The origins of comics

The origins of comics

Many volumes have been created to describe the history of comics from its beginnings to today. But the fundamental theme of what came before the comic had never been addressed before. Which painters, which artists, which newspaper illustrators gave rise to this extraordinary means of communication?

This essay, richly illustrated and award-winning in France, is published for the first time in Italy and will lead the reader to the early nineteenth century, up to the early twentieth century.

From sequential painters to when the great American newspaper publishers of the 20th century discovered that Sunday cartoons sold more copies. An extraordinary flight of fancy on comics, before comics.

«Comic strips are an expressive form and an intellectual field weak in terms of capacity for cultural impact – a well-known and still rather evident fact. Less obvious are the reasons for all this. If for some the causes are "external", attributable to the institutions and personalities who defined the cultural policies of the twentieth century, for others the nodes are all "internal" and reside in the extensive children's and entertainment production, enriched by the explosion of comics copyright only in the 1960s and the graphic novel in the 1990s. All true, but a little too schematic.

And one way to overcome this prospective polarization is to observe a different front: one of the reasons for this fragility is the fact that, around comics, some historical coordinates and theoretical questions have remained unexplored for a long time.

Thierry Smolderen's work is, to date, the most important research contribution to have welded these two dimensions, historical and theoretical. A brilliant, documented and inventive attempt to offer decisive elements for the construction of the set of ideas useful for a richer and more solid ground of knowledge around comics.

The subject of this volume is the history of comics, in particular the past, distant and archaeological history of the early days in which this medium began to establish itself. However, in the plural title, origins, Smolderen affirms not only a historical perimeter, but an interpretative perspective: the fact that one can - and must - retrace the auroral phase of the vehicle not so much as a technological invention, as one might expect from discourses on the affirmation of different media (photography, radio, cinema, television), as much as a set of expressive, technical, editorial factors and ideas which, partly together and partly in parallel, have "given shape" to what which, sometime later, we would have taken to calling comics.

(From the preface to the volume by Matteo Stefanelli)