A Hastily Researched History of Comics. Part 1
Why not, right? I mean, I’ve been drawing them pretty steadily for a year now, so I might as well have a look at where all this idiocy started.
Generally, ‘comics’ as you know them now, fall under a thing called ‘sequential art’ which as the name suggests is art, but it’s all sequential, which sadly doesn’t mean it’s covered in sequins, but is rather composed of a series of panels intended to be read in sequence. Before newspapers and magazines (and printing in general) hit the scene, this art form was mainly confined to ornamental design on buildings and various monuments; the most well known surviving example of which is the outrageously narcissistic Trajan’s Column in Rome.
As far as columns go, it’s really, really, quite impressively big. (you can look at it in detail here) There’s a copy of it in one of the biggest rooms in the V&A Museum in London, and even then they had to lop it in half just to fit it all in. All told the entire thing is about 35 meters high, which is around the height of a ten story building, and coiling continuously all the way up this thing is an incredibly detailed pictorial history sculpted into the sides of the column. The column was commissioned by a guy called Trajan, the Emperor at the time, and the story it tells (in typical Roman style) is all about how Trajan kicked the shit out of some people called the Dacians (you don’t need to know much about them, other than that they used to live in Dacia, which is mostly where Moldova and Romania are now and they had some pretty good beards). Unsurprisingly, Trajan gets mentioned something like 60 times over the course of the story the column tells. Thing is, as beautiful and amazing as the design of this column was, as far as understanding anything on it was concerned it’s almost entirely useless. While the first few rings of the story are easily visible from the ground while you elbow other tourist aside, as the story gradually moves higher and higher up the column the intricately carved figures become harder and harder to see, until the entire thing blurs together into incomprehensible noise. If anything, the designers really should have built this thing sideways, and possibly had it slowly rotating like a big classical marble spit roast (for a civilisation that invented plumbing, surely this would have been in the realm of possibility). However, Romans being Romans wanted something a bit more grand, and rather than creating a useful educational tool, opted instead to create what is essentially a very large middle finger directed at whatever was left of the recently vanquished Dacians.
Another notable example of sequential art is probably the Bayeux Tapestry, which isn’t actually a tapestry, and probably wasn’t made in Bayeux. Much like Rome’s big marble ‘Fuck You’ to the Dacians, the tapestry follows the events of a battle, in this case The Battle of Hastings in which William the Conqueror brought over a whole lot of new words to England and killed quite a few people (including the ruling king) in the process. The entire thing is about 70 metres long, which makes it a bit of a struggle if you’re planning on reading it in bed.
As far at these two bits of sequential art go, they weren’t the most comedic affairs. To be fair, whoever made the Bayeux tapestry had a bit of fun, the scene where King Harold cops an arrow in the face is captured in all its glory. It’s not entirely clear if he did actually receive an arrow to the head, other sources mention that a few of his limbs were chopped off, and there’s speculation that someone might have received a demotion for cutting off his penis (which is fair enough I guess as far as ‘reasons for demotion’ go). There’s also other stuff on the tapestry which people are still a little confused about, namely this panel of a cleric smacking a woman in the face while a man does a naked crab-core dance apparently under the floorboards.
Nobody really knows who the woman Ælfgyva is, or why she’s being assulted by a Cleric, much less the naked man underneath. There’s a good chance that after drawing the first 35 meters of the thing, the embroiderer just got a little bit bored and started adding in a few misogynistic filler panels, if only to keep the editors on the ball, which evidently, they weren’t.
Full blown satire didn’t really hit the art form until a guy named William Hogarth arrived on the scene. A guy so good at this kind of thing that this kind of thing is now often called ‘Hogarthian’ and London deemed him famous enough to name a roundabout after him (which is a big deal in London). Here he is with his pug.
Hogarth and his pug were hanging out in London during the 18th century, initially working as an engraver (just him, not the pug) but quickly began doing his own thing. It was after returning from a trip to France during which he was arrested under suspicion of being a spy that he painted one of his earliest pieces of satirical work, or more accurately, a fairly xenophobic ridiculing of the French.
O the Roast Beef of Old England (‘The Gate of Calais’) 1748, takes a massive piece of roast beef as a symbol of British wealth and power, and surrounds it with a bunch of offensive French caricatures. It also stands as possibly the only piece of British art celebrating roast beef, a fact that any British roast beef and/or art historian should be very disappointed by. (Here’s a more detailed description of everything going on in the scene)
As far at the road to today’s standard comic arrangement goes, it’s Hogarth’s more well known work that could be viewed as a kind of early proto-comic at the very beginning of that road.
A Harlot’s Progress, consisting of six panels, shows the story of a young woman who moves to London, becomes a mistress, falls into prostitution, does a stint in prison, before eventually dying of venereal disease leaving behind a young child and not much else.
Admittedly, not as funny as his tongue-in-cheek French bashing material, but the satirizing of London’s gradual urban decay at the time was viciously unforgiving. He followed it up with a second series, ostensibly a similar story but from a male perspective, entitled A Rake’s Progress. You can still see the original paintings of this series over at the incredible Sir John Soane Museum, which might just be London’s most underrated tourist attraction.
These sequences in turn set up a style of illustration that The Glasgow Looking Glass began utilizing almost 100 years later in 1825, and which has, relatively recently, been pinpointed as the first bona-fide comic in the modern sense. The Glasgow Looking Glass was published by a guy called William Heath, who eventually closed down the publication after only a few years, apparently due to having to leave the city thanks to a bunch of debts he’d managed to run up in various drinking establishments.
Before the publication did come to an end however, Heath managed to fill it with drawings satirising the events happening at the time. These drawings included some new additions that are now fairly common in regards to comics, namely the use of speech bubbles, and also the now ubiquitous sign-off “To Be Continued” — the same of which can hopefully be said about this article.
