News about the premier academic journal devoted to all aspects of cartooning and comics -- the International Journal of Comic Art (ISSN 1531-6793) published and edited by John Lent.

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Book Review: The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and their Publics, ed. by Woo and Stoll

The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and their Publics. Edited by Benjamin Woo and Jeremy Stoll. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. HC $99. PB, $30. < https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Comics-World>

 

Reviewed by Matthew J. Costello

Professor of Political Science

Saint Xavier University

Chicago, IL USA

 

 

Woo and Stoll have curated a collection of essays to point comics studies beyond its language and literature roots, and situate it within a social-scientific tradition. To bridge the gap between social sciences and humanities, they define a general social scientific orientation derived from mid-twentieth century sociology emphasizing the meanings people attribute to social action and tempered by Bourdieu’s approach to cultural production. The anchoring frame is Howard Becker’s notion of “art worlds,” comprised of “everyone necessary for a work of art to be produced in the way that it was in fact produced.” (xiv) and this would include the creators, corporations, retailers of various kinds, critics, scholars and consumers. The fourteen essays are grouped into three general categories of the comics world: production, circulation, and reception. Woo and Stoll note that an art form as diverse as comics may have “many worlds” (xiv). The essays reflect this by examining diverse communities of producers and consumers from the US, Latin America, and Asia; and multiple channels of circulation using a variety of methodologies, including ethnography, survey research, economic geography, and institutional analysis. The volume thus captures much of the diversity across various comics worlds.

The essays are strongest overall and cohere best in the section on production. Together, the five essays in this section seek to identify who produces comics, where they produce comics, and the global and political influences on comics production. Woo’s essay reporting results of a survey of comics producers notes that most producers engage in multiple fields of production—with a publisher or self-publishing, work-for-hire or creator-owned—and that few make comics their full-time job. Essays by Maynard and Lent explore communities that produce comics geographically and by gender and the importance of these communities for creating a space for comics production. Exner and Gomes offer essays on the transnational and editorial roles in the origins of manga and the use of comics as tools for political education during the Unidad Popular in Chile, respectively.

The second section, circulation, is more of a mixed bag. The consequences of comics’ move from ghettoized niche form to major commercial center of popular culture are explored in Bart Beaty’s consideration of the rise and fall of the comics press and Salkowitz’s classification and discussion of different fan communities at Comic-Con. The use of comics for school and social education are explored in essays by Sabeti and Wieskamp. Wieskamp’s study of Priya’s Shakti reveals how transnational ties and non-western ideas can be used in a comic to try to bring about cultural change, in this case to raise consciousness of how to address violence against females.

The essays on reception are probably the weakest in the collection. Sinervo’s essay on comics scanning makes a convincing argument that scanners considered themselves fan participants in the comics world rather than pirates or free-speech defenders, and Galdieri shows that readers’ participation in leadership elections for the Legion of Superheroes demonstrated fan commitment to the series’ history. Neither essay really fulfills its promise of revealing underlying ideologies of their subjects. The other two essays in this section identify that Comic-Con attendees seek a sense of community and that comics fans see fandom as informing other parts of their lives.

Together the essays provide a description of the comics world (or worlds as Woo and Stoll prefer), but they do not provide much analysis of how this world is shaped and why, although many point in directions that would be interesting to explore. How, for instance, does the political economy of the culture industries generate specific kinds of comics production? Woo’s essay suggests that comics producers continue to be an economically marginalized community, more diverse at the economic margins. Maynard and Lent show how marginalized communities can work together to build support, with Maynard, in particular, exploring how government gate-keeping in the area of cultural production can force such marginalized communities together. Considering how these different communities are affected by and navigate the structures of the political economy of cultural production and how that affects their products seems one clear direction for research. Another is how the reception by fan communities is affected by the hegemony of neoliberal production in the culture industries. Beaty shows that the comics press has been undermined in both form and function by the explosive growth of comics in mainstream culture. Salkowitz examines how Comic-Con has been transformed by the influx of non-fan cultural tourists, and Sinervo shows how the move to digital publication by major producers effectively subsumed and destroyed the scanner sub-culture. While these discrete pieces offer descriptive histories or sociological snapshots, they cry out for a systematic analysis of the effects of the changing political economy of the comics industry on fan communities. Finally, the essays by Exner, Gomes and Wieskamp offer insights into specific political and transnational influences in the comics world. How does increased globalization affect the production, circulation, and reception of comics?  Exner suggests that manga was influenced more by US cartooning than previously thought but also notes the reverse effects in recent years. Gomes describes how the Unidad Popular government sought to use comics to reverse the imperialist ideas imported into 1960’s Chile. Wieskamp demonstrates that diasporic communities can cross national boundaries to create comics that bring non-western ideas to address major social issues. These essays suggest another fruitful direction for research would be to interrogate the ways various cross-national ties link, inform, and empower the marginalized communities discussed by Maynard, Lent, and Woo to produce different kinds of comics in different worlds in the face of the hegemonic and homogenizing neoliberal influences.

