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Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014); translation of Naissances de la bande dessinée: De William Hogarth à Winsor McCay (Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2009). 200 pp. ISBN: 9781617031496 (hardback, $50.00)
Thierry Smolderen's Origins of Comics is a beautifully produced and thought-provoking study of the first 150 years of comics. Since much of this material has been rehearsed before, he opts to organise it in a new way, stating that he will not write a history of comics that follows a linear narrative development because he does not think comics developed like that. Instead, he chooses a different aspect of comics for discussion in each chapter. The resulting eight chapters, each focused on a single idea, give us much to think about and debate.
His main idea is that, beginning with Hogarth, comics are 'polygraphic', combining visual language from many different sources. Most popular art does this, so the thesis itself is not new, but what is new is its application to the comics medium. He identifies a 'scribbly' style of drawing, a 'graffiti style', as an anti-academic strategy used by cartoonists, and traces out the various shifts in style and subject, ending in the early twentieth century with the work of Winsor McCay. Along the way, he proposes that comics have much in common with theatre, especially pantomime; that photography, particularly the works of Muybridge, with their repetitive frames, inspired the standard comics format; and that the colour comics of the Sunday supplements, the 'funnies', developed out of commercial necessity and media competition. He sees speech balloons as having been created in...