According to Wikipedia, a comic strip is ‘a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions’ which first appeared some time in the 19th century, although exactly when and where is debatable. 1933 is the date given for the first comic book:
a magazine made up of “comics” —narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog (usually in word balloons, emblematic of the comic book art form) as well as including brief descriptive prose
Over the last few years, I’ve been wondering why this didn’t happen earlier. I don’t think it’s just a case of inevitable progress, the inspiration of a super-special genius, or people in the past being more stupid. I haven’t researched the question in any detail, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else had said all this better than I can, but I thought it was interesting enough to write about. In true early modern style, I’ve presented it as a dialogue with an implausibly ignorant straw man. So why didn’t anything that meets the modern definition of comics exist in the 1640s?
Is it because people didn’t understand sequential art?
Don’t be stupid, straw man, sequential art is much older than this. Trajan’s Column and the Bayeux Tapestry both used a series of pictures to tell a story. During the 17th century, sequential art was also used for practical purposes. In 1607, Jacob De Gheyn produced a series of engravings to show soldiers how to use pikes and muskets. These pictures were widely copied in English drill books – Gervase Markham was the first and certainly not the last English author to copy them (Lawrence, Complete Soldier, 140-1, 152-3).
A sequence of pictures showing how to use a pistol on horseback (from Cruso).
Is it because speech bubbles hadn’t been invented yet?
Actually they had. You can see lots of examples at Mercurius Politicus. People were clearly used to producing and reading pictures with speech text in them.
Is it because of censorship?
King and Parliament both tried to censor the press, but censorship failed in the early 1640s, partly because the civil war disrupted it, and partly because censors were overwhelmed by the amount of stuff being published, which just encouraged people to publish even more. Both sides in the civil war were happy to allow and even encourage offensive and dishonest propaganda if it served their interests. Some authors and printers still got in trouble, but some very radical views found their way into print in the 1640s. Weekly newspapers first became a big thing in this period, so no-one was stifling innovation.
Would comics have been too expensive to make?
Yes, but not as much as you might think. This was long before cheap paper made from wood pulp, so paper was made from rags and was more expensive. That didn’t stop cheap print from happening. Short text pamphlets printed with moveable type were affordable for printers to print and a fairly wide range of people to buy. A custom woodcut picture on the front page pushed the costs up, but also made the pamphlet more attractive to buyers so could be worth doing. A pamphlet with an original picture on every page probably would have been too expensive to produce. But printers often recycled woodcuts, as you can see from a whole series of posts at Mercurius Politicus: part 1, part 2, part 3. The examples at the top of part 2 even came with blank speech bubbles that could have different text printed in them. Something like Dinosaur Comics would have been feasible if there was a market for it.
Is it because most people were illiterate?
Sort of, but in a very roundabout way. Knowing how many people could read is actually quite hard. It’s complicated by the fact that reading was usually taught at an earlier stage of education than writing, whereas now they tend to be taught together. That means that lots of people who couldn’t write might still have been able to read. Literacy was also gendered because boys tended to get more education than girls and were more likely to be taught to write, so talking about how many ‘people’ were literate can be misleading (Erickson, Women and Property, 57-8). I’m sure I’ve seen estimated figures for literacy somewhere but I can’t find any now. It seems to be generally reckoned that literacy had been increasing for a long time before the 1640s, and there was certainly a significant market for cheap pamphlets.
But there were also lots of people who couldn’t read. That doesn’t mean that they were cut off from print culture. The crucial point is that reading practices were very different in this period. Pamphlets were often read out loud to a group so that illiterate people could enjoy them. Today this is associated mostly with children, but then it was normal for adults. Dagmar Freist points out that some pamphlets were written as dialogues or plays which could be acted out by more than one person (Freist, Governed by Opinion, 19, 25, 85, 126-7). Reading a comic is a much more solitary experience. It’s not practical to read them aloud to a group because the pictures are just as important as the words, and they work together (or at least, it wasn’t practical before slide projectors). It’s not just that (some) people were illiterate in the 1640s: there was a different kind of literacy that’s much less prominent now. The comic as we know it wouldn’t fit the social practice of reading in the 17th century. I think that’s the main reason why there wasn’t much demand for something like a comic book.
Seventeenth-century people also had different ways of reading images, and perhaps different ways of seeing- the comic-like woodcuts in 1640s pamphlets look very different from modern comics. Cheap woodcuts often didn’t bother with realistic perspective or scale. Maybe this was partly a case of pay peanuts, get monkeys, as realistic looking representative art was produced in this period, but often realism wasn’t the point. The woodcuts in cheap 1640s pamphlets are full of symbolism that can’t be read literally (Freist, 127-8). This is also true of expensive and ostensibly realistic looking equestrian portraits. Today most people seem to expect ‘realistic’ literal representations of things, although what they get from comic art, photoshopped photos and CGI films is often hyperreal and actually impossible (for example). It seems to me that mainstream comic art is heavily influenced by cinema. Cinematic ways of seeing were inconceivable in the 17th century, and I suspect it might not be a coincidence that comic books took off after cinema took off (although it might be – I really don’t know). This leads me to a bigger hypothesis that I’m probably not going to do anything with, but here it is:
Modern comics aren’t graphic novels, they’re printed films.