Abstract
The chapter argues that by comparing comics from different countries it is possible to understand just what features American comic strips have contributed to the international form of comic art. The chapter offers a brief account of the passage of American comics to France, Italy and Brazil and a slight history of comics in Britain and Australia.
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Notes
- 1.
Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), flyleaf, 19. The Hanoverian artist Wilhelm Busch published his illustrated story Max und Moritz in 1865.
- 2.
David Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip: Vol. 1, The Early Comic Strip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) and History of the Comic Strip: Vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): Thierry Smolderen, Naissances de la bande dessinée: de William Hogarth à Winsor McCay (Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2009) and The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).
- 3.
Here I am restating in bold terms an argument I made more subtly, perhaps too subtly, in Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).
- 4.
Alex Valente, “Translating Humour in Comics, from Italian to English to Italian,” presented at International Comics and Graphic Novel and International Bande Dessinée Society, Joint Conference, Glasgow and Dundee, June 24–28, 2013.
- 5.
Antoine Sausverd, “La beauté convulsive de Buster Brown,” Topfferiana, October 30, 2014, http://www.topfferiana.fr/2014/10/la-beaute-convulsive-de-buster-brown/
- 6.
Waldomiro Vergueiro, “Children’s comics in Brazil: From Chiquinho to Mônica, a Difficult Journey,” International Journal of Comic Art, Vol. 1 no. 1 (1999): 171–186; Álvaro Moya História da História em Quadrinhos. 3ª Edição. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994, 25. See also Matthew Maculotti, “Chiquinho ‘in Slumberland’: quando Buster Brown fu Little Nemo,” bambini&topi, August 19, 2014, http://www.bambinietopi.it/2014/08/chiquinho-in-slumberland-quando-buster.html.
- 7.
Roger Sabin, “Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?,” Image & Narrative, Vol. 4, No. 1 (October 2003), http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/graphicnovel/rogersabin.htm; David Kunzle, “Marie Duval: A Caricaturist Rediscovered,” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring–Summer, 1986): 26–31; Peter Bailey, “Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday: Comic Art in the 1880s,” History Workshop, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1983): 4–31.
- 8.
George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics: A Slight History (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 201.
- 9.
Vane Lindesay, Drawing from Life: A History of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1994).
- 10.
Ian Gordon, “From the Bulletin to Comics: Comic Art in Australia, 1890–1950,” in Bonzer: Australian Comics, 1900s–1990s. Annette Shiell, editor (Redhill South, VIC: Elgua Media, 1999), 1–14.
- 11.
C. R. Bradish, “The Poetic,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 3, 1953, 9.
- 12.
Eugene Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1976), 565–566, note 46.
- 13.
Le Petit Journal Illustré, December 25, 1920, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k717451x/f12.item.r=Le%20Petit%20journal%20illustr%C3%A9: Le Petit Journal Illustré, December 20, 1925, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k717711g/f9.item; Le Petit Journal Illustré, December 27, 1925, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k717712v/f8.item; Le Petit Journal Illustré, January 3, 1926, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k7177137/f9.item.
- 14.
Thierry Smolderen, “Of Labels, Loops, and Bubbles: Solving the Historical Puzzle of the Speech Balloon,” Comic Art, No. 8 (Summer 2006): 90–113; Pascal Lefèvre, “The Battle Over the Balloon: The Conflictual Institutionalization of the Speech Balloon in Various European Cultures,” Image & Narrative, Vol. 7, No. 1 (July 2006), http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/pascal_levevre.htm.
- 15.
Lance Rickman, “Bande dessiné and the Cinematograph: Visual Narrative in 1895,” European Comic Art, Vol. 1 (Spring 2008): 1–19.
- 16.
Michigan State university Library, Comic Art Collection, http://comics.lib.msu.edu/rri/brri/ballo.htm#btw.
- 17.
Les collections numérisées, Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image, http://collections.citebd.org/in/faces/details.xhtml?id=46d2e8f5-889f-4b1e-a3b0-2f213a3e4e6f.
- 18.
Ian Gordon, “The Symbol of a Nation: Ginger Meggs and Australian National Identity,” Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 34 (September 1992): 1–14.
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Gordon, I. (2016). Why Kid Comics. In: Kid Comic Strips. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55580-9_1
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