Lost Literacies Strips Down the Dawn of Comics

Most people consider the introduction of the Funny Pages in the late nineteenth century as the birthday of the “modern” American comic strip. Alex Beringer is not most people.

A literary historian and professor of English at the University of Montevallo, Beringer dates the history of comics earlier, to roughly the mid-1800s, a period of prolific and uninhibited experimentation. He came to this understanding by piecing together the medium’s fractured archaeological record, diving through myriad online resources and archives. In the middle of the nineteenth century, New York-based artists followed the lead of their French and Swiss colleagues, particularly Rodolphe Töpffer, the “Father of the Comic Strip,” exchanging single-image political cartoons and caricatures for multi-panel sequences that, many believe, for the first time enabled them to play around with characterization, worldbuilding, and—well—storytelling.

Coming decades before the standardization of speech bubbles and panel borders, these early American comics seem to have little in common with their modern, more streamlined counterparts; they featured sudden and purposefully jarring jump cuts reminiscent of the yet-to-be-invented film montage or musical notes instead of text. One comic artist tells a story through shadows behind the curtains of a window; another, with hieroglyphs the reader must decipher with the help of a legend.

“The audience for this first wave of US comic strips was strikingly sophisticated in its reception of this material,” Beringer writes in Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip, which chronicles this oft-forgotten renaissance. Out from the Ohio State University Press, the book is one of hundreds of titles included in JSTOR’s Path to Open program, making scholarly books accessible online to wide audiences (read chapter four here, free of charge).

“The sense of flux—the idea that the visual language could turn on a dime—was often precisely the appeal,” Beringer observes in his chronicle of this oft-forgotten renaissance.

Foretelling the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s assertion that drawing is in itself a “form of knowing,” early comic strip artists and their consumers treated the medium as a philosophical exercise; Beringer quotes the observation by media scholars Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda that comics “enable an intense focus on how complexly woven stories unfold across time and space and, particularly, how these involve the reader…to generate meaning through interacting with, or themselves shaping, spatiotemporal form.”

While some early American artists blatantly plagiarized illustrations and formats that originated in France and Switzerland, others used them as a springboard, giving European drawings a decidedly American twist. For example, where Töpffer’s character Monsieur Vieux Bois (“Mr. Oldbuck”) satirized the European bourgeoisie, comics featuring his Yankee doppelganger, Jeremiah Oldpot (artist unknown), a New York tin merchant who leaves his family to prospect gold in California, often hinge on what Beringer defines as the contradiction between his “romantic view of himself as a rugged frontiersman and his attachment to consumer goods.”

Beringer discusses this and other critical facets of this period in comics history.

What’s your personal history with comics, and what made you decide to write this book?

When I began the project, I had just finished my PhD in nineteenth-century American literature, had always really loved comics, and was looking for something that would allow me to combine those interests. Once I started digging in the archive, I found myself stunned by the variety and ambition of nineteenth-century American comic strips.

Lost Literacies is the first full-length study of comic strips in America before the rise of the Sunday Funnies. It’s a story that not only involves little-known artists and editors like Frank Bellew (1828–1888) and T. W. Strong (1817–1892), but also some well-known names in literature and culture such as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.

When people think of nineteenth-century comics, the images that most frequently spring to mind are racist caricatures like E. W. Clay’s illustrations of Jim Crow or Thomas Nast’s famous political cartoons of Boss Tweed. I found that my archive strongly contradicted that commonly held wisdom. Humor magazines and graphic albums (book-length precursors to graphic novels) were publishing story-driven, multi-panel strips in large numbers at least as early as the 1840s. It struck me as an enormous gap in the history and, even more importantly, an archive that really deserved a large audience.

You discuss the influence these comics had on film and theater and vice versa. What about the relationship between comics and early animation like Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown, or even Disney’s Alice Comedies?

Much in the way film was an inspiration to comic artists in the early twentieth century, theater offered a logical point of departure for organizing narrative in nineteenth-century comics. Comic artists often pictured their characters as actors upon a stage and depicted movement in ways that mimicked the gestures of stage actors. In some cases, we even see things like stages and ticket booths making their way into the comics.

