{"id":546,"date":"2019-08-03T19:43:30","date_gmt":"2019-08-03T23:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/extra-inks.comicssociety.org\/?p=546"},"modified":"2020-01-22T08:49:50","modified_gmt":"2020-01-22T13:49:50","slug":"what-if-comics-began-in-the-16th-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/extra-inks.comicssociety.org\/2019\/08\/03\/what-if-comics-began-in-the-16th-century\/","title":{"rendered":"What If… Comics Began in the 16th Century?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With this installment Extra Inks launches what we hope will be a recurring feature, tentative manifestos designed not to be definitive but to question some of our assumptions as a field in order to generate ongoing discussion. Send on suggestions for future “What Ifs?” to <\/em>extra-inks@comicssociety.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The definitions that have shaped comics studies emphasize formal features. Karin Kukkonen, for example, defines comics as \u201ca medium that communicates through images, words, and sequence,\u201d and Scott McCloud\u2019s defines it as \u201cjuxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and\/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.\u201d While these definitions come in many varieties, they share in common an insistence on sequence, <\/em>juxtaposition and deliberate order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A definition is only as good as the communication it facilitates about a shared object of inquiry, and clearly by this criterion, this definition of \u201ccomics\u201d has been a success. But personally I find it less productive of late in terms of the kinds of questions the study of comics has led me to\u2014and especially in terms of the kinds of historical connections I find myself wanting to be able to explain. And so I find myself inhabiting a kind of parallel universe to comics studies, one in which we define our object not as a form but a practice: comics defined as the products of the art of cartooning<\/em>. In this parallel universe, what are termed \u201csingle-panel cartoons\u201d\u2014Far Side<\/em> or Family Circus<\/em>, editorial or gag cartooning\u2014live alongside the longest of serial and multipage comics. In this world, comics is not born in the later years of the 19th<\/sup> century, but traces its origins in the West to the late 16th<\/sup> century, bound up with early modern print and the technological and market changes that would shape its evolution in the centuries to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are terminological challenges with this definition, of course, before we even get to other problems it might raise. For one thing, the very category of \u201ccartoon\u201d is itself something of a neologism, first disseminated in the pages of Punch<\/em> beginning in the 1840s (the profession of \u201ccartoonist\u201d follows a few years later). Nonetheless, I settle on the word because today most makers of \u201ccomics\u201d identify themselves as cartoonists (even as few describe what they make as \u201ccartoons\u201d). It is a start, it seems to me, towards breaking the presentism of comics studies (and of comics in general).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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John Leech, Punch, <\/em>July 15, 1843<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Of course, cartooning did not originate in the illustrated magazines of the 1840s, having circulated for more than two centuries under an earlier denomination: caricature<\/em>. Caricature began as an attempt to break from the Renaissance idealization of the human form through the practice of \u201cloading\u201d a portrait such that something otherwise invisible about the individual might be revealed. As Ernst Gombrich put it, the earliest caricaturists did \u201cnot seek the perfect form but the perfect deformity, thus penetrating through the mere outward appearance to the inner being.\u201d As the practice spread beyond its birthplace in northern Italy\u00ad, other characteristics came to be associated, including radical simplification\u2014the use of the fewest possible strokes to arrive at an essence. Freedom of line did not translate easily to the technologies of early printing and so would not flourish until the more fluid engravings of Rowlandson and the lithographs of Daumier. But the ideals of iconicity, simplification, exaggeration, and alchemical insight were there from the start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While all today would agree that this is an example of cartooning, most would resist my attempt to identify this or the work of, say, the 17th<\/sup>-century caricaturist Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (seen below) as \u201ccomics.\u201d After all, our object of study involves \u201cnarrative\u201d and the passage of time (which, we are told inheres necessarily in sequentiality); no story is told, no time passes in a single image. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, from L’Arti per via <\/em>(1660)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I would argue that this print of a peddler of quack medicines does indeed tell a story, just as surely as it represents the passage of time. The snake exiting stage left at the feet of the performer tells of dangers to come and of the threat to the public welfare the itinerant snake-handler represents once admitted into the town square. The onlookers pictured behind him reflecting a range of different responses to what is being sold from the stage, including two who seem to be ominously consulting behind his back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what happens when we see this print as it was presented by Mitelli, not as an isolated image but as part of a series. This is one of forty such images from his Arts of the Streets<\/em> published in 1660. Here is a small selection from the series, with our medical charlatan in his place in the procession:<\/p>\n\n\n\n