Update: comic strips of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News

Thierry Smolderen has posted an article with numerous examples of the comic strips of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News HERE.

A. C. Corbould II

“Red Shirt and Broncho Bill invited in Hertfordshire”, A.C. Corbould, The Graphic, 11/12/1887. Right click and open in new window for large-size image. There were four Corbould's in the wood engraving business: Aster Chantrey, Edward Henry, Henry and Richard. 

A.C. Corbould

“A Midnight trip to Brighton”, A.C. Corbould, The Graphic 12/31/1887. Right click and open in new window for large-size image. There were four Corbould's in the wood engraving business: Aster Chantrey, Edward Henry, Henry and Richard. 

Cuthbert Bede (1827-1889)

One of the first ever attempts at a newspaper comic strip continuity was “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, An Oxford Freshman,” by Cuthbert Bede in the Illustrated London News. There were only two installments, one in December 1851, and one in January 1852. “The Adventures of Verdant Green” was published in hardcover in 1853 by Nathaniel Cooke and can be read HERE. ‘Cuthbert Bede’ was the pseudonym of the Rev. Edward Bradley (1827-1889), who contributed articles and cartoons to the Illustrated London News. 

ILN Supplements were edited by Mark Lemon, who was editing Punch at the same time. Bradley/Bede contributed to the London Figaro, Bentley's, Sharpe's, Cruikshank's magazines, Punch, The Graphic, and The Illustrated London News. 

Cuthbert Bede, in Notes & Queries 6th S. II. Nov. 6, '80, wrote that “Douglas Jerrold, W. Blanchard Jerrold, John Leech, Shirley Brooks, Tenniel, Mayhew, and others of “the Punch men” were among the contributors to these supplements. In addition to some stories and other papers, I also contributed to these supplements a series of sketches, “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman,” which were drawn and engraved to appear, a page at a time, in Punch; but as one page of the Illustrated London News was equal to two of Punch, Mark Lemon asked me to transfer the sketches to his supplements in the former paper. When three sheets of the sketches had appeared the late Mr. Ingram changed his mind concerning these special supplements and brought them to a sudden close. This led to the “Verdant Green” woodcuts being subsequently “written up to,” and issued with letter-press in a book form. Therefore it might be said of it that it was a book written in spite of itself.” 

 Image: “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, An Oxford Freshman Part I” courtesy Thierry Smolderen

 Image: “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, An Oxford FreshmanPart II” courtesy E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra

Portrait: Obituary, The Graphic, 28 Dec 1889 (Bradley died 12 Dec 1889)

See also The comic strips of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News HERE

A.S. Boyd and Arthur M. Horwood

“An Eastern Imbroglio”, A.S. Boyd and Arthur M. Horwood, The Graphic, Xmas supplement, 1896. Right click and open in new window for large-size image.

Reginald Cleaver

 “An Unfortunate Huntress”, Reginald Cleaver, The Graphic, Xmas supplement, 1899. Right click and open in new window for large-size image.

The comic strips of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News

The comic strips of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News: an announcement by Thierry Smolderen, author of Naissances de la bande dessinée.

I've been holding this (more or less) secret for the last six months, but I guess now is the time to announce the big news: hundreds of comic strip stories of the highest artistic quality, published between the 1850s and the first World War, have been completely ignored by historians and scholars despite the fact that they were published in the leading illustrated British weeklies of the second half of the 19th century (1).

I know the claim sounds quite preposterous — indeed, I scarcely believed my own eyes when this material progressively came to light, after a serendipitous find in an antiquarian bookshop in Wales. I now have about 200 tear sheets in my possession.

I'll present the results of my research Saturday the 28th, at 14:00, in the auditorium of the CIBDI, in Angouleme, and in an extensive and fully illustrated article on “Neuvieme Art 2.0” at the end of this month.

Here's a little foretaste of what I've found:

The publication of comic strips started early in the Christmas supplements of the Illustrated London News (the first example I was able to find appears in the Christmas supplement of the Illustrated London News in December 1852).

Two major illustrators, Frederick Barnard (known for his illustrations of Dickens' works) and Harry Furniss (known for his illustration of Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno), started publishing magnificent large format pages in the Christmas supplements of the Illustrated London News in the late 1860s.

The ILN's big rival -- The Graphic -- started publishing great stories in colour in their own seasonal supplements from the 1870s on: Randolph Caldecott, William Ralston, J.C. Dollman, Reginald Cleaver, A.S. Boyd,H.M. Brock, Tom Browne, are amongst the best of the artists who published comic strip stories in colour in these supplements.

But that's only the least surprising part of the discovery, because during the 1870s, the two large periodicals also started publishing more and more regularly, in their standard issues, some extraordinary pieces of “comic strip journalism” that shed a completely new light on the role of the comic strip form in the emergence of modern visual mass media.

