RAMBLING THOUGHTS ABOUT EARLY COMICS

Yep! More early newspaper strips! I thought I'd free associate on some surreal (if that's the term) pictures that Allan Holtz recently published in his blog, "Strippers Guide (link in the sidebar)."

Above, "Polly" from 1906. What strikes me about these pictures is the reminder that a hundred years ago newspaper readers routinely read what would be considered underground comics today, and didn't see anything strange in it at all.

Surrealism in comic strips goes way back. This French strip (above) is from 1895, and wasn't at all untypical. It's very tempting to believe that the whole surrealist movement was inspired by cartoonists.

Surrealism was all over the comics page at the turn of the century. Here's (above) a newspaper strip from 1907 which was all about weird role reversals. Wood whittles kids, cigars smoke people, flies trap humans with "human paper"....it was all kinda clever. I don't know if you could get away with that now. Today surreal subjects are associated with drugs.

Believe it or not sequential comic stories were somewhat common in European newspapers and magazines at least as far back as the 1840s. How far back depends on how you define the term "comics." The strip above is from Punch, 1868.

One of the things that prevented early comics from having mass appeal was that they were initially used as a kind of editorial cartoon, for the purpose of ridiculing political and cultural opponents. The medium never really took off till editors began to realize that comics could be family fare, funny in their own right, like the "Jocko" strip above (date: 1900).

I'll digress back to surrealism to hypothesize that Edward Lear (above) might have created surrealism way back when in the mid-19th Century. Lots of people drew weird before Lear, but he showed that weirdness could cross the line into fine art. Aaaargh! Come to think of it, Hieronymus Bosch and others did that too...I guess surrealism is a movement that has many fathers.

While I'm on the subject of Lear, what do you think of this painting (above) of Masada that he did in 1868? Imagine a cartoonist like Lear pulling off this kind of realism! Click to enlarge.

Here's (above) Lear painting trees in the style of...dare I say it?...Bill Peet!