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An Alternate History of the Comics Medium

  
 
Jack Fear
19:06 / 29.05.03
A bit of a thought-experiment, here. In looking over centuries of art and writing developing in parallel, it constantly surprises me that the comics medium as we know it didn't develop a lot sooner: so many lost opportunities, so many near-misses.

Think of some writer-artists, or writer-artist teams, and what they could have done with the form, had it been available to them. Here's five to start...

Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones: Jonson's character writing was broad, based as it was on the notion of humours, or character types—but the interaction of these personalities lay the foundations for the "team book." Jones's intricate renderings had an immediate appeal: his architecture and costumes were beautifully imagined and realized. Their collaboration Volpone, printed in pamphlet form, ran for twenty-five issues: it was later published in a folio edition by William Jaggard.

In "real" history William Blake was both writer and artist, integrating his words right into his illustrations—and also an early self-publisher, even to the point of carving the plates himself. It's only a short leap to imagine him producing some of his longer works, such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as massive graphic novels. His fantastic, philosophical tales of celestial beings were the Kirby before Kirby.

William Hogarth's OGNs The Rake's Progress and The Harlot's Progress were sharp, bitterly funny attacks on the manners and mores of the times: they're highly praised for their detailed, grotesque art, although some controversy persists over John Gay's claim that he'd ghostwritten much of the dialogue.

Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel's classic series Alice's Adventures, though ostensibly a children's comic, had a devoted adult following as well. Its forty issues, comprising two major story arcs, were reprinted in several lartghe volumes. Carroll and Tenniel's final collaboration, the dark, satiric The Hunting of the Snark, was an OGN aimed squarely at adults.

Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank started producing their strip The Pickwick Papers as a back-up feature in Dickens's magazine: it was Dickens's first dabbling in comics. Encouraged by its reception, he determined to create a longer work in the form, teaming again with Cruikshank to produce the graphic novel Oliver Twist—today considered a masterpiece of the medium.

Your turn.
 
 
penitentvandal
19:32 / 29.05.03
Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley - astonished readers with their frank depiction of sex and sexuality in the groundbreaking Salome, one of the major success stories from the alternative press anthology The Yellow Book. Their epic, however, has to be The Picture of Dorian Gray: a graphic novel in a series of installments, with a definite beginning, middle and end, its completion was frustrated by Wilde's imprisonment and, more importantly, Beardsley's battle with TB - a battle he would eventually lose, leaving fellow talent William Morris to pencil and ink the final issue of 'Dorian' as a memorial to the young artist.
 
 
rakehell
05:10 / 30.05.03
Much like P. Craig Russell would do more than a century later, Dante Gabriel Rossetti would try to adapt classic works into comics. Focusing on the works of Dante Alighieri, he began his ambitious adaptation of "The Divine Comedy" shortly after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1862. Plagued by ill-health and savage critical attacks Rossetti would die in 1882 after completing most of the first third of the project, "Inferno".

Many sketches and notes were discovered after his death and it's only now that audiences have come to appreciate both the scope of the project and the sheer mastery of the medium Rossetti managed to attain.
 
 
grant
15:53 / 30.05.03
Of course, while the Romantics were aping the Renaissance comics masters, those earlier artists were really simply secularizing what was in their era already a well-established (even hoary) sacred form: the illuminated scripture.


Book of Kells, The Four Evangelists, c.800 CE

With roots in early Irish scriptures and iconic church illustrations of the 11th century, the form truly flowered in the 13th century with the work of artists like William de Brailes and Bernard of Parma.

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Two Brailes sketches: David & Goliath layouts and a vivid Moses.

Their experiments with color and frame layout flirted with controversy, but thanks to Pope Gregory IX's keen enthusiasm for picture-stories (and some well-composed flattery by Italian inkers and letterers) the "scripture strip" flourished more than 300 years before Ben Jonson & Inigo Jones' first forays into visual storytelling.


Rough draft of Bernard of Parma's
graphic novel honoring the pope.

Although these comics producers used the same assembly-line techniques as efficiency-obssesed American 20th century pulp comics publishers, they were limited by the lack of mechanical presses. Each page was painstakingly copied by hand, line by line and color by color. The finished products were correspondingly precious. Even a black & white indie offering could cost a laborer several weeks' pay; the big-name books were more usually found chained to the walls of a monastery or locked in the vaults of aristocratic collectors.
 
  
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