The World’s First 4-Page Spread?

Jim Steranko is a deservedly praised comics innovator. He is (almost) single-handedly responsible for transforming the layout norms that defined 1970s superhero comics (as I argue in “Layout Wars! Kirby vs. Steranko!“). I also thought Steranko created the first four-page foldout in his “Nick Fury” episode from Strange Tales #167 (April 1968). Blogger David Hime calls it “The World’s First 4-Page Spread.”

Here it is scanned and digitally pasted together:

Later reprints correct the coloring error for the ground in the bottom of the second page, making the division seem less obvious:

Each full-page panel is framed, so there’s no bleed along the connecting edges. That means getting the pages fully (or at least more nearly) continuous requires the gutters:

The pages also don’t fold out as I had incorrectly assumed. My mistake was probably from a cultural awareness of the three-page foldout “centerfolds” made famous by Playboy beginning March 1956:

Joe Sacco’s The Great War might have influenced my impression too.

Steranko’s artwork is not a foldout. The text in the caption box at the top of the fourth page calls it a “four-page spread.” It is certainly a four-page image, but “spread” is murkier since the term refers to the physical object of the comic, implying that the “spread” is continuous, as it is for the two-page spread joined physically at any publication’s centerfold. Only Steranko’s image content is continuous.

I have no criticism of Steranko, or of folks like David Hime who, like me, accepted the common comics history assumption that his Nick Fury art was “the first” of its kind.

Then I started viewing scans of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

Here’s a four-page spread from May 11, 1867:

The four-page image, “General View of the Champ de Mars and its Environ[s at th]e Opening of the Great Paris Exhibition, April 1, 1867,” may also be a foldout — or at least a continuously printed image across one or more folds.

Maybe.

I’m having trouble solving the physical puzzle. Though I wildly applaud the Internet Archive‘s massive collection of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the scans of the individual pages are sometimes ambiguous about what is a material edge of the original paper and what is an effect of the scanning process. There’s also sadly a portion missing from the left edge of the third page, made obvious by the gap in the bottom title and in the top header: “Frank Leslie’s I—–ted Newspaper.”

The issue consists of 16 pages and so is physically four separate sheets of paper, each double-wide and printed back and front with two (typically nonconsecutive) pages. That means two of the four pages could be printed continuously with no physical break at all. I suspect the two middle pages are continuous in that sense and were also the middle spread of the issue. The placement of the first and fourth pages are less clear to me. I cut and pasted the pages digitally, increasing the continuous effect created by the top line running across all four pages. But the fourth page may have a distinct left border edge, which I could have obscured digitally, but since there seems to be unprinted paper along that outer edge, I preserved it.

However it was arranged, the four-page spread predates Steranko’s by a century.

After drafting this post, I found another from two years earlier, published May 6, 1865: “Funeral of President Lincoln, at Washington D.C, April 19”:

I digitally combined the four scans. Based on the top and bottom text, the middle two pages appear physically continuous, though the other two seem continuous too. Could it be an actual four-page foldout?

And then I found “Attack of the Iron-Clads” from May 2, 1863:

Is the middle gap produced by the digital scan or are these just two two-page spreads like Steranko’s?

And I’m still trying to decipher this one from July 18, 1863:

It’s two two-page-wide images printed across two pages. The scans were especially confusing because the images were printed vertically, requiring the reader to rotate the page 90 degrees. The title is missing, but I think it’s a before/after battleground that you need to rotate again 180 degrees:

19th-century illustrated newspapers are not comics, but they do contain comics, so these Frank Leslie’s four-pagers sit on an ambiguous shelf in the history of the medium — which I’ll keep exploring.