David Kunzle (April 17, 1936 – January 1, 2024)
by Ian Gordon
Vale David Kunzle. I received the news from Roger Sabin when I was in London in early January. As it happened I was at Cambridge, his undergraduate university, the day before I heard and on my return to London walked pass his doctoral home at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
David was a formative influence on my work. Like many comics fans at the time I first encountered David through his 1974 introduction to and translation of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck. The red-hot prose of that work is best understood as a visceral reaction to the vicious Pinochet regime and the comics analyzed had been altered by the Chilean publishers who were not sympathetic to the Allende socialist government. But my engagement with David’s work only came later. In 1989 I decided to do my doctoral dissertation on comic strips. In that same year the University of California Press announced the forthcoming publication of the second volume of his The History of the Comic Strip and I sought a venue to review it since at $110 it was beyond my graduate student budget. Michael Kazin at Tikkun, who I had met at the Smithsonian, said no, but suggested the American Quarterly. At first Charles Bassett, then the book review editor, said no but after he received a volume from the University Press of Mississippi, Joseph (Rusty) Witek’s Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, he said yes provided I did a combined review. Somewhat miffed that this fellow Witek had used a version of the title I wanted for my dissertation I said yes. In preparation while waiting for Volume 2, which only came out in mid 1990, I studied Volume 1 closely after previously only having given it a cursory read. I remember this well because I was traveling home to Australia and borrowed a copy from the University of Sydney library and read about a third, lugging it between Sydney and Melbourne and back again. Returning to the USA I spent a week or so in Los Angeles at my grad school friend Charles Shindo’s family home and he borrowed a copy from his alma mater, USC, and I may have even read some of it on the beach. Finally, back in Washington, DC I finished Volume 1 at the Library of Congress and moved to Volume 2 that I had by then received. The review duly appeared in American Quarterly.[1] After completing the review essay I begun the research for my dissertation. In many ways my approach to studying comics was shaped through this review essay. I wanted to use Kunzle’s methods to study American comics and was too sharp with Rusty’s work for not doing quite what I wanted it to do. Stressing the merits of Kunzle I neglected the merits of Witek, something that I later addressed.[2]
Of Kunzle’s work I had this to say in the American Quarterly:
Kunzle's first volume History of the Comic Strip: Vol. 1, The Early Comic Strip, published in 1973, contained an account of the crucial transformation in graphic narrative in late eighteenth century England; "the stylistic revolution in popular graphic art known as caricature" (Kunzie, Berkeley, 1973, 1). Kunzie demonstrated that before Hogarth introduced a comic element in graphic narrative during the eighteenth century, it was primarily concerned with religious, moral, and political themes of a didactic or propagandistic nature. The narrative in Hogarth's panels was also easier to follow than in earlier, more static, graphic narrative. But Hogarth was no caricaturist. Nor did he use speech balloons, contrary to the view held by many comic art historians.' Caricature, a method of capturing a person's essential character by the exaggeration of features in a loose line drawing, entered the public realm of European art late in the eighteenth century. It lent itself to political commentary and to a new style of narrative fiction: the comic strip. Rodolphe Topffer (1799-1846) undertook the first sustained work in the new medium of the comic strip, and History of the Comic Strip: Vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century opens with a discussion of his work.
Kunzie argues that Topffer and those who followed him, most notably Cham (Charles-Henri-Amedee de Noe), Leonce Petit, Adolphe Willette, and Wilhelm Busch, effected a profound change in graphic narrative. They produced comic strips that aimed to entertain. The works presented not the facile comic strip offerings one so often encounters in the late twentieth century, but extended tales, gathered in albums, that addressed the emerging bourgeois order of Europe. For instance, between 1830 and 1846, Topffer lampooned the pretensions of the petite bourgeoisie on the make, parodied scientific research, and in his final work, derided would-be revolutionists. To tell these stories, Topffer and the others developed new graphic narrative techniques. These included dried pen etching and stunning montage sequences in which the images cut back and forth between protagonists, or ranged over movement through time and space. Kunzle's detailed account of the European development of the comic strip is relevant to an American Studies audience because despite the unique and "specifically American humorous tradition" displayed in early American comic strips (5), their form, and indeed their content, owed much to the earlier European work. (242-243).