Woo and Stoll’s The Comics World is a well-conceived and thoughtfully executed catalog of many of the ways that social scientists would describe the 21st century comics worlds. It is an important starting point for the development of a social scientific study of comics. As such should be of interest not only to comics scholars, but to anyone interested in the sociology of culture in general. More importantly, it points toward new directions for further research and sustained causal analysis of how the changing political economy of the comics worlds affects production and reception and how it creates opportunities for marginalized communities to appropriate elements of the comics worlds to engage these power structures. I expect this text will be widely read and cited and remembered as a foundational text in the broadening of comics studies.

 

A version of this review will appear in IJOCA 23:2. 

Remembrance of Giannalberto Bendazzi (1946-2021)

 Remembrance of Giannalberto Bendazzi (1946-2021)

 by 

John A. Lent

 

I first met Giannalberto Bendazzi when I picked him up at the Philadelphia International Airport, April 8, 2002, but I knew of his contributions to animation studies for years. He was staying at my home for a few days. On the drive to my house, Giannalberto began talking about his wife. I chimed in about mine, just having been divorced--a second time, no less. Then, out of nowhere, Bendazzi tells me he takes his wife to the beach every week. Things can’t be that bad if he does that. Not so, he snapped back; he took her there hoping the sharks would get her. A sample of the dark humor he was capable of.

For the next few days, we talked about everything--of course, animation, a book he invited me to co-edit, our Italianness, and, of course, his wife. We spent a day in New York City with Oscar-winning animator and professor John Canemaker and others, had a potluck dinner at my house with Temple University colleagues and graduate students interested in animation, and visited the nearby Brandywine Museum and its Wyeth family collections. Bendazzi also lectured on animator Alexandre Alexeieff to a large class of film students at Temple University after which he described as a listless bunch.

About a month later, we met again at Penn Station in Manhattan. Bendazzi wanted to fill me in on a huge book project he was planning with mutual friend, Keith Bradbury of Australia. They had invited me to join them in co-editing a 16-volume, tentatively titled, Understanding Animation:  An Anthology of Documents and Sources. Indiana University Press showed a keen interest in publishing the books to be extended over ten years. As far as I know, the project did not come to fruition; Giannalberto wrote us in April 2003, saying he wanted to put it on the “back burner.” Keith suggested that he and I continue, but this did not materialize either. I think Bendazzi wanted time to continue where his 1994 groundbreaking Cartoons left off, organizing what was to be the three-volume Animation:  A World History. He asked me to write the sections on Taiwan and India, and coordinate with the collaboration of Hassan Muthalib, the Southeast Asia part, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Animation:  A World History hit snags along an eight-year journey, about which Bendazzi lamented to me. John Libbey Publishing was commissioned to bring out the volumes, but needed a co-publisher for an American edition. Multiple publishers, including Indiana University Press and University of California Press, rejected the proposition, complaining the book was too large. Focal Press, affiliated with Taylor & Francis, eventually published the nearly 1,100 pages in three volumes in 2016.

