoons. But it is a very important part of the history of comics, and it would have been a proving ground for some of the wittiest writers and best comic artists over the next hundred years. I won’t pretend I know any of them, other than Gerald Scarfe and John Tenniel, but I’m reliably informed they were all big names. Punch also attracted huge names in the field of literature; apart from Dickens, who took an active part in editing the magazine, there was Kingsley Amis, Quentin Crisp, C.S. Lewis, Somerset Maugham, George Melly, William Makepeace Thackeray and P.G. Wodehouse, to name but a few.

Punch was quickly subject to imitators, pretenders to its comic crown, the most blatant of which was Judy (1867 - 1888) which also undercut its price. This magazine would in fact be the one to spawn perhaps the first real comic character - the first comic strip to concentrate on a single character’s adventures, at any rate - Ally McBeal sorry Ally Sloper, who would go on to have his own weekly self-titled comic in 1884. Sloper would make his debut in Judy in 1867.

Other imitators included Diogenes: A Light Upon Many Subjects (1853) and Fun (1861). This latter was in fact the basis for later magazine Judy, though it played upon Punch’s name. The two, Judy and Fun, were seen as rivals and divided along lines of political ideology, the former conservative while the latter was liberal. Fun made much use of its name in puns (not too hard really) and tried to attract the younger, more savvy reader away from Punch and (ahem) Judy, however in 1871 it was bought by the engravers Dalziel Brothers, who took all the (ahem, again) fun out of it, running it purely as a money-making enterprise. Judy was not laughing for long though, as the Dalziel’s bought it two years later, and for sixteen years the two publications had to run side by side. However by now the sleeping giant which would become the comic book proper was beginning to stir, and a seismic shift would occur in another ten years, as we will see in the next chapter.

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