The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Monday nights from 7 to 9 PM in New York City. Presentations vary weekly and include everything from historical topics and technical demonstrations to creators presenting their work. Check out upcoming meetings here.
Monday night’s Comics Symposium was hosted by Bluestockings Bookstore and Café and featured a presentation on American comics by N.C. Christopher Couch, which before I begin to recap it, I should mention he described as work in progress.
First, he denounced theories of art history that seek out the triumphalist in any category or medium. Popular questions regarding the course of history always revolve around the pioneers of a certain medium. Furthermore, considering the nature of passionate comic book collectors, devoted fans, and the ridiculously large proportions of the superhero industry in the international markets, the content of comics history reflects the form in which it is viewed. Most of the people involved in the industry are hunters. They hunt for the first editions, the absolute original sources (and the ideal trophies), and therefore they expect the histories of their prized possessions to reflect this hunt.
However, this way of organizing history can potentially decontextualize the items in question from a much wider scope of events. History, like the subject of this symposium, has to be read not only in a linear fashion, but also as a whole: as a constellation of variables and timelines. Given his versatile academic background and personal experiences in comic-book publishing, Couch can offer a wider outlook on comics history.
From Hogarth prints to Japanese scrolls, there are numerous incidents of picture stories in history. One could go back as far as the first Egyptian pictograms or Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts from indigenous nations. Rudolph Topffer’s picture stories might be widely accepted as the original comic strips, but there’s more to the definition of comics than just its form.
On the surface, a comic strip is a sequence of panels in which words and images are juxtaposed to tell a story. Topffer’s creations indeed told stories in both word and image, each possessing equal narrative functions, divided by vertical and horizontal lines. But it only takes a five-minute conversation with a wide-eyed comics consumer/creator to realize there is much more to its formality as a parameter of determining what was the first comic strip. There are emotional factors just as legitimate to the analytical definitions of the medium.
A comic strip is something that makes a person buy the entire newspaper that it’s printed in. It’s something that compels you to inhale the paper as soon as it’s snatched off the newsstand, something that links your childhood memories with your adult ones. It’s a visible transgression and an invisible rite. It’s a profound relationship with both real, collectible materials and fictitious characters. It can be made available to everyone to own and for everyone to hide.
To recreate Couch’s point, I’ll use the two-dimensional paradigm of the comics-world superlatives—speed, power, sensation—which were disclaimed in the introductory paragraph. If it is indeed possible to pinpoint seminal moments in comics history, then there is nothing more superb than the moment the first newspaper issue flew off a brand new (and extraordinarily powerful) rotary press. The comics section inside that newspaper would have been the most significant demonstration of the ability of said rotary press, smacked by metal plates and licked by saturated ink. It would have been the equivalent of the climactic cinematic combination of The Wizard of Oz and the technology of Technicolor filming. The history of the medium begins when the story can finally be told with the best means.
While cartoons and picture stories outside the United States were left to incubate in magazines and various idiosyncratic formats, American artists were given a canvas unmatched in size and circulation. The integration of the funnies into the newspaper was a way of cutting costs, but it gave the medium the legitimacy it needed and automatically injected it directly into people’s homes. In 1895, when Richard F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley cartoons were published in Joseph Pulitzer’s The New York World (folded up like any other Sunday supplement), the comic strip was born as a cultural, commercial, and primarily American phenomenon.
Why American? Because it was first and foremost a product of the economic and social circumstances of America at the time of its conception, and in particular those of the city of New York. The Yellow Kid would appeal to the massive immigrant working class population who were well educated in their native tongues but used the Sunday funnies as an entertaining means to strengthen their English. The stories reflected their lives in the tenements. They were enticing in their familiarity, emitting the same smells, sounds, and voices of the tenements in which the readers lived. Even though the subject matter included ethnic stereotypes or critiques of street life versus the lifestyle of the elite, everyone looked forward to those strips because of their colorful appeal; often, they could conveniently miss the irony of immigrants reading immigrant jokes. The medium’s complexity, its layering of multiple possible readings one atop another, found receptive audiences in children and adults.
Due to the medium’s monetary power and popularity, American artists like Richard F. Outcault, George McManus, and Winsor McCay were given a canvas that their international peers could only dream of. The comics grid developed to the full extent of its tabloid glory under the watch of American publishers. The innovative architectural aesthetics of strips like Little Nemo or the delicious depth of field in a Hogan’s Alley cartoon were the culmination of factors available only in New York at the turn of the last century. They drew inspiration from the ever expanding, breathing, neoclassical architecture of the city itself. Soon after, they were efficiently distributed to the rest of the country by another modern innovation: railroads.