I saw Giannalberto twice more, when we had dinner at the Milan airport Oct. 24, 2002, during a layover I had enroute to Lviv and at a comics and animation conference in Jilin, China, in September 2006. We kept up a correspondence at our lazy paces; his emails were personal at times, philosophical some times, sad and happy, humble and proud, but usually, peppered with some sarcasm and much wit. When I sent him a review I wrote of his work, he replied:  “I received the review, made three somersaults and sent it to my publisher. We have a very well-coordinated opinion of each other:  I tell him he is an idiot, and he behaves so” (May 22, 2017). On one occasion, he labeled his publishers “slow as a snail,” another publisher as “the worst bunch of screw-ups on the planet,” and bemoaned the “geological times” of another publisher.

He could also tangle up emotions as in this Sept. 18, 2014 email:

 

you bet that I will come to see you!

After the publication of the book, I will be travelling around to present it, and get some rewarding appraisal. Actually, I don’t give anything for appraisal=vanity. Appraisal is a substitute for love. I wrote all my books in order to demonstrate that I am honest, intelligent, in other words, worth [sic] to be loved.

Mine was a lifelong search for this thing, but I didn’t succeed.

I’m 68 and I’m alone.

I have no complaints:  I did my best, with sincerity.

I’m deeply devoted to animation, for its qualities but also because it is underloved. So I do my best to promote it and enrich the number of its loving specialists.

I always felt at home with animators from every country of the world because in general, they are sensitive, kindhearted, altruistic.

In other words, loving and lovable people.

Thank you for listening. I realize that this confession is almost embarrassing…

Your faithful,

Giannalberto

 

Giannalberto was always humbly thankful. When, on June 22, 2019, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universidade LusÏŒfona of Lisbon, that he said was “the first that an animation scholar ever received,” he sent many of us a note saying,

 

I thank all of you for the affection and teaching you have given me, in many ways, over many years of career. This result would not have been possible without you. I hope (I believe) that this is one more step in the ascent towards a generalized conception of animation as an art.

Thank you, Giannalberto (June 26, 2019)

 

That was Giannalberto Bendazzi as a human being:  kind, frank, intelligent, and accommodating. He usually called me a friend which I was appreciative of and honored by.

As for Giannalberto Bendazzi as a scholar, his accomplishments provide the answer. That he was a pioneer in animation studies and one of the field’s most outstanding representatives and promoters is undisputable. He took the route to a career in animation as so many of us have--via training and employment in other disciplines; his was law, which he studied but never practiced. Instead, he became a film critic and in the 1970s, began easing his way into animation, especially its history, a virgin topic outside of coverage of Disney, Fleischer, and other U.S. studios.

Giannalberto wrote books, monographs, and articles on various animators, such as Quirino Cristiani, Italian-born Argentine who created the world’s first animated feature, Osvaldo Cavandoli, Bruno Bozzetto, Alexandre Alexeieff, and others, as well as his best-known compilations, Cartoons:  One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation and Animation:  A World History. He held teaching stints at Università degli Studi di Milano (2002-2009), Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (2013-2015), and Griffith University in Australia; lectured and presented papers in Italy, U.S., China, Singapore, and elsewhere, and co-founded ASIFA-Italy (1982) and Society for Animation Studies (1987).

His death, at age 75, on Dec. 13, 2021, left a huge void in the profession of animation studies and in the hearts of those of us who had the privilege of knowing him, that will be difficult to fill.

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Review Essay: Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870 by David Kunzle

David Kunzle. Rebirth of the English Comic Strip:  A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870, Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Hardcover:  ISBN:  978-1-4968-3399-0, 472 pp., 309 b&w & 12 color illustrations. US $90. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Rebirth-of-the-English-Comic-Strip


 A Review Essay

 by

Richard Scully

Reviewing another book for another journal, Michael Connerty (2021) observed that “This is a good time to be alive for anybody interested in the development of cartooning and comic strip art during the nineteenth century.” Among the reasons why, he mentioned the hugely-significant recent study of Marie Duval by Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite (2020), and my own Eminent Victorian Cartoonists (2018). To that list we should also add Ian Haywood’s The Rise of Victorian Caricature (2020), and Brian Maidment’s Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (2021), but of the original three works Connerty mentioned, the one that probably represents an epoch in the field is the latest--and possibly final--offering by the “foundational scholar” of early comics history:  David Kunzle.

