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David Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). xii +207 pp. ISBN: 978-1-57806-948-4 (paperback, $25.00)
Rodolphe Töpffer, Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips, compiled, translated and annotated by David Kunzle (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). xv + 650 pp. ISBN: 978-1-57806-946-0 (hardback, $65.00)
A new book of comics scholarship by art historian David Kunzle has always been a landmark event, and these latest two volumes are no exception. Together, they help consolidate the important place of Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) in the history of comic strips, and make the Swiss (Genevan) cartoonist and early theoretician of comics better known to readers of English. The son of a painter and caricaturist (Wolfgang-Adam Töpffer), the cartoonist engaged in a wide variety of other professional and artistic activities. He wrote prose fiction and travel literature, ran a private school for boys, taught literature at university and engaged in political journalism. Over the last dozen years or so, French-language scholars have laboured hard to give Töpffer the place that they feel he deserves, by commentary on his work and through the republication of six of his eight comic books.8 By contrast, until now English readers have had far less access to Töpffer. The publication of these two volumes has done a great deal to change that.
However, even before these two books, publications by Kunzle had been the main English-language sources on the early comic strip, and had been consulted by scholars in France and elsewhere, who delved into the history of the comics medium. In Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, Kunzle reworks and expands upon his previous scholarship on Töpffer and nineteenth-century comics.9 Kunzle gives us a fascinating account of the cartoonist's life and its connections with his work. He shows us Töpffer moving from liberalism to conservatism during the course of his life, and describes the importance of Swiss patriotism and Genevan identity in Töpffer's worldview, at a time of Napoleonic imperialism and great social upheavals and transformations (revolutions, workers' strikes, cholera epidemics, the advent of mass tourism).
Father of the Comic Strip includes nine chapters. The first provides a richly contextualised and synthetic reading of important satirical themes, which Kunzle traces through Töpffer's comics: soldiers, war and...