And, “David Kunzle's History sets a standard for discussion and analysis of the comic art form. He not only recounts the technical and stylistic development of the form but sets it within the cultural matrix of nineteenth century Europe." (246)
For good measure I should note that I saw Rusty’s work positing something that indeed happened and he was ahead of the curve in seeing that possibility and explaining the way it took shape, “Witek's book raises the possibility that comic books may transcend their formulaic nature and produce a new literary medium." (246)
Having finished his second volume David seemed to balk at doing the third volume that he had originally intended. In May 1992 he wrote to the art historian Rebecca Zurier had received a Swann Foundation fellowship for her work on the Ashcan School. He proposed a collaboration on a third volume that would run from 1896 to Krazy Kat stopping short of the adventure strips of the 1930s. Given her path to tenure as an art historian had been mapped out for her in discussions with her Department Zurier could not take up Kunzle’s offer, and she directed him to me. In 1992 just as I was wrapping up my dissertation, I received a letter from Kunzle (see below). Busy with meeting the demand from the graduate Dean of my university that all 200 figures appear in portrait form with full captions, rather than a mix of portrait and landscape, and then with defending the dissertation I did not reply until October. To say I was flattered was an understatement. I was flabbergasted that Kunzle had contacted me and proposed such a collaboration. I of course said yes. So where is that third volume? I said yes conditionally since I wanted to get some publications out before turning to that collaboration. I also hoped to stay in America and was able to do so through some employment at the Smithsonian allowed as gaining work experience under my F1 visa. David replied and we agreed to meet in Los Angeles in 1993 to discuss the volume. I sent him my dissertation.
In 1993 he graciously collected me at the LA train station and we and his wife Marjoyre had dinner at their UCLA house. I remember the dinner because at one point David excused himself and returned with a rapier and told me about his performance with an Elizabethan troupe. I was unsure if I should engage him with the fork I was using to eat pasta. I am not sure if it was that evening, or perhaps in a letter that I no longer have, that David responded to my dissertation with the comment “was it as bad as that” meaning the mass commodification of comic art in the American comic strip. I now wonder if perhaps he was also asking me to think a little more about comic art that had not been so drastically commodified and perhaps expand my vision from the very real role comics played in shaping consumer culture.
By this stage though I had decided to return to Australia since long term work was not presenting itself in America. I am not sure exactly what David and I decided on the proposed collaboration or indeed if we decided anything. Perhaps it disappeared as other priorities and the passage of time took us further away from the project. From a letter from Martin Barker sometime in mid to late 1993 I do know that David had been speaking with him to about the project. But as Martin suggested I think David was not as engaged with Volume 3 as he had other work he wanted to do.
In the last ten years or so other scholars have filled some of the gaps left by the absence of a third volume. Beyond my own initial attempts to place comics in a broader development of twentieth century American culture Christina Meyer’s Producing Mass Entertainment, Lara Saguisag’s Incorrigibles and Innocents, and Alex Beringer’s Lost Literacies are all invaluable works that should be read in the absence of that volume. One can hope for many more works like these to plug the gaps.
Many non-academic readers with an interest in understanding the history of comics have appreciated Kunzle’s work. But that was not always the case. For instance, when I visited Bill Blackbeard in 1991 he dismissed David’s work as simply reproducing every early image he could find and not worth attention. His influence on others was perhaps pernicious since Bob Beerbohm, now very much a fan of the work, told me he had been put off by Blackbeard’s comments. I can only surmise that Blackbeard’s view was colored by a desire to claim comic strips as a uniquely American form and David’s work demonstrating long antecedents of commercial graphic work (and not fanciful connections like hieroglyphics) upset that apple cart. On the scholarly front David was aware of Donald Ault and I do wonder if they discussed Disney.
David Kunzle encouraged my work especially in the early years when I was trying to make a career. Other scholars like the Australian historian Richard Scully and the British historian Patrick Hagopian, to whom David sent photo documentation of his anti-Vietnam war posters, have mentioned David’s kindness. I was very happy to meet David again in 2017 at a conference in the UK. By then he had returned to the study of comics at a time when more and more scholars had turned their attention to both comics and David’s work. The following year at the International Graphic Novels and Comics conference in Bournemouth I was able to thank him publicly during my keynote address for his help, encouragement, and exemplary scholarship. His gracious nod in thanks was as wonderful as the first letter I received from him. We have lost a scholar of enormous importance.
David Kunzle has received obituaries at the following sites:
https://www.dailycartoonist.
https://www.tcj.com/david-
https://www.politicalgraphics.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/
And a fine memory from Charles Hatfield:
https://www.tcj.com/
[1] Ian Gordon, ""But Seriously, Folks ...": - Comic Art and History," American Quarterly, 43 (June 1991): 122-126.
[2] Ian
Gordon, “In Praise of Comic Books as History: Joseph Witek and Comics
Scholarship,” in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and
the Graphic Novel, Michael Chaney ed., (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2011): 244-246.
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