Book review: Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grenann, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite

Simon Grenann, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite. Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 288 pages, £85.00 978-1526133540. https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526133564

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

            Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist is the first, and much-needed, critical survey of Marie Duval's body of work. Duval is one of a few pseudonyms used by Isabella Émilie de Tessier, who was an actress on the London stage and also a prolific cartoonist, with a wealth of comics and cartoons published between 1860 and 1885. The authors examined various primary sources to analyze Duval's major themes, vision, and processes in relation to historic contexts. They provide a brief biography of Marie Duval, stitched together from public records, newspaper articles, and her body of work. They also discuss their website The Marie Duval Archive https://www.marieduval.org/  created in 2016 as a key resource that provides online information about Duval and seeks out her unknown work.

            The book is divided into two main parts: Part I, Work, and Part II: Depicting and Performing. There are also two appendices on attribution and terminology. Part I is comprised of five chapters which "examines Duval within her own context, presenting an overview of the publishing industry and her place and influence in it" (p. 6). Part II, Depicting and Performing, consists of four chapters where her accomplishments are highlighted, along with the significance of her cartoons and characters (p. 6).

            Part I opens with a chapter on Duval's role working in Judy, a magazine where Duval was employed from 1869 through 1885. Sabin asserts that Judy was not merely a "low-level Punch clone" but was "innovative and often pioneering" (p. 11) and argues that Duval, as a cartoonist, was essential to the publication's development. After all, a woman was a key contributor in a time when most society held they were supposed to be relegated to more domestic roles and pursuits. He explains a serio-comic magazine is a publication that covers serious topics, such as politics and daily news, as well as more leisurely topics, such as fashion, humorous stories, cartoons and comic strips. Sabin also discusses the importance of the periodical itself, including the topics, the layout of the contents, and other producers of Judy, such as cartoonist William Boucher, editor Charles Henry Ross, owner and publisher William Spencer Johnson, and others.

            This brings us to Marie Duval herself. Considering her brief history, including her time as an actor and that she contributed art to other publications, Sabin states that it "is important to mention these other endeavors because they indicate that Duval, like her fellow practitioners, was part of the Victorian swirl of hustling and entrepreneurship. If you had a skill, you used it" (p. 21). Sabin discusses Duval's most prolific work on Ally Sloper; her unique style; influences such as Doré and Cruikshank; and content and subject matter of her strips (not shying away from mentioning racist and anti-Semitic content), as well as her theater work and how she was able to "bring the stage to the page" (p. 27). Sabin concludes the chapter with further discussion of The Marie Duval Archive in that as an online resource of her work, it effectively removes the context of the Victorian period. The need for this book is clear from this statement alone. By providing context into the publishing cycle in the Victorian era with an analysis of Duval's work with Judy as a whole, readers get a better idea of her influence on publishing and comics in that era.

            In the second chapter, Grennan considers how women "undertook work, performed work and visualised work" (p. 40). The author provides an overview of women's employment in the Victorian period and asserts that employment "was thought to make women masculine because employment was considered to be masculine. As a result, employment for women challenged conceptions of the significance of domestic life, upon which the highest personal premium was placed, for women rather than men" (p. 40). Grennan, referring to the women's household management roles, says "work in one's own house was not work, because it was not employment" (p. 39). One could ask if this notion has changed much in the following 150 years. Sabin noted that Duval and other women who opted to enter the workforce outside the domestic realm, which included domestic work, were considered to be masculinized, despite the fact they are acting as caregivers (e.g. the employment of governesses). Grennan then juxtaposes Margaret Beetham's assertion, that with the rise of mid-to-late century periodical journal publishing, there came "new visualisations of femininity," especially with regard to advertisements directed at women readers, with Duval's rendering of women in her comics (p. 46). Another juxtaposition Grennan mentions regarding Beetham and Duval is the benchmarks of gender, as well as providing a great example of how Duval contradicted an ad page in Ally Sloper's Comic Kalendar for 1878 (p. 49). Grennan examines the fictional woman employee in The Girl of the Period Miscellany and fictional editor Miss Echo, comparing them to Duval's own work. The author closes the chapter with the concept of anonymity and the adoption of pseudonyms, which undoubtedly opened up the employment field in publications more widely to women than by writing under their own names and posits reasons for Duval's adopting more than one pseudonym, as these allowed her to explore different styles of illustration (p. 59).

            In Chapter 3, Waite maps Duval's time on the stage to her cartoons published in Judy. The author looks at Duval's time as an actress, from early appearances, her performances in Charles Ross' lost play Clam, as well as Silence, and The Beggar's Uproar, her time on tour, and in other plays. While she was on tour, she was constantly drawing and publishing, but her comics do not reveal personal details about Duval (p. 75). Waite examines Duval's late acting career and, with a chronology of her life and works, its influences on her cartoons and comics (p. 93). A section is devoted to Duval's involvement in the Such and Such divorce case in 1873 (p. 90). The chapter ends with the notion that there "are no known portraits of Marie Duval" in existence (p. 96). Despite the small amounts of evidence available, Waite provides a good analysis of how Duval's experiences with acting affected her work for Judy.