With The Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, Kunzle returns to explore the British contexts first touched upon more than a generation ago in The Early Comic Strip (1973) and then in The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. II:  The Nineteenth Century (1990). At the time, it was the German and Francophone comic artists whose work was given pride of place in the grand narrative of c. 1450-1825 and beyond, to the 1890s. Only two of the chapters of The Nineteenth Century related to “England”--just 36-odd pages out of the total of 300--and in Rebirth, Kunzle expresses regret that “space restriction inhibited closer look at the English contribution,” especially given “the riches of Britain’s contribution to the comic strip” (x).

This richness is now given its due, with nearly all the main subjects first explored in 1990--and additional topics discovered in the intervening decades--examined with customary thoroughness and incisiveness; and all in the unmistakable prose style that has led so many of us to follow Kunzle into the serious study of comics. David Kunzle has always written inclusively. Second-person pronouns abound, as “we” are taken along for a remarkable peek into the archives. The story told in Rebirth is not merely his hobby horse, but “our exploration” (398). The language is not preserved in the amber-like fixity of the formal “academese” past tense--it is living and present. It is often funny. It is emotive. From the very beginning to the charming and beautiful postscript at the very end (437). Kunzle is also a master of dropping in and out of different modes, such as a divergence into Victorian theatricality in the Prologue (xv-xvi), the “Once upon a time” (xi), or the excurses that appear in several chapters (50-52; 97; 112-113; 200; 410-412). This is to say nothing of the way Kunzle--and the publishers--allows the comic art to speak for itself for page after page (a fortunate byproduct of intellectual property law, and the presence of such work in the public domain, rather than in corporate hands).

Divided into chapters focused on particular artists (e.g. Chapter 1 on George Cruikshank) or publications (e.g. Chapter 2 on The Man in the Moon, 1847-1849), the approach is chronological, and covers what W. L. Burn called The Age of Equipoise (1964). This was the period of relative calm that characterized “the Mid-Victorian generation” between the ending of the “hungry ‘40s” amidst the upheavals of Chartism and the Continent-wide revolutions of 1848, and the Gladstonian ascendancy, Beaconsfieldism, and the “New Imperialism” of the 1880s and 1890s. While Burn concentrated on 1852 to 1867, Kunzle’s span of time is a little longer:  between the “sudden erupt[ion] of “comic strip fireworks” in 1847 (ix), and the “bizarre new stylistic era” beginning around 1870. Context is king from the outset of the book, and the cultural status of the Victorian magazine (arbitrated by Carlyle and Dickens), and the “sociopolitical history” of a period not well-known for its comic strips, is presented in fine form. The contrast between Britain (or England, as Kunzle has it) and France; the working lives of comic artists; the sources for comic comment; and--in a deliberate glance back to 1990 and The Nineteenth Century--the crucial importance of a society shaped by the railways and by the theatre, all make for an ideal Prologue.

The prehistory of the English comic strip is the focus for the Introduction, with Hogarth the logical starting point. Kunzle sees the narrative, though, as a disconnected one. From Hogarth to the “Great Age of Caricature” there is continuity, but huge changes in the “printing and publishing industries, cultural attitudes (such as the ‘Victorian’ rejection of Regency libertinism), and caricature itself” separated Kunzle’s period of Rebirth from what had gone before. This is actually rather an older way of viewing the periodization, and the evolution of British comic art; something challenged by Brian Maidment and others (including myself). But here is nonetheless an engaging narrative encompassing Rodolphe Töpffer--whose reputation Kunzle has done much to reinforce in two key volumes (2007a and 2007b)--and a potential, crucial transnational transfer from his Swiss homeland to England via John Ruskin and George Eliot (3-4). Rounding out the chapter is a somewhat disconnected study of Robert Seymour, who--Kunzle argues--“deserves to be remembered for more than his illustrations to Pickwick, his pre-Punch satirical Figaro in London (1831-1838), or his tragic suicide at the age of thirty-eight” (8). It’s a little surprising that Kunzle shows some ignorance of Brian Maidment’s (2013a) early work on Seymour, which went a long way towards remedying such a myopia, and has culminated with the first full-length study just this year (2021).

