Development of the comic
If the comic is viewed as a work that can be assigned to the sequential visual arts , the beginnings of its development can be traced back to the Stone Age .
The publication of Hogan's Alley (later Yellow Kid ) by Richard F. Outcault in Pulitzer's New York World from July 1895 is considered the actual birth of modern comics .
Prehistoric times
Already in prehistoric times, more than 30,000 years ago, humans painted animals of their world on rock walls (humans are seldom found, landscapes not at all) and at that time already had the ability to use outlines and indicated lines and the resulting abstract lines To recognize the content behind it - one of the important aspects of the comic, in which two points at the same level, below a horizontal line and all enclosed by a circle, represent a face for everyone to recognize. In the cave of Chauvet on the Ardèche in France , the first drawing of an animal (rhinoceros) was created, the body outline of which was provided with several borders and with which the first representation of a moving animal succeeded.
The painting in the Lascaux cave is generally considered to be the first depiction of the course of time . Characters, by means of which different images could be brought into a context of meaning and time, originated in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC . Around 2,600 BC A seal was created for the cemetery of Ur, whose picture shows the queen and contained a signature that said: Queen Pua-bi .
In the ancient Egyptian art was used a combination of hieroglyphs and images to describe the daily life of this culture. The images were also subject to a symbolism that hardly differed from one another. The same perspective was always retained, everything shown from the side. The representation of the people also happened according to a fixed scheme. The idea of the sequence of images came from Egypt to Greece , where it was used in particular in vase painting. For the first time, texts were also painted over the heads of the characters, which virtually came out of the mouth. Something similar can be found in Syria in the 6th century AD or among the Aztecs two centuries later.
The Roman culture took up this art and carried it on: In 113 AD the ruler Trajan initiated a description of a campaign around a stone column, the 33 m high Trajan column in Rome. The 200-meter-long stone relief comprises 155 individual scenes, which are separated from one another by stylistic devices such as trees (an anticipation of the image walkways).
Middle Ages and Modern Times
With the advent of the monasteries in the early Middle Ages , they became the keepers of knowledge. Its residents wrote books, which soon also contained pictures. Often churches were provided with frescoes , wall paintings or glass paintings that contained religious motifs and not infrequently also described different scenes of a story and thus formed quasi sequences . From 1000 AD, churches repeatedly used tapestries to describe events and also inserted ( Latin ) text in between. The best known is the Bayeux Tapestry , which is about the Battle of Hastings .
In the 12th century, picture illustrations also appeared in which the persons depicted were represented with spoken texts in the form of banners - forerunners of speech bubbles (e.g. in the Gospel of Henry the Lion ). In the 13th century, the illustrated Bible for the poor, with which the church wanted to reach believers who were ignorant of reading and Latin, became increasingly popular.
There was an increasing need for scribes who were no longer just in monasteries. Court literature emerged, paper found its way to Europe, and woodcut was invented in the 15th century . Then the first block books were created, which combined images and texts.
In Japan , a tradition of Japanese woodcuts arose in the 16th century , which was the model for a series of grotesque drawings by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai in the 19th century, comparable to da Vinci's grotesques . Hokusai called it Manga . This term is still used today for Japanese-style comics.
In the 20th century, the comic was sometimes used for propaganda purposes. During the Second World War, for example, US comic publishers used racist representations in their comics in relation to the opponents of the war . This has also been passed on to comic book content in Sweden, for example.
Introduction of the printing press
With the introduction of book printing and its professional distribution by Johannes Gutenberg , images and texts were initially separated again; later, single-sheet printing succeeded, which can be seen as a predecessor of the illustrated sheet. So the thematic restriction to courtly and biblical stories was finally lifted and the narrative story prevailed. Since most of the population was still illiterate , the plot was still conveyed through images. Written books also contained up to 100 woodcuts that retold the plot, but could only reach a few readers. It was not until the middle of the 18th century that schooling was compulsory in the entire German-speaking region.
The genre of the picture cycle allowed artists such as Albrecht Dürer , Hans Holbein the Younger to sell pictures that represented an action for the first time. The best known and most influential Briton was William Hogarth (1697-1764), the theme of modern life treated, such as poverty and prostitution , from which there was even a plant with interpretations that of his aphorisms known Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote. Rodolphe Töpffer used one and the same person for the first time from 1827 for his picture sheets Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux-Bois with over 200 pictures and made each one appear as a result of what happened before. He also provided each picture with a few lines of text. At the same time he used stylistic devices for the first time to visualize movements or music. This principle influenced many draftsmen all over Europe .
cartoon
At that time, the cartoon was already widespread. Leonardo da Vinci already used the method of creating a satirical effect by means of grotesque optical distortion of the people. The term itself comes from the 17th century and from the Italian caricare (= overloaded). From 1800 Thomas Rowlandson drew sequences of pictures with dialogues above the heads of those involved and, thanks to the great success of his Doctor Syntax series, was soon able to sell books for which sequels and translations were published abroad. In 1830 the first French newspaper with a satirical focus was founded, mainly selling caricatures: La Caricature . In the follow-up magazine Charivari published artists such as Grandville and Gustave Doré . In England the magazine Punch appeared and invented the term cartoon for its pictures. German magazines were Fliegende Blätter , Der Wahre Jacob and above all Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus , which later influenced Wilhelm Busch , whose Max and Moritz were the godfathers of The Katzenjammer Kids . In the American magazine Truth , Richard Felton Outcault first drew the character that would later become The Yellow Kid .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Scholz, Michael F .: Comics in the fight for hearts and minds. Propaganda during the 2nd World War , in: Katapult-Magazin, Greifswald 2015.