October 16, 2017 • 43 mins
Before there were superheroes, a Swiss teacher drew entertaining doodles for friends. As he developed his sketches into stories told with multiple captioned images, he inadvertently invented the first sequential art comics in the Western world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, we recently were lucky enough
to be part of New York Comic Con Presents, which
we have talked about before, but is the parallel evening
programming for New York Comic Con. So today we are
(00:22):
sharing the audio of that recording, which was made at
Hudson Mercantile. It is all about the man who was
often credited as being the creator of the first comic
book in the Western world, and we are definitely going
to get into all the qualifiers around that in the
course of the show. So h it is a full episode,
so let's hop right in and hear it. Hello, and
(00:53):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh, Tracy.
Humans have always communicated your pictures pretty much always always.
It goes back literally to the earliest known cave paintings,
and we have come to be as a species very
acquainted with the idea of pictures in a series that
tell a story. Yeah, sorry, I know you were selling
(01:15):
tranced by my voice. I just went to a special
place I did so, but that that concept not just
of pictures but of pictures one after another telling a
story like that started somewhere. And one of the people
that's often latted is the father of the modern comic
book which uses that pattern, is Rudolph top Fer. But
(01:35):
before we talk about him, we actually have to talk
about um the fact that that title as father of
the modern comic book comes with some pretty serious qualifiers. First,
I'm gonna ask Tracy to mention one that came up
while we were talking today that I did not include
in this outline. I was sure the Biou tapestry that
tells a story with a lot of pictures in a
particular order. It's from a very long time ago, And
(01:57):
I mean there's all kinds of pottery that's got stories
noted in pictures. And as I mentioned earlier, even previous
podcast subject William Hogarth sometimes actually gets a nod as
the creator of sequential art, at least in the Western world,
because of his print series that he did, like a
Rake's Progress. Those are the ones on the boots Um
and Marriage Ala Mode. But while those featured stories that
(02:21):
did play out over a series of successive images, they
reach on a full size print, so it wasn't like
a thing you could just look at and get the
whole story at once. The viewer would have to work
their way like physically through a room where they were hung,
or in a big, huge folio style book where they
would have to flip each page. Yeah, today you can
scroll down correct the elections of it on the internet
(02:42):
with the much smaller but at the time it was
a big gallery situation. So Rodolf Tougher actually cited Hogarth
as an influence in this his writing and his visual storytelling.
He mentioned in particular the series called Industry and Idleness,
which is published in seventeen already seven And we didn't
talk about that specific one in our previous episode about
(03:04):
the life of Hogarth, but it's a series of twelve prints.
I'm a little saddened by the topic. They were intended
to give working children a sense not of how life
might get better one day and maybe we would have
child labor laws and stuff, but of how important hard
work and mindfulness to duty are and then ignoring the
(03:27):
importance of one's of those things would invite a life
of misfortune. So keep on working, kids. It's good for you,
super good for you. And it's actually no mistake that
top for singled out that particular series because the two
other Hogarth series that we mentioned, A Rake's Progress and
a Marriage All the Moode had actually both been created
(03:47):
as a series of paintings before they were then turned
into engravings for mass production. But Industry and Idleness was
a little bit different, and that it had been made
with the intent of mass production from the start, presumably
because so many working children really needed these lessons um
and it was priced to market to a wide audience,
so it was priced not to be great art, but
(04:08):
to be something consumed by middle and lower classes. Uh.
And as top for was not a painter, which we'll
talk about why, and he did eventually position his own
work in a similar way. I feel like I should
qualify that and say he did some paintings, but that
wasn't really his vocation, as we'll learn. But it made
sense that he would choose Industry and Idleness, something that
was purposely intended for wide range consumption, as the item
(04:32):
of William Hogarth's work that he would write about. Yeah,
and of course he's not the only person in all
of Western art history that had this sort of series
of pictures. You could even say that the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel is a form of sequential art because
it's a series of pictures that are telling a story.
But I mean, that's obviously not a book. You don't
turn pages on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But there is
(04:54):
a narrative that's being communicated in the artwork, and narrative
comical art in Asia has been traced as far back
as scrolls attributed to a priest named Toba Sojo in
the eleventh century, and the Hokusai manga, which was first
published in the early eighteen hundreds, are examples of sketches
by Hokusai which convey narrative in a similar way, but
(05:15):
they're kind of grouped on a on one thing together.