Where Kunzle is on firmer ground is in his shedding new light on the otherwise well-known and high-profile artists of the Victorian Age. In the first of the substantive chapters, Kunzle focuses on George Cruikshank (of the famous dynasty of caricaturists), and explores his work in the temperance and teetotal social movement in depth. Following Robert Patten’s immense, two-volume biography of Cruikshank (1992; 1996)--itself almost a conscious imitation of the classic Victorian form of the genre--it’s hard to imagine how anything new could be said about this Janus-faced figure. But Kunzle draws-in likely influences from Töpffer and re-interprets much of Cruikshank’s work; and The Toothache is dealt with in ways not hitherto appreciated as well.

Albert Smith’s brief, but significant, Man in the Moon (1847-1849) takes up Chapter 2, and Kunzle successfully rescues that publication from more than a century of condescension by Punch scholars. Since his departure from Punch, the judgement of his one-time peers, Douglas Jerrold and Mark Lemon, has been that Smith was “vulgar and bumptious” (43) and that his own paper was little more than a foil to the senior paper. Kunzle sees much more merit in its pages than the admittedly quite deliberate swipes at Punch. For starters, there was Cham’s (Amédée de Noé) contribution (45-47), and the work of Henry Hine and the character Mr. Crindle. Nevertheless, Man in the Moon did deflate (just as assuredly as did Smith’s own hot-air balloon in 1847), and Kunzle does a good job of accounting for that (as well as providing a nice summation of Europe’s revolutionary atmosphere around the time of its demise).

Beginning with Chapter 3, Kunzle embarks on a truly fascinating series of studies of Punch that truly breaks new ground. So, while the existing literature on Punch is vast (and is still growing), it is surprising that neither Richard D. Altick (1997), nor Frankie Morris (2005), Patrick Leary (2010) or Brian Maidment (2013b), have picked-up on this crucial role as not merely an inspiration for comic strip magazines, but also the very practice. This is the London Charivari as a comic, and its chief cartoonists--Richard Doyle, John Leech, John Tenniel, Charles Keene, and George Du Maurier--as comic strip artists.

Interspersed with the Punch exploration are additional chapters on the fascinating political Francophobia/cultural Francophilia of two short comics regarding King Louis Philippe; and on Thomas Onwhyn’s shilling booklet Mr. and Mrs. John Brown’s Visit to London to See the Grand Exposition (1851). The impression given is precisely what Kunzle intends for these middle chapters:  to restore the mid-Victorian period as one of the key historical phases of comic strip art, in which multiple, regular, comic publications appeared to cater for various tastes. The status of the comic strip was enhanced by its association with Punch, at the moment it became a fixture of the establishment. So too it was adapted for other periodicals, such as Town Talk (the subject of Chapter 12) and the Illustrated London News (Chapter 13), as well as other journals, before disappearing after 1870.

But before the Epilogue deals with the sudden fading of the Victorian comic strip (compromised by a new perception that it was “vulgar”), the final substantive chapter (14), picks up on themes that have been of particular interest to the most recent Victorian-age comics scholarship:  the hitherto-neglected career of Marie Duval at Judy, and perspectives from the sesquicentenary of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). For the former, the aforementioned work of Grennan, Sabin, and Waite may be of unsurpassed quality, but it was built on the foundation established by Kunzle himself, who basically discovered Duval back in the 1980s. For the latter, Kunzle was name-checked by a number of scholars attending the May 2021 conference Chroniquer la guerre La Guerre de 1870-1871 dans la presse européenne et atlantique (held online because of COVID, via the École Polytechnique, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Musée de l’Armée). And like the rest of Rebirth, this chapter is not an exercise in resting on one’s laurels, but a further advancement in the interpretation of both comic touchstones. In part, this is due to the acid Kunzle wit:  Bismarck’s Ems telegram is likened to Trumpian “fake news” (403), and the link between the correspondents of 1870 with those in Baghdad or Kabul in more recent years. There does seem to be one slip-up (probably editorial, post-proofing) in misidentifying Judy’s “big cut” artist as William Brunton, not William Boucher (404); but that does not prevent Kunzle from joining a recent push to highlight Boucher’s remarkable body of work (Scully, 2013; Scully, 2018; Grennan, Sabin, and Waite, 2020; Gangnes, 2020).

