The origins of comics

This is a seminal study that remaps the history of the comic form, placing its beginnings well before Rodolphe Topffer. In The Origins of Comics, Thierry Smolderen explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basi [...]
Visa längre beskrivning

This is a seminal study that remaps the history of the comic form, placing its beginnings well before Rodolphe Topffer. In The Origins of Comics, Thierry Smolderen explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Topffer, Gustave Dore, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images - satirical images in particular - were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies at the end of the 19th-century led to a new visual culture.