FIRST SEQUENTIAL ART SERIES

Though speech balloons fell from favour during the middle 19th century, Töpffer's sequentially illustrated stories, with text compartmentalized below images, were reprinted throughout Europe and the United States. Rodolphe Töpffer, a Francophone Swiss artist, was a key figure in the early part of the 19th century. It had most of the elements that make up the modern comic, including pictures with captions that display a continuous narrative told often in installments, and the use of speech bubbles, satire and caricature. A satirical publication, later known as The Northern Looking Glass, it lampooned the fashions and politics of the times. The Glasgow Looking Glass, published in 1826, was arguably the first comic magazine. Form established A page by Rodolphe Töpffer, whose work is considered influential in shaping the comics form. Speech balloons were not reintroduced to the form until Richard F. They now represented narrative, but for identification purposes rather than dialogue within the work, and artists soon discarded them in favour of running dialogue underneath the panels. Artists such as George Cruikshank helped codify such phylacters as balloons rather than scrolls, though at this time they were still called labels. The speech balloon also evolved over the centuries, from the medieval origins of the phylacter, a label, usually in the form of a scroll, which identified a character either through naming them or using a short text to explain their purpose. 1682) as well as The Punishments of Lemuel Gulliver and A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth (1726), can be seen to establish a narrative over a number of images, it wasn't until the 19th century that the elements of such works began to crystallise into the comic strip. While surviving works of these periods, such as Francis Barlow's A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot (c. These publications sometimes utilized illustrations as a means of commenting on political and social issues, such illustrations becoming known as ' cartoons' since 1842. As printing techniques developed, due to the technological advances of the industrial revolution, magazines and newspapers were established. One of his works, A Rake's Progress, was composed of a number of canvases, each reproduced as a print, and the eight prints together created a narrative. Hogarth created seven sets of sequential images on 'Modern Moral Subjects'.

FIRST SEQUENTIAL ART SERIES

One of the first British creators of sequential series of satirical art was William Hogarth (1697–1764). The dog pulls a bonnet out of the husband's pocket which may allude to infidelity as the wife is already wearing a bonnet. The second plate depicts a morning in the couple's home after a night out. The first plate depicts the signing of a marriage contract between the wealthy Lord Squanderfield and the bride's poor merchant father. The first two of six plates in Hogarth's 'Marriage à la Mode' series. It took the invention of modern printing techniques to bring the form to a wide audience and become a mass medium. In medieval paintings, multiple sequential scenes of the same story (usually a Biblical one) appear simultaneously in the same painting.Īn ancient tradition in India, possibly dating back to at least 700 BCE, had picture showmen narrating stories that were simultaneously presented in painted pictures (also the origin of shadow play with jointed puppets). It can be traced back to early precursors such as Trajan's Column, in Rome, Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Bayeux Tapestry.Įarly narratives in art Sequential depictions on Trajan's Column in Rome, ItalyĮxamples of early sequential art can be found in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek friezes, Rome's Trajan's Column (dedicated in 110 AD), Maya script, medieval tapestries such as the Bayeux Tapestry and illustrated Christian manuscripts. The history of comics has followed different paths in different parts of the world.

First sequential art