It is rather striking that the book can be so original despite relying almost entirely on published primary sources. The Punch archives held by the British Library were not consulted for the light they shed on matters such as income, editorial decision-making, and the like, meaning there is still work to be done in this area. Although the expenses of geography and time can account for this omission, the absence of the editors’ copy of Fun, held at the Huntington Library, close to Kunzle’s base of operations, is a little less forgivable. Still, one can really only quibble about the details, as they are not crucial to the overall argument. For instance, from the 1860s, major Punch artists were not paid “£10-20 per major drawing” (xiii), but rather received a salary--Tenniel’s was £853.5s per year in 1875 (Scully, 2018b: 147). True, at Fun, John Gordon Thomson was paid by the drawing, but this was only ever in the realm of £4-6 for a “large cut” cartoon in the 1870s and 1880s (Scully, 2018b: 146). One of Kunzle’s key case-studies--George Du Maurier--spent an inordinate amount of time worrying over the relative incomes of his senior colleagues as early as 1861:  John Leech reportedly earning £1000 a year, and Tenniel £500 (Scully, 2018a: 107).

There are also a few notable omissions from the secondary sources, too. I, for one, would have enjoyed seeing Kunzle weigh-in to the obvious debate with Belgian historian Thierry Smolderen on The Origins of Comics (2014; published in the same Mississippi series). Although complementary, their interpretations differ, but there seems to be very little historiographical engagement with this, more broadly. James Chapman’s complete history of British Comics (2011) also doesn’t merit a mention--but then, Chapman didn’t seem terribly aware of Kunzle’s volumes, either, and just one of his articles on Ally Sloper (261, n14). Indeed, the literature review does not seem itself to be a favored means of contextualizing much comics scholarship. Absent from Kunzle’s Bibliography are also works by Brian Maidment (see above) and Henry Miller (2009a & b), as well as Richard D. Altick’s 1997 study of the early Punch, and (it has to be said) some of my own recent stuff on cartoonists; all of which would provide important context, if not being of direct relevance to the comic strip itself. That the scholarly literature is still somewhat disjointed and disconnected is underscored by Kunzle’s own observation (444, n6) that his work on Marie Duval--amounting to three articles (1985; 1986a; 1986b) and copious references in The Nineteenth Century (1990)--was largely ignored by the late Denis Gifford in writing an entry on the “Ally Sloper group” for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). This is something that Kunzle--perhaps in partnership with Grennan, Sabin, and Waite--should address.

One does also wonder why Kunzle did not revisit aspects of his earlier work that would have benefited from a second opinion, modified by the passage of time. Looking back to 1990, and The Nineteenth Century, one is struck by the absence in Rebirth of a chapter updating Kunzle’s work on James Sullivan, Fun, and “The British Working Man” (spanning pages 324-329 of the earlier volume). The Huntington Library copy of Fun would provide some very interesting new material for such a study; as would the only substantial work to have been based on that primary source:  E. S. Lauterbach’s doctoral thesis (completed at Urbana, Illinois in 1961). But, as Kunzle notes himself, one can only do so much, and there is not always much point in revisiting the past when trying to drive forward.

Speaking of the past, though; for someone like me, I’m most cheered by the fact that Kunzle has always--unashamedly--written history (as opposed to critique, commentary, or other, jargonistic or theory-heavy analytical forms from the literary or cultural studies world). Without the scholarly weight of his works to point to, I’d probably have been laughed-out of one too many seminars--and possibly a job--long ago. As an art historian, however, Kunzle is permitted to be more critical when it comes to the aesthetic merits of his subject-matter than the “straight” historian. And this is evident as he closes his volume with a riposte to the Punch tradition of comic art:

 

Punch’s reputation had declined [by the 1890s], having become tired and repetitive… [It] persisted through to the end of the century and beyond, in the endless, dreary perambulation of academically drawn illustrated jokes, with captions featuring the witty and the witless, the fatuous infelicity and the verbal faux pas [433].