Their regular contributors (Harry Furniss, A.C. Corbould, Joseph Nash, William Ralston, Reginald Cleaver, George Durand, Robert Barnes, A.S. Boyd, Mabel Ince, and many others) combined the light humoristic tone and the flexible graphic imagination of the comic strip artist with the reportorial skill of the visual journalist, to produce sophisticated news stories (in true comic strip format) about sporting, military, or other special events that they personally witnessed (snowstorms, balloon races, naval manoeuvres, exhibitions etc.). Dozens and dozens of news stories of the kind appeared in the pages of the two weeklies.

But the reportorial output of the Graphic took a whole new dimension when the periodical started accepting, from all corners of the British Empire, sketches describing “interesting incidents” (as the editors put it), sent by readers and special correspondents. From the sketches and short description sent by the readers, the artists of the Graphic produced mind boggling comic strips, in one or two pages, reporting (always with a smile) all kind of traveling incidents, some at home (excursions, hunt, etc.) but most of them reflecting the civilian and military life in foreign countries, expeditions in Africa, pleasure cruises on the Mediterranean, transcontinental passages on military ships etc.

Sometimes surprisingly realistic but most often comedic -- and always inventive and surprising -- these forgotten comic strips are bound to change our view on the historical evolution and artistic range of the comic strip form.

(1) The Illustrated London News and The Graphic were clearly the most interesting in terms of circulation and quality, but The Illustrated Times also published comic strips in their supplements in the 1850s, and comic strips were also frequent in a fourth London illustrated weekly, The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News.)

ILLUSTRATIONS:

1) “An Unfortunate Huntress”, Reginald Cleaver, The Graphic, Xmas supplement, 1899

2) “An Eastern Imbroglio”, A.S. Boyd and Arthur M. Horwood, The Graphic, Xmas supplement, 1896

3) “Tommy Atkins, first interview with an Octopus”, W. Ralston, The Graphic, 06/16/1894

4) “Red Shirt and Broncho Bill invited in Hertfordshire”, A.C. Corbould, The Graphic, 11/12/1887

5) “A Midnight trip to Brighton”, A.C. Corbould, The Graphic 12/31/1887

Naissances de la bande dessinée

Many of us in North America may not be aware that a quiet revolution has taken place in world views on the topic of the origins of the comics, and the pre-history of the comic strip. Much of the research on origins has taken place in Europe; in Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and diverse other places, and is often not available in the English language.

I think we can trace the beginnings of the change in perception to 1966 when the Smithsonian Institution put on an exhibit honoring 75 Years of the Comics, showing the growth and development of form in the newspaper strip. One year later an international exposition on comic strips and their creators was held at the Louvre hosted by Claude Moliterni, director of the French Society of Research in Illustrated Literature. The exhibition traced the evolution of figurative drawings from carved Trojan columns to space-age comic strips using slide projections and panel blow -ups of comics from America, Europe, Argentina and Mexico. Among the early pioneers in historical research was David Kunzle, with a massive two volume History of the Comic Strip (1973) which searched for precursors from 1450 to the late nineteenth century, and Denis Gifford’s Victorian Comics (1976) with its emphasis on British beginnings.

An impressive recent book on beginnings is Thierry Smolderen’s Naissances de la bande dessinée De William Hogarth à Winsor McCay, published in late 2009 by Les Impressions Nouvelles. Thierry Smolderen is a Brussels born scriptwriter, essayist, theorist and Professor at the European School of Visual Arts. His articles have appeared in the periodicals Les Cahiers de comics, 9th Art, and Comic Art and he has been writing scenarios for graphic albums since the eighties.

Naissances de la bande dessinée (“The Many Births of the Comics”) studies the parallel growth, and world-wide diffusion of influences, from the days of William Hogarth to the modern baroque stylings of Winsor McCay. Smolderen starts with Hogarth, and rightly so, as he was the originator of commercial reproducible caricature in Britain and strongly influenced Rodolphe Töpffer and George Cruikshank, the two giants whose experiments would have the most influence on the practitioners of 19th century comic art. Hogarth’s Harlots Progress was sold by subscription for one guinea, and the buyer was supplied with a bonus in the shape of an illustrated ticket. Hogarth’s famous pictorial dramas had a tremendous effect on the nascent novel, the drama, book illustration, sequential caricature, and even social reform.

Smolderen's most surprising claim is that Töpffer, contrary to Kunzle’s theory of him as “Father of the Comics,” had no interest in promoting the modern comic strip, that instead he invented the form in order to ridicule G. O. Lessing’s theory of poetry as a sequential art, which was put forth in The Laocoon: or the Limits of Poetry and Painting: “The rule is this, that succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.” Töpffer’s ironic use of sequential graphics was meant to expose the fallacies of Lessing’s ideas, and Töpffer showed little interest in the comic albums produced by those artists he influenced.