Characters like Felix and Oswald have kind of an unfortunate connection to theater insofar as they’re associated with blackface minstrelsy—the notoriously racist form of stage performance where actors would blacken their faces, wear white gloves, and perform clownish antics. It’s certainly true that minstrelsy was a major influence on nineteenth-century comic strips. But something I find equally interesting about the earlier comics is the way that they draw on a wider array of influences as well. For example, some of my favorite images from the book are based on the playful forms of sexuality that occasionally made their way onto the American stage. Images of cross-dressing and queer sexuality were prominent in both comics and onstage in ways that I think many readers today would find surprising.

The humor magazine Nick Nax is one of the more extraordinary stories that I came across in writing my book. Upon the death of the original publisher William Levison in 1860, William’s widow Mary Levison took ownership. With Mary in control, a rejuvenated Nick Nax pursued a genteel, female audience (and apparently achieved some success) in ways that made it wholly exceptional in the male-dominated world of nineteenth century graphic humor.

The comics often took place in domestic settings and focused on sympathetic female protagonists. Many plates were printed as full or half pages with illustrations that rivaled the detail in fashion magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and Harper’s Bazaar for their accurate renderings of clothing and manners. Even more surprising was the playful approach to sexuality and queer desire of Nick Nax in the 1860s.

One series in particular entitled “Masquerading” featured scenes of cross-dressing and free love bacchanalia at a series of masquerade balls. In one of the series’ most extraordinary sequences, transvestitism becomes a powerful weapon against toxic masculinity. On the left side of the image, a woman in a top hat and tuxedo, declares her intent to “make love to Sallie Myers,” to which her friend responds, “Then, don’t say the things the stupid animals say to me.” The right side of the image features a large mustachioed man in a wig and ball gown, who has just cheerfully punched out an unfortunate male seducer, declaring that he will “teach a fellow like that to know he’s not to take too many liberties because he treats to a glass of punch.”

How and why did the variety and experimentation of the 1850s and ’60s give way to a more universal approach to comics at the end of the century?

I think it had to do with the expansion of the publishing industry. The whole idea of what even constituted a “comic strip” was not terribly well defined in the 1850s–60s, which creates this extraordinary situation where artists were inventing the genre as they went along. Basic conventions of the modern comic like speech balloons, panels grids, and methods for transitioning between panels couldn’t be taken for granted. Editors, meanwhile, were more than happy to give artists room to play with different approaches to their comics.

By the 1890s, the newspaper industry was expanding the reach of comic strips. Where the humor magazines and graphic albums had circulations in the tens of thousands, the newspaper comics of the 1890s were reaching audiences in the millions. Editors start demanding a standard, more consistent approach for readers coming back week after week to follow their favorite strips.

What’s startling to me is how quickly this seems to happen. The epilogue to the book describes a kind of “smoking gun moment” in 1901 where editors at the Hearst syndicate very suddenly start rejecting any comic strip that doesn’t use speech balloons and panel grids. On one hand, it’s certainly the start of what we think of as “modern comics,” but that moment was also the end of an extraordinary period of creativity.

Speech bubbles seem like such a logical and obvious solution. Why hadn’t anyone thought of them before the late 1800s?

Speech bubbles weren’t necessarily a “new” invention in the 1890s. Some histories date them to the eighteenth century, others even earlier. But what did happen in the 1890s was that speech bubbles became a standardized approach. Before that, artists represented dialogue through an array of different techniques such as captions and playscript. I think that the fact that they seem “logical and obvious” now really gets to the heart of the book’s argument. Namely, approaches to comics storytelling that seem “inevitable” today like the speech balloon were competing with an array of techniques or “literacies” that have fallen by the wayside. I think of this like a family tree. Some branches persist while others stop, leaving us with a sense of possibility over what could have been.

You mention American comic book artists from the 1850s and ’60s were interested in social dynamics, creating outcast characters whose antics exposed the constraints and hypocrisies of bourgeois society. Did they play a role in the development of socially conscious literature in general?