 

Reputations are difficult things to track, historically. And Kunzle doesn’t offer any evidence for this perceived decline, which is important, given this was a time when the circulation figures were exceeding 80-90,000 per week (Scully, 2018, I: 18), and its status had been cemented by The History of “Punch” (1895) from M. H. Spielmann (a great arbiter of taste). Certainly, its fin de siècle content is unattractive to the radical sensibility, and Kunzle joins Sir David Low in criticizing it for staidness (Scully, 2018, I: 15). But Punch was hugely popular in its time and of its class; and any diminution of its quality is a subjective, anachronistic one, from the perspective of the 21st Century and the focus on the comic strip.

But Kunzle’s opinion of Punch in part a lament, rather than outright criticism, for in eschewing the comic strip, the London Charivari left that medium to its lower-class rivals--although Kunzle dismisses the notion of any true rivalry (434). Between 1870 and the Edwardian period, Will o’ the Wisp, Judy, Fun, Pick-Me-Up, Funny Folks, Scraps, Illustrated Bits, and Comic Cuts witnessed the “vulgarization” of the comic periodical, and in cheapening the fare to be had by British readers, “it would take generations before the comic strip and comic books could rise from the reputational miasma of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century” (435). A harsh assessment indeed, especially given Judy probably entered a definite, post-Sloperian “Golden Age” in the 1890s (Scully, 2018, II: 83-84). Fun did decline in the later 1890s, and expired in 1901; Funny Folks folded in 1894. But Pick-Me-Up was a glossy and glorious product of the “Naughty Nineties,” despite its obvious piracy from Continental counterparts; hardly of a kind with the cheap-and-nasty Scraps, Illustrated Bits, and Comic Cuts (something evident from their very names). If one steps-back and applies a less aesthetic set of judgments, then what Kunzle identifies here is precisely what he spotted occurring in the 1830s (1983):  the material change of medium that accompanies a seismic shift in the history of the cartoon and comic. The “graphic bric-a-brac”--in his own, memorable phrasing (Kunzle, 1990: 20)--of the late Regency/early Victorian period finds its counterpart in these comics, which were experimental publishing forms, deserving of less judgmental assessment, and appreciation for what they were, not the later standards they failed to attain.

There is thus an opportunity here to challenge Kunzle’s assessment of the late-Victorian/Edwardian comic paper, just as Brian Maidment (2018: 54) and others have done for his assessment of the beginning of that period. Aspiring scholars should probably get their skates on, though. As Kunzle points out, the very cheapness of the Harmsworth/Northcliffe Comic Cuts presents a major problem for the historian of a century later:

 

in consulting Comic Cuts of this period… I found the danger not so much the bleeding through of the ink onto the reverse side (as shown on p. 369), not so much the occasional indecipherability, but the acidic disintegration of whole pages, as I turned them into a shower of confetti (435).

 

A timely reminder in our digital age of the need to preserve the archive, but also to consult the material culture, not merely its facsimile.

In an earlier age, in 1973 and 1990, comics studies was of fringe interest; edgy; even subversive. And Kunzle’s radical credentials were reinforced by his choice of subject-matter. For years we have been weaning ourselves off the need to bemoan the “neglectedness” of our field, because today, it is no longer the poor cousin in the Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, nor even a minor area of study. It is probably the fastest-growing field in the Humanities, if not quite yet a nascent discipline of its own.1 Rebirth is not a standalone curiosity, but a handsomely-produced, well-edited, contribution to Mississippi’s Comics Studies series--some 162 volumes to date--which is itself just one of a number of series devoted to the field (including those of Palgrave, Routledge, Bloomsbury, Ohio State, Nebraska, and more). Kunzle’s work across six decades is one of the key reasons for the all-conquering strength of the field and, appropriately, Rebirth brings us not only full circle, but opens up new vistas for the future.

 

 

 

References

 

Altick, Richard D. 1997. Punch:  the Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-1851. Columbus:  Ohio State University Press.

Burn, W. L. 1964. The Age of Equipoise:  A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation. London:  George Allen & Unwin.

Chapman, James. 2011. British Comics:  A Cultural History. London:  Reaktion.

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1 My appraisal of the evolution of the field is paraphrased (if not plagiarised, unashamedly!) from Roger Sabin’s joyful editors’ preface to Palgrave’s “Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels” series.