Couch worked closely with Will Eisner during his time as a senior editor at Kitchen Sink Press. From this experience, he related many anecdotes of the inner workings of the comic-book industry and the way it’s perceived by its most prominent leaders. Couch recounted one of Eisner’s stories: upon a remark he had made to Rube Goldberg, the latter pounded on the floor with his cane, bellowing, “We are not artists, we are vaudevillians!” Comics, in Couch’s argument, are synonymous with vaudeville: they’re a staged act, and they’re American. Indeed, immediately after the creation of the first newspaper strips, the beloved characters jumped off the page to grace stages nationwide. If there was still a part of the population (likely outside urban areas) that did not have access to newsstands, vaudeville introduced even them to comics.
The influence worked both ways. The major distinction of American comic strips over European ones, for instance, is their theatricality. The “names” of the protagonists (the Gibson Girls, for example, or Maggie and Jiggs), attributes, slang, sound effects, and narratives follow those of a vaudeville act. The principal themes of the most popular strips were ethnic slander and slapstick, rendering them almost as vivid as live entertainment. Everyone across the nation would have heard the songs and voices of the kids from Hogan’s alley in New York City. Everyone would have encountered the Yellow Kid through merchandise of the famous characters: buttons, billboards, toys, cigarette packets, or chewing-gum cards, thus making him the first equivalent of today’s comics character paradigm. At a time when capitalism and consumerism were the forces leading American society into the twentieth century, comics, a medium with mass appeal, seeped into the roots of American culture deeper and faster than in any place and at any time in the world.
Couch pointed out that the urban landscape at the time of the inception of comics as an American art form had left a geological imprint on the form itself. The structural evolution of the comics page, like the shifting of tectonic plates, echoes the industrial zeitgeist both in shape (panel after panel after panel) and in its narrative structure (event after event after event, which is unique to American adventure fiction plots). The electric city smog, heavy with fumes from the steam-driven rotary presses, spitting out page after page of news twenty-four hours a day and polluting the city with the noise of the new.
At the beginning of his lecture, Couch disclaimed the notion of American exceptionalism as a way to explain the ascendance of comics into its prominent cultural role and to which to attribute its liberal and democratic image. The reason for its evolution shouldn’t be researched exclusively through an ideological perspective. On the contrary, the medium has a greater association with powerful publishers who benefitted from its capitalistic value, and later from the general population’s disillusionment with the American government after the Great Depression and World War II and embrace of transgressive, graphic stories of horror and crime. Later on in the twentieth century, comics were shaped in response to severe censorship and regulations against its “corruptive” effects on youth, and they finally exploded in the late 1960s as the powerful underground comix movement that influenced comics culture worldwide.
In this light, the road to the first graphic novel was paved by a line of cunning commercial developments, successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams because of American culture’s readiness for these innovations. The first comic books were the result of a marketing solution to recycle old comic strips by reprinting them and giving them away with the paper. The first magazines filled cover to cover with fiction were the brainchild of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, who latched onto the idea that people would want to buy and read serialized stories, and so created a line of adventure- and action-themed comics magazines. The ground for this comics market was already fertile from a long history of pulp fiction and dime novels readership leading all the way back to the Civil War.
The fiction magazines were coveted by children and young adults who watched their parents read the lush, beautiful Life and Time magazines that started to come out during the post-Depression era.
It’s not hard to explain the immediate popularity of superhero stories in the wake of the war and their embrace by American soldiers overseas. When these soldiers returned home, this same embrace of comics posed a threat to wholesome familial life in corporate America and led to the institution of the Comics Code. After a decade and half of severe censorship and dumbing-down of the medium, a new non-conformist aesthetic, underground comix, emerged. “Will Eisner’s A Contract With God,” Couch said, “is not the first graphic novel, but it is the first graphic novel.” It was received as such by readers who had been deprived of the comics they adored as children after the Comics Code lobotomized their favorite medium. As adult consumers, they craved comics in a mature and intellectually stimulating form. All of these uniquely American comics tropes—horror and crime, adventure comics, superhero comics, and underground fanzines—were crucial to the popular reception of the first graphic novel and its exciting evolution. Lastly, the genres and aesthetics of American comics became the most influential in comics history due to the dramatic (and arguably aggressive) influence of the American market in the global economy.
Image 1: Image, engraving by George Edward Perine, King’s Handbook of New York City, 1893. Collection: The Skyscraper Museum
Image 2: Richard F. Outcault, The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley, 1896
Image 3: Winsor Mccay, Little Nemo in Slumberland
Image 4: Richard F. Outcault, McFadden’s Row of Flats, The New York Journal
Image 5: George McManus, Bringing Up Father, King Features Syndicate
Image 6: Cover of True Crime Comics
Image 7: Cover of The Curse of Capistrano, Johnston McCulley, 1924, Grosset & Dunlap
Image 8: A selection of covers, Life Magazine
Image 9: Super Man #3
Image 10: Will Eisner, A contract with God, 1978, Baronet Books
About the author: Keren Katz is the illustrating half of the Katz Sisters duo. She is also the half that is not fictitious. Their latest graphic novel is The Night Poetry Class in Room 1001. You can check out more of her projects here.
