What Did Comics Page Layout Look Like in 1891?

First answer: it didn’t.

Comics page layout couldn’t look like anything in 1891 because comics page layout didn’t exist yet. The term “comics” was coined in the early 1890s, as a truncation of “comic strips,” which were printed in rows or columns or some other subunit of a larger newspaper or magazine page. Whatever the layout of that larger page, it was separate from any comic strip appearing on it.

Because I think it adds clarity to analysis, I’m a proponent of differentiating between works in the comics form and works in the comics medium. The form may be any sequence of images, but the medium includes the physical publication and its historical context. Though there are many exceptions, that’s often what folks mean when they say “comics.” For example, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica, “The terms comics and comic strip became established about 1900 in the United States, when all strips were indeed comic.” Brittanica means the comics medium, which at that time produced only comics in the humor genre.

Unless it didn’t.

Nonfiction has been recognized as a genre of comics for at least a century. Ida M. Tarbell and Nicholas Afonsky’s biography comic strip In the Footsteps of Abraham Lincoln was syndicated daily in 1927. Joe Sacco coined the term “comics journalism” in the 1990s, but recognized precedents include the single-image lithographs published by Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives for most of the 19th century.

I’m new to this nonfiction subarea, but I haven’t noticed the genre of illustrated newspapers receiving very much attention in comics scholarship. As Thierry Smolderen observes: this “genre of the journalistic picture stories … for some reason has, until recently, completely escaped the scrutiny of historians” (79). Illustrated newspapers not only challenge the encyclopedic claim that all early works in the comics medium were in the humor genre, but they reveal a sophistication of drawn page design that precedes later innovations by decades (particularly what Benoit Peeters calls “decorative” and identifies as primarily post-1968, or what Joseph Witek calls “high baroque” and identifies as primarily 1940s).

I’ve been looking at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which ran weekly from 1855 to 1922. The Internet Archive has an immense collection, and as a starting point, I reviewed the 32 issues published from April 11 to November 28, 1891. The specific dates are fairly random (there’s a gap in the collection after November), but the year is key since it’s just within a common historically defined scope of the comics medium. Since Leslie’s is a printed weekly newspaper, it’s in the medium’s production-defined scope too. Leslie’s even included a single-image “comic” every week. This one appears in the April 11, 1891 issue:

That, according to most medium-focused definitions, is a “comic” — and probably also a “cartoon,” even though it is drawn in a naturalistic style and so is not a cartoon in the simplified and exaggerated stylistic sense. It appears on a page otherwise dedicated to advertisements:

While any newspaper page is an example of layout in the broad sense, this one is not an example of comics layout. Many of Leslie’s other pages aren’t either. They vary radically, some consisting almost entirely of text, with minimal other graphic elements:

At the other extreme, one two-page spread is a single centerfold-crossing image that has to be turned sideways:

Single-image pages are fairly common, and Leslie’s is surprisingly indifferent to vertical design, regularly arranging horizontal layouts that require viewers to rotate the newspaper 90 degrees:

Though single images are often in the comics medium, they are never in the comics form (if defined as sequenced images). It’s when form and medium combine that Leslie’s gets most interesting, and where comics layout comes into play.

Though uncommon in the issues I reviewed, some include two-image pages:

That above one features a standard gutter between two rectangular images drawn independently of each other.

The next example instead incorporates two images within a single drawing, with an inset separated by a partial wavy-lined frame and white space in the top left corner of the page (which again must be rotated 90 degrees):

While those examples are interesting enough, it’s Leslie’s three-image pages that start to intrigue me as comics layouts:

Those two follow roughly the same design: two half-page images with a smaller off-center inset drawn as if it were a physically separate image placed on top of the others. Note the right edge of the inset in the first example is drawn as though it extends slightly beyond the edge of the images that appear to be underneath it. The second example is more extreme, with the edges of the inset drawn as though its corners are bent and folding up. Content from the underlying image is also drawn as though paradoxically encroaching onto the surface of the inset.

These drawn qualities are why I have termed comics layout a “secondary diegesis.” The primary diegesis is the story content of the images, which is distinct from the metafictional conceit of the drawn page as an actually layered or otherwise arranged set of physically distinct images.

Both examples also include a middle left space where the edges of the first and last images are visually ambiguous. The effect occurs again for another three-image drawing:

Here the artist draws a frame edge between the first and second images — except along the left area where the white of the first image’s ground either becomes the white of the second image’s sky or is diegetically ambiguous. The third image is drawn as if it obscures the bottom right corner of the middle image and with frame lines along its top and right edges but not its margin edges.

While I already consider these examples of comics pages, the parallels to the later medium intensify with the addition of more images per page. Here’s a four-image drawing:

Note the continuing conceit of layering, now with the third circular panel drawn as though placed over both the second panel and the initial underlying image. A corner of the second panel is also drawn with a bent corner, making the secondary diegesis explicit. The fourth panel is instead drawn with a partial gutter, defined by the sharp frame lines of the first image and the hazier edges of the fourth image’s content. Alternatively, that ambiguous white area could be interpreted as though it’s part of a physical panel also placed “on” the larger image.

Things get even more interesting with five images:

The layering conceit now includes the corner of the fourth image drawn as if placed “over” the final fifth image, which are both “on” the larger third image. The effect occurs only within the interior area of the page though, since neither panel has frame lines defining their edges along the bottom or side margins. The second image also appears to overlap, but the first instead seems to be cut into a shared drawing space, with no frame line drawn between the third image and the ambiguous white areas at the hazier edges of the first image’s content. More paradoxically, the artist draws content from both the first and second images breaking the circular frame line of the second image:

The playfulness increases in another five-image drawing:

The layering effect expands, with the last image overlapping the fourth, and the middle image overlapping the first which overlaps the second, and with multiple ambiguous and frame-breaking image edges throughout. Only the middle panel is drawn as if fully contained by a frame that includes a white border as part of the illusion that it sits atop the other images. More playfully, a branch from the primary diegesis is drawn as if overlapping the bottom two images, metafictionally merging with the secondary diegesis.

Another five-image drawing instead avoids all frames, leaving ambiguous white space between unframed content:

Expanding to six images, a drawn layout frames only its third panel, leaving the others unframed:

This next six-image layout begins with drawn frames overlapping, before transitioning to ambiguous white between unframed panels in the bottom half of the page:

Probably my favorite from the Leslie’s I’ve reviewed, this next six-image page includes two frames drawn to resemble physical objects, the first overlapping the middle panel, which overlaps the circular panel in the bottom row, both of which appear to be layered over the background image of the train, plus the top left and right buildings and the materials of the title crest drawn as if arranged on top of the middle frame:

This eight-image page features more drawn frame edges until the bottom unframed image:

I think this page includes eleven images, all but two unframed:

Another eleven-image page, with a complex combination of overlapping and ambiguously divided framed and unframed panels:

Here is a more orderly row-based page of twelve images, with only the fourth unframed:

The most images I found on a single page is thirteen, all unframed:

These are all examples of comics page layout from 1891 — unless you feel the one-panel humor piece “Marry Him Off” is the only “comic” here.