Naissances de la bande dessinée investigates the role played by various media in the organic development of the comic strip; in novels, the romantic gestures of the stage melodrama, the rise of book illustration, photography, magic lanterns, and the cinema. George Cruikshank’s spectacular use of sequential illustrations in Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard was inspired by the pictorial drama of William Hogarth, and turn of the century comic strips by A. B. Frost were influenced by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies in human and animal locomotion.

The book is illustrated throughout with examples of sequential art drawn from all corners of the globe. Samples from all the major actors are presented in sharp focus reproductions: Töpffer, Cruikshank, Cham, Dore, Grandville, Caran d’Ache, Doyle, Oberlander, Christophe, Frost, Sullivant, Outcault and McCay. The whole is so information rich that it comes as a surprise to find it weighing in at a mere 144 pages.

Smolderen’s book is a graphic reminder that the comic strip was not the invention of the American comic supplements at the turn of the century. The comic strip was the result of a century (possibly more) of world-wide experimentation by artists and writers with a mass appreciative audience drawn from every class of society. There was very little that was original to the comic supplements. Comic strippers like Frederick Burr Opper and F. M. Howarth had been supplying comic journals with sequential art since the 1870’s, the format of the Yellow Kid followed Hogarth and Cruikshank, the Katzenjammer Kids were borrowed from the German bilderbogen of Wilhelm Busch, and even Little Nemo’s technicolor dream-world had been anticipated by the artists of Quantin’s l'Imagerie artistique of the 1880’s.

The comic strip was the result of a continuous diffusion of world theory, experimentation, and technology from the days of Hogarth to the present. The history of the comic strip is a world history and we can only hope that Naissances de la bande dessinée and other essential works of European comic scholarship will someday be translated into English for the education and enjoyment of North American audiences. Strangely enough my search of Google blogs and newspapers for English reviews of Naissances de la bande dessinée was a dismal failure, not one English language review could be found.

William Hogarth (1697 – 1764)

I was reading Thierry Smolderen's recent [and well-recommended] book "Naissances de la bande dessinée De William Hogarth à Winsor McCay" which brought to mind this ancient article "Memoirs of the Celebrated William Hogarth," from the November 1780 Universal Magazine. I have cleaned my photocopies up a bit -- in the original the type bled through the paper so the reproduction is not of the best quality.

McCay

“McCay” is a series of four albums by scenarist Thierry Smolderen and artist Jean-Philippe Bramanti first published in 2000 by Delcourt in France. The main character is the Platinum Age comic strip artist Winsor McCay. Smolderen described the series for the Platinum Comics Group as dealing with “an imaginary relationship between McCay and his alter-ego named Silas -- an incredibly good draughtsman himself, whom young McCay met in Detroit while working at the Wonderland dime-museum. If McCay is a “dream” oriented guy, Silas is very much on the nightmarish side of Slumberland: an anarchist and violent revolutionary. Thinking Silas had died in a police assault in Chicago in the early nineties, McCay adopted his friend's name when working on the dreams of a rarebit fiend series. But their path will cross dramatically again and again, because both have a very deep and disturbing secret dating back from their Detroit days.”

It’s tempting to imagine what a mess such a concept could have been in the hands of less capable artists. Smolderen’s scenario is highly cinematic and except for the words “Detroit 1889” which open the book the story is told almost entirely in dialogue. The book is a fantasy-biography told with a brisk simplicity by writer and artist from the point of view of an invisible cameraman. The surface reality of the comic strip is broken by the intrusion of dreams, psychology, surrealism and McCay’s own vivid imagination. Panels are large, sometimes empty, sometimes detailed with the occasional full-page drawing.

Smolderen and Bramanti have crafted an intelligent, engrossing, psychological comic unlike any other comic I can bring to mind. The cover of Volume I, “The Haunted Swing,” is an audacious piece of design confronting the viewer with the outline of a bowler-hatted head floating in a nebulous grey void. The impressionistic artwork of Bramanti is close kin to the sketches of Toulouse-Lautrec and the poster artists of la Belle Epoque; an American subject told with a Gallic flair. The colors yellow, brown and olive dominate throughout, imparting a sun-dappled air of nostalgia to the proceedings. “McCay” is a comic series of the highest order, deep, intelligent, haunting, and unique. I’m not sure if all the volumes are still in print (I have only recently managed to finish the series through a local French University) but if you can find the complete series you have found “the stuff dreams are made of,” a wonderful experiment in biographical homage that I’m sure would have impressed Winsor McCay himself.