The comics and publications that I discuss in the book constitute a sort of early counterculture movement, similar to something like the Underground Comix of the 1970s and 80s—or maybe even Andy Warhol’s famous Factory. The artists themselves lived and worked in Manhattan’s entertainment district and were known for hanging out in restaurants and taverns like Crook & Duff and Pfaff’s Cellar, which doubled as salons and conversation clubs, where they had interactions with a who’s-who of American literary and artistic culture, be it the famous poet Walt Whitman, painter Winslow Homer, Bohemian write Ada Clare, or the playwright John Brougham.

We see this influence emerge in a variety of ways in the comics. Like the social world of Whitman’s poetry, comics engaged with a large, inclusive version of American culture. They feature a parade of subjects who, at least in the 1850s, represent a newer vision of America—urban toughs, drunks, and newsboys cohabitated with Yankee rustics, effeminate swells, and fashionable women wearing hoop dresses.

Comics also exposed a scandalous side to American society with scenes of free love, secret identities, and gender-play. It’s even there in the odd mixture of cosmopolitan refinement and thievery that had led uncredited European comics to appear in US magazines.

Most of all, the fingerprint of this creative atmosphere was in the experimental ethos of the comics. To live and work in New York in the 1850s was to be inured to a culture of innovation and novelty—of exciting new ways of thinking about the project of what literature and art could look like and who could compose it.

France and Switzerland were pioneers in the field of comics. What about these countries—specifically France, which went on to produce Asterix & Obelix and Tintin—made them into trailblazers?

Especially through the 1830s and ’40s, France and Switzerland start developing approaches to comics that focus much more on novelistic forms of storytelling as opposed to ethnic caricature or political allegory like we see in the English tradition with figures like Hogarth and Gilray. Artists like Rodolphe Töpffer from Switzerland and Cham from France created comics steered away from overt political commentary in favor of an approach that bore a much closer resemblance to picaresque novels like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

This was the approach that was appropriated (and sometimes pirated) by the American artists in my book. But it’s also true that some version of this novelistic approach seems to persist in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists in France, whether it be Hergé with Tintin or someone newer like Pénélope Bagieu.

You mention the study of early comics is limited due to there being no centralized archive, with many old comics remaining in the possession of private collectors. How did you navigate these challenges while researching?

I’m fairly certain that this book would have been nearly impossible without digital resources like the American Antiquarian Society’s Historical Periodicals Database and HathiTrust. Many of the magazines and albums I discuss are very fragile and dispersed as fragments across multiple archives, making them incredibly difficult to research. The digital resources changed all of this by allowing me to rapidly scan through and survey the breadth of different types of illustrations, observing broad patterns in the artwork and composition of these materials. It allowed me a “top-down” view of the material that would have otherwise taken decades to compile.

I felt so strongly about the transformative power of this approach that I included a directory of digital resources for magazines and graphic albums in the appendix to Lost Literacies.

That said, I still think it’s important to visit those physical archives. There’s just no viable replacement for contact with the physical materials. Things like the depth of the inking, the quality of the paper, and the size of the publications provide extremely valuable insights about how comics were read and experienced.

You keep coming back to the contemporary notion that the comics of the 1850s and ’60s were intended and consumed as these philosophical exercises that challenge and broaden people’s notions of the relationship between words, ideas, and images. As comics became more standardized over the course of the twentieth century with text bubbles and the like, has the medium moved away from intellectual stimulation towards entertainment?

I don’t think I would say that. In fact, at precisely the moment comics became standardized, we started seeing artists like Winsor McCay (Little Nemo), George Herriman (Krazy Kat), and Nell Brinkley (Fortunes of Flossie) pushing back on editorial constraints and tearing those conventions apart. The trend continues today with experimental graphic novelists like Chris Ware and Alison Bechdel. Much of what I aimed to do with Lost Literacies was to show that the innovative spirit we see in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was absolutely a feature of the comics landscape in the mid-nineteenth.

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