            In Chapter 4, Sabin considers Duval's children's book, Queens & Kings and Other Things, written under the pseudonym S. A. the Princess Hesse Schwartzbourg. Sabin argues that her "naïve drawing style she had developed at Judy made her a natural choice for a children's book" (p. 101). He also mentions while her name was not included in the creation of the work, her readers could easily recognize her distinct style and would purchase the book. The author discusses the creation and rise of the children's book, as well as the gift book (p. 104). Sabin compares Duval and Edward Lear in terms of their work and how both children and adults appreciated them, the latter's influence on Duval's work, and where the similarities stopped and Duval diverged from Lear, in terms of verse, tone, and art style (p. 109). Sabin then moves on to discuss the content of Queens & Kings and Other Things, Duval's rich illustrations of medieval fashion and royalty, of which could be attributed to her stage work, and how the book was received by the public -- sadly not a roaring success.

            Concluding the section on work, Grennan looks at women and gender in the printing business. He presents a framework for "considering the material conditions, social expectations, opportunities, prohibitions and representations of the type of work in the production of periodical publications" (p. 123). In so doing, Grennan explains that what modern readers may know as the process of creating a comic book involving a penciller, an inker, a colorist and so on, has nothing to do with Duval, who apparently drew directly on the engraving woodblock. Most cartoonists draw on paper, and then the engraver would transfer the illustration, sometimes by gluing the paper to the woodblock and carving through it. He describes general woodblock processes and further discussion of women's employment in printing, including Duval's own work.  

            Part II: Depicting and performing opens with the sixth chapter, Grennan's "The significance of Duval's drawing style." In this, he examines the "surviving public, non-academic commentary on Marie Duval's work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" and that it is "brief and easy to summarize" (p. 137). Basically, her art was judged by critics as elementary or downright terrible, and humorless, which Grennan asserts was a result of Victorian sexism and prejudice. The author also examines her parodies of various artworks displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions of 1880 and 1876, and concludes the chapter declaring that Duval "made a living recklessly, by drawing attention to the contradictions of a working life that she shared with her readers, so as to provoke laughter and, in doing so, to sell the next publication, bring on the next comics register and create a new visual culture" (p. 159).

            In Chapter 7, Waite looks at "nineteenth-century theories of acting in relation to visual aspects of the craft" to determine whether there is evidence that Duval's role as an actor influenced her work as a cartoonist (p. 160). Waite analyses resources including unpublished manuscripts and diaries of contemporary performers to Duval and published acting manuals that she and others in the theater either had access to or had knowledge of. He also takes a closer look at her Ally Sloper cartoons as a means to show her own performance as an "imperfect artist" (p. 182-183).   

            In Chapter 8, "Waite continues from Chapter 3 his analysis of the theater, specifically "Victorian spectacle" such as pantomime and special theatrical effects that "involved the manipulation of bodies in a way entirely unrecorded in the usual drawing tropes of the nineteenth century, arising as they did from classical training and fine art models", as an influence on Duval's illustrations (p. 187). There is extensive analysis of transformations scenes and characters in pantomime performances, as well as what the author terms as "flying bodies" and physical performance, such as the extreme physical work of the Hanlon-Lee Brothers and circus and music hall acts, and Duval's incorporating certain elements into her artwork. Waite concludes that, because of Duval's potential access to circus and music hall acts, and participation in acting herself, she may have put her observations to use in her cartoons and  "allowed her to depict the actions and presence of bodies in space through a unique gestural, graphic style that communicates movement" rather than simply relying on the theater manuals and other works available (p. 214).

            In the closing chapter, Sabin examines Duval's comics and cartoons attempting to answer whether she is "a 'women's cartoonist' (p. 216) and looks at other women in the cartooning business and women's magazines as an emerging genre. Sabin notes that because of the lack of primary resources with such information, that "the historical record relating to women is sparse to the point of near invisibility" which he assigns to prejudice. The author discusses the content of Judy, such as fashion, politics, and advertising, and how Duval "fit in" with the publication (p. 222), presenting perhaps why she chose Duval as a penname, her subject matter, and her comedy. 

            Authors Simon Grennan (Leading Research Fellow at the University of Chester), Roger Sabin (Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London), and Julian Waite  (independent scholar and former Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Programme Leader MA Drama at the University of Chester) provide valuable analyses of Marie Duval's works, both as a cartoonist and as an actor on the London stage. They place her firmly in the important tradition of British magazine cartooning. Alongside the text, the authors include a rich selection of Duval's art, as well as of other contemporaries. In creating this volume, Grennan, Sabin, and Waite have created a multidisciplinary text that would be good for comics studies, gender studies, art or theater history, and more. It is also a good resource for those interested in digital humanities and archives, as libraries and special collections are increasingly making such materials accessible by digitizing resources. This text is an excellent example of what scholars can do with digitized collections. The authors mention that comprehensive mapping work has not yet been developed between her stage work and artistic efforts that might provide even more information on this important cartoonist. This book is the first step in mapping Duval's two career paths.

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 21^st 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.

Connerty, Michael. 2021. “Book Review:  Marie Duval:  Maverick Victorian Cartoonist, by Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite, Manchester University Press, 2020, 272 pp.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Published online May 11, 2021.

Connerty, Michael. 2021. The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats. Cham (Switzerland):  Palgrave.

Gangnes, Madeline B. 2020. “Material Romance:  Kidnapped In and Out of Young Folks Paper.” Victorian Periodicals Review 53 (2): 183-213.

Gifford, Denis. 2004. “Ally Sloper Group (act. 1867-1923).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/66301>. Accessed Nov. 15, 2021.

Grennan, Simon, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite. 2020. Marie Duval:  Maverick Victorian Cartoonist. Manchester:  Manchester University Press.

Haywood, Ian. 2020. The Rise of Victorian Caricature. Cham:  Palgrave Macmillan.

Kunzle, David. 1973. The Early Comic Strip:  Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley and London:  University of California Press.

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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.