They don't separate out with frames. Um, they had more
of this free form approach to conveying the story. So
there weren't frames, as I said, there weren't captions, uh,
And we're going to talk about those kinds of concepts
though in this episode. And they did, though, eventually integrate
both of those things into manga. Of course. Some more
(05:35):
modern examples that sometimes come up as the origin of
sequential art and comics include the popular strip The Yellow
Kid which ran at the end of the nineteenth century
in newspapers and the United States. Um, the Yellow Kid
was influential, particularly in the popularization of word balloons to
convey dialogue. So you know, comics have a whole visual
language to them, with that being one part of that language.
(05:57):
I'm just gonna draw word balloons with my hands apparently. Uh.
And Top for his work, though predated by the Yellow
Kid by several decades and combined other comic elements that
we would recognize the day. Yeah, the the Yellow Kid
was also one of the first things that was actually
used as a merchandizing opportunity. There was you could get
all the Yellow Kid everything when it was popular. That's
(06:19):
one of those things that I actually would love to
do as another episode one day. Um. But making the
case for giving Top for his share of the credit
and creating this genre, We're going to turn to the
words of a prolific writer when it comes to discussing
comics as a medium, and that is Scott McLeod and
in his book Understanding Comics, he wrote, the father of
the modern comic in many ways is Rodolph Top, for
(06:40):
whose light satiric picture stories starting in the mid eighteen hundreds,
employed cartooning and panel borders, and featured the first independent
combination of words and pictures seen in Europe. And even
the term sequential art didn't exist when top for was alive.
That phrase was actually coined by will Eisner more than
a century later in his publication Comics and Sequential Art. So,
(07:05):
having established at this point that there really isn't just
one person that we can give all the credit to
for the genesis of the comic book, and acknowledging that
we are definitely focusing on sequential art in the Western world,
We're going to start in on the life of this
one man who was unarguably a huge part of creating
this genre that we all know today as comic books
(07:26):
and thus comic con Why we're all here, well, why
some of us are here? Uh so. Topper was born
on January thirty one, sev in Geneva, Switzerland. His father
was Wolfgang Adam. Adam Adam is a normal word I
can say, I mean, you can spruce it up. His
(07:51):
father was Wolfgang Adam Topper, and he was a German
painter who had moved to Switzerland and then made that
at his home the met here in New York actually
has some of his paintings in their collection, but they're
not currently on display. You can see them on the
internet though. Yeah, the Mets website has everything. If I'm
remembering correctly, It's like a painting and a sketch. Might
(08:11):
be a painting and two pencil sketches, but you can
see his dad's work. Uh. And Rodolph was almost a
phrase that I mentioned in and Tracy made a quizzical
puppy face. He was almost uniquely completely Swiss. And the
reason that I chose that phrasing is because he stayed
in Geneva pretty much his entire life. He didn't even
travel very much. He just loved being there. Um. He
(08:33):
went to Paris briefly as boy for school in the
nine school year, but that was really the only time
he left Geneva for any length at all. Uh. He
would occasionally make short excursion trips to hike in the
Alps close to home, but that was it. Yeah. He
was not a big world traveler, not even a europe traveler,
even though it was all very close by. He also
(08:54):
had poor eyesight, and it was while he was away
at school that it was recognized that this poor eyesight
was a degenerative eye disease. So he had been interested
in art and had wanted to do art from an
early age, and he thought his vision problems meant that
he wouldn't be able to follow in his father's professional footsteps,
so he turned his interests to literature, although he kept sketching,
(09:17):
and so because his vision was really poor, he developed
a very fast and casual way of drawing, which actually
enabled him to capture moments, idea and ideas really quickly
in a visual form using I mean a very small
number of strokes. Yeah, and we're going to talk a
little bit about why he ended up prizing that simplicity
in terms of his drawing style later on, as he
(09:39):
turned it into more of a profession. But top first
schooling led him to a career in education, so he
started teaching in eighteen twenty two, and he taught in
a number of boys schools in Geneva over the course
of the next couple of years. Not long into his
career as an educator, though, he struck out on his
own and he founded his own boarding school in eighteen
(10:00):
where he had married a woman named and Francois. I
wrote down how to say this. He had married a
woman named Anne Francoise Luannier in the previous year, and
the two of them eventually had four children together. And
even though Radolph was invested in his teaching career, he
never stopped crafting stories, either in writing or by sketches.
(10:22):
And he would take these hiking trips in the summer
with his students. These are his brief little sojourns into
the Alps from his school, and then he would kind
of make a diary of them in words and pictures
with his own story embellishments. And these accounts were actually
the beginning of the visual storytelling that would eventually lead
to his sequential art. And doing this art really filled
(10:42):
a void in his life. He continued to develop visual
stories basically as a hobby. It offered him a creative
outlet that being a teacher and an administrator didn't really
Sometime in eighteen seven he started drawing images in sequence
with captions to tell the stories, and he started sharing
his work with other people, which at first was all
he really intended to do, just kind of handed around
(11:04):
to his friends. He just wanted to amuse himself and
his friends and his students in a creative way. And
we're going to talk about a pretty major figure who
actually encouraged this educator to start publishing his picture stories
and kind of create a new career for himself. But
before we do that, we're gonna pause for a little
sponsor break. Okay, back to Rodolf. So a famous name
(11:33):
in literature is in part to thank for Rodolf top
For deciding that he should publish these am using little
sketch stories, and that is Johann Vogang von Gerta. The
two are acquaintances, and top For actually sent him some
of his work at one point. Gerta was already quite
old at this time and he immensely enjoyed this way
of representing narrative in this new style, and he is
(11:54):
largely credited with encouraging top For to go to print
with these comical stories. Those was risky for him to
do though, I mean, this was considered a pretty lowbrow
form of entertainment, and because he was an educator, associating
himself with such a lowbrow thing could damage his career,
and unfortunately we know he did go forward with it.
(12:14):
But when top first first example of lett on his thomp,
which translates roughly to graphic literature, was published in eighteen
thirty three. Gerta had already died of heart failure, so
he didn't see his his encouraged accomplishment come to fruition.
But that series it was published was his wild Demonschieur Jabeau,
and it published the year after Guerta's death, but it
(12:35):
had been created actually two years before that, in eighteen
thirty one. This will come up over and over that
top Fur was publishing things that he had been sitting on,
in some cases for more than a decade at a time,
and the publication of Monsieur Jabeau was also plagued with problems.
Tougher his relationship with this printer had soured while they
were working on it. There was a lot of bickering
(12:56):
between the two of them about both money and damaged art. Yeah.
Top Forer had ordered and paid for a full run
of several hundred copies of this comic, but initially he
only wanted it to go out to friends. But words
soon circulated that a wide release into bookstores was coming,
and top for blamed the printer for spilling the beans
(13:18):
about this. The artist had held back the majority of
copies for two reasons. First, he wanted to wait until
his professorship was tenured so that even if his reputation suffered,
his income was still going to be secure. Uh. Second,
he wanted it to seem like his room work was
kind of rare before it went into a wider publication
(13:40):
to try to drive up the price, and public knowledge
that a release was on the way was going to
ruin that effort to create a false scarcity as a
marketing tactic. At the same time, though, Top made ten
times the cost of ten times the cost of having
the print run on that first run of Monsieur Jebo. Yeah, Like,
this is one of those things I'm always reluctant to
(14:01):
ever tell a comic book creator because because nobody just
out of the gate makes ten times what they put
into something. Um, but he just took off like a
rocket right out of the gate. Uh. The character Monsieur
Jabou is something of a social upstart and a climber,
so he was already starting with his satire immediately. Uh So,
Jabeau puts on airs to try to imitate the manners
(14:22):
of a man in high society, but in the end
he just comes off as a buffoon, Jabeau became really
really popular as a character, and even top For himself
sort of loved him. So he actually makes appearances in
other comic books by Top for his kind of like
a cameo. So in a strange way, Jabou's buffoonery did
in fact gain him entry into society. And as Holly
(14:45):
alluded to, before Monsieur Jabou's adventures were made public, Tougher
had all kinds of other projects that were already in
the works. He was a prolific creator, not just of
these sketched out stories, but also of more traditional fiction
in an essays. By eighteen thirty, his writing was regularly
featured in the monthly journal I'm going to just go
(15:06):
ahead and start with the frenchifying in the English words.
His work was regularly featured in the monthly journal La
BiblioTech Universal digenev and that is essentially Universal Library of Geneva. Yes,
so that was a couple of years before he started
printing his little comics. Um But the series that he
wrote for the journal, which was called Reflection Minu Popo
(15:28):
dun Genevois, was a review of paintings in Geneva. It
was essay work and critiques, and these writings were later
republished in collected form across two volumes. After top first death,
in eighteen thirty two, his story La BiblioTech demon or
My Uncle's Library was published. That is a tale about
young love and tragedy. The main character falls in love
(15:52):
with a young woman who dies. It was generally was
generally well received and was called charming by its critics.
I'm I chuckled because it's like the young woman dies,
but it was very charming. Um between his critical essays
as fiction and these sketched out stories. From that point on,
