Some people can only draw. They might become
artists. Others can only write. They might become authors. But
some can both write and draw…Some people can only draw. They might become
artists. Others can only write. They might become authors. But
some can both write and draw…
We humans have a wonderful ability to believe in something that's not true. It's called fantasy. Fantasy perhaps is a consequence of language, because using language means calling objects and other things something they really aren't: a combination of sounds. Our fantasy is what political and religious prophets use to trick us, it makes us able to imagine useful and entertaining things that didn't exist before and to break the bounds that our instincts and the construction of our bodies set for us. We use our language to tell each other things which can be true or untrue or something in-between, and we can choose to believe in them or not. This information can be useful and/or interesting for us whether it's true or not, and this is why the art of storytelling has been vital for our culture from the moment language was invented. Another means for telling stories is with pictures. A picture can say more than a thousand words. But some words can say more than a thousand pictures. And this is why a combination usually is best.
Pictorial tales have been in existence for
a long time. Stone age people made paintings in caves and carved
images on shoreside cliff faces. What they actually tried to communicate
is hard to say. The Egyptians painted fabulous scenes and illustrated
tales in their tombs. The Greeks decorated their pottery with
scenes from famous myths. The Romans and various other conquerors
made triumphal arcs and other monuments with representations of
their exploits. Medieval monks transformed bibles and other holy
manuscripts into pictorial books. In draughty old houses it was
a useful practice to cover the walls with carpets, and many of
these were decorated with pictorial representations of famous
tales and historical events. In such pictorial tales, the most
important scenes would usually be represented with one frame each.
Text and graphic elements were commonly combined, and often the
text was embellished to form a decorative element of the picture.
The development of xylography in the 15th century resulted in numerous pictorial tales that were published mostly for propaganda purposes. And when the art of printing came about, new markets were created for the illustrators, who grew in numbers and illustrated an endless row of printed tales. These illustrations mainly acted as supplements to the written tale. But in the bustling political life of Britain in the 1700s, a number of satirical magazines emerged, and some of them had illustrators who became famous in their own right and published satirical drawings that were unconnected with any written story in the magazine. Often, these were accompanied by explanatory text, sometimes the text was placed under or outside the picture, but in other cases, it was placed inside and formed an element of the picture itself. Sometimes the artist allowed the people in the picture to make statements, and occasionally, they used a bubble filled with text and supplied with an extension pointing towards the person's mouth to imply speech. Usually, these drawings consisted only of one picture, but if the artist wanted to express a temporal development, they were occasionally extended to two or more pictures.
Entertainment literature boomed in the 1800s, and cartoons were a necessary ingredient. Often, the jokes were extended to several panels, usually with text under the panels, but sometimes with no text at all, occasionally published in books or graphical letters on their own. Between 1833 and 1844, the Swiss teacher and author Rudolphe Töpffer published six albums of pictorial tales where the scenes were broken down in several pictures to depict the development of the scene. For the first time, motion was depicted in the pictorial tale. Then, from 1858, the German cartoonist Wilhelm Busch published Max und Moritz, a series of tales utilising the same principle, often with text inside his panels. It became enormously popular and appeared in several European countries. The main feature of the series was two severely misbehaved kids and their pranks.
One important type of entertaining literature
was the daily newspaper, and with technical printing innovations
in the USA around 1880, these became important social factors.
In the mid-1890s, the market was becoming saturated, and one of
the most important weapons in the fierce competitive war that
ensued was the coloured Sunday supplement where the cartoonists
could display their talents on entire pages. In 1896, Richard
F. Outcault experimented with a new yellow colour on one of the
minor figures in his series "Hogan's Alley" in New York
World, and for inexplicable reasons, it suddenly became amazingly
popular under a new name "The Yellow Kid". In desperation,
World's main rivals New York Journal next year stole Wilhelm Busch'
idea and published their own comic strip under the name "The
Katzenjammer Kids". This newspaper war lead to a dramatic
growth in the following years.
The comics in this early golden
age were mostly about crazy kids who made the most fantastic exploits
in the Busch pattern. But soon it was discovered that most of
the readers were adults, and thus came the family series, like
Bringing up Father (1913), Gasoline Alley (1918), and Blondie
(1930). The depression in the 1930s brought a flourish of adventure
comics, strongly influenced by science fiction from the start
with Buck Rogers, Tarzan and Tintin (all 1929), Terry and the
Pirates, Mandrake and Flash Gordon (all 1934). Some of these made
their way from the newspapers into special comics magazines. Superman
arrived from Krypton in 1938 and knocked the comics market clean
out of its senses. The Superman clones became numberless, and
in the late 40s, about 80% of all comics were superhero comics
featuring characters of various supernatural gifts. But the market
was saturating again, the readers were difficult to please, and
some of the new artists used sex and violence to a previously
unknown extent as a means of attraction. The "moral majority"
reacted, and in the McCarthy era it was easy to launch aggressive
attacks on the comics industry. As a means of defence, the American
comics distribution syndicates agreed to employ a self-censorship
code and survived, but seriously disadvantaged. Adults stopped
reading comics, they had become bland and sterile and weren't
interesting anymore. In compensation, a series of underground
comics grew up as a refuge for the comics lovers. The censorship
code existed for more than 30 years. Now, everything is allowed
again, and it shows. But was it too late? Comics are on the retreat
from attacks by computer games and the Internet. Adventure comics
have been dying out. But humour comics still are a success story.
In Norway today, comics seem to go through a golden age with quality
artists such as Frode Øverli, Lise Myhre, Jason and Karine
Haaland. And comics still have serious advantages in relation
to film and animation: handy and portable format, static pictures
which you can admire as long as you wish, and yet are part of
a dynamic story, all the things that happen between the frames...
Some Norwegian comics publishers:
http://www.bladkompaniet.no/tegneserier/
http://www.pluto.no/doogie/ncp/index.html
http://www.jippicomics.com/
(the publishers of Jason)
A Norwegian website (in English!) about Sandman: http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/sandman.html
The official Asterix pages: http://www.asterix.tm.fr/
Comics archives and databases:
http://www.unitedmedia.com/
http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/~erikt/comics/welcome.html
Cartoon laws of physics: http://www.gshotts.com/HUMOR/cartoonphysics.htm
The Comic Book Periodic Table of the Elements: http://www.uky.edu/Projects/Chemcomics/