Anachronistic “Comics”

“Anachronistic rhetoric,” argues comics philosopher Aaron Meskin, “is unnecessary.”

For example: “Nothing could have counted as jazz in the seventeenth century, and any theory that implied that there was an instance of jazz 350 years ago or more would be anachronistic.”

More importantly for comics scholarship: “spatially juxtaposed pictorial narratives existed well before the birth of comics in the nineteenth century and any definition that characterizes these as comics is guilty of artistic anachronism.”

I disagree. Or, more precisely, I agree but think artistic anachronism is a common convention and possibly a defining trait of terminology generally.

Caravaggio, the exemplar of chiaroscuro painting, died in 1610, over seven decades before the term “chiaroscuro” was coined in 1686. “Science fiction” was coined in 1929, making H. G. Wells’ 1897 The War of the Worlds not science fiction. Far more significantly, “genocide” was termed in 1944, making the 1915 Armenian genocide, in which the Turkish government killed a million Armenian civilians, not a genocide. Terms are coined in response to something that necessarily pre-exists the term, making them all anachronistic and retroactively applicable.

The term “comics” is typically understood to originate in the 1890s, making any pre-1890 use anachronistic. I have no problem with that. When I find artworks that are sequenced images (AKA, what I consider the comics form) but also include multiple conventions common to the later comics medium, calling them anything other than “comics” seems false.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper is filled with them. Last summer, I explored weekly issues from 1891 (and blogged enthusiastically about them here, here, here, here, and here), all of which fall roughly within the term’s historical timeframe, but I’m now two decades earlier and so fully in the anachronistic zone.

Unless I’m not.

The “Platinum Age” was coined to group comics or proto-comics published before the mid-1930s, but I’ve not seen a start year earlier than 1882. I’ve also seen the “Victorian Age” refer to works published from 1840 to 1897, due mostly to the existence of Rodolphe Töpffer and Punch magazine. Accepting that terminology, I’m just exploring “Victorian Age comics.”

Whatever you prefer to call them, here’s one of my favorites from 1872:

It’s titled, “The Grand Duke Alexis on the Plains — The Buffalo as it Really Was.”

I was especially taken by how the (unnamed) artist draws the panels overlapping, a technique I thought emerged decades later (for example, by George Herriman in the late 1910s and early 20s). If you’re a fan of Neil Cohn’s Visual Narrative Grammer (which isn’t a kind of grammar, but that’s a whole other argument), you’ll notice that all but the penultimate image tell a clear visual story without the need for words. The few captioned words that are included fall within the norms of a standard third-person narrator. The page sequence is even “comic” in the humor sense, the origin of the U.S. misnomer (it’s a shame “comic strips” wasn’t abbreviated “strips” instead).

Here’s another from the same year.

Though this page also features overlapping panels arranged in a sequenced narrative, the text is more essential for understanding the events because each panel is a stand-alone segment of “The Adventures of the Japanese Ambassador in Utah.” Unlike later works in the comics medium, the text is placed in footnotes at the bottom of the page, but, like later works, each panel is numbered. Also, the style of drawing is cartoon (simplified and exaggerated), another later norm, and the intent is comic (and probably racist, though I’m not sure if the features of the Utah characters are more exaggerated than the Japanese ones).

Again, not calling this a “comic” seems false.

To be clear though, these are exceptions. Of the 52 issues published in 1872, each usually 16 pages, these are the only two individual pages that closely resemble later 20th-century Sunday comics: a visually unified one-page narrative.

Of course “narrative” is a tricky term too. Some sequences achieve a different kind of diegetic coherence.

Here’s an example from 1870:

The black line across the center is from the newspaper spine; this is a two-page spread held sideways. It’s titled: “The Promise of the Declaration of Independence Fulfilled: An Allegorical Picture Commemorative of the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution.” The amendment, establishing the right to vote for Black men, was ratified the month before. Rather than a time sequence, the six images occur simultaneously, with any combination producing what Scott McCloud would term an aspect-to-aspect transition. It’s also an unusual example of a layout drawn with multiple overlap and framebreak effects, as well as two circular insets, all techniques I thought originated over seventy years later.

Here’s another stand-out from 1871:

The work is atypical, because it was not drawn for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper but included instead because the paper considered the German artist, Paul Konewka, noteworthy:

Unlike Konewka’s Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrations (which include one image per page), “The Prussian Soldier” is a one-page multi-image narrative.

I’m especially intrigued by this description: “A scroll-work of thorns and thistles supports, decorates and apportions the subdivisions of this touching story.” That’s an excellent definition of a comics gutter.

It also prefigures Theirry Groensteen’s 1999 analysis of a comics panel:

“There are six important functions of the frame, which I call the function of closure, the separative function, the rhythmic function, the structural function, the expressive function, and the readerly function. All of these functions exert their effects on the contents of the panel (a voluntarily general expression, by which I mean the totality of the figurative elements within the frame) and, especially, on the perceptive and cognitive processes of the reader. Most of the functions also open up a range of formal possibilities, allowing the frame to fully participate in the specific rhetoric of each author.”

While Frank Leslie’s “comics” are rare in the four-year 1868-1872 period I searched, I found one more self-contained one-page coherent humorous narrative in 1868:

Like “The Adventures of the Japanese Ambassador in Utah” published four years later, “A Fight for the Championship” is drawn in a cartoon style (humorous exaggerations), this time caricaturing members of President Grant’s cabinet. Like “The Grand Duke Alexis on the Plains,” the eight unframed panels are not numbered, because each instead includes its own caption. Oddly, the page also includes segments of newspaper text between two of the rows — which have nothing to do with the images but are the continuation of the previous page’s article; perhaps more oddly, the words flow as columns rather than rows, producing two unrelated and contradictory reading paths.

Finally, Frank Leslie’s also includes what could be described as a “comics page,” in the sense later used to name the pages in a newspaper that includes humorous comics, AKA “the funnies page.” In Leslie’s the page typically has only one one-panel comic (or “cartoon” as the term is sometimes used) on a back page of mostly ads.

Here are four from 1872. They all include captions typed below the image, though this first one also includes what would later be termed a speech balloon (emanating from the birdcage) and handwritten text:

The next includes two speech balloons (though I understand from better-researched comics historians that the device did not convey an impression of sound as it would after 1900) and four distinct images combined into one undivided panel (what I call embedded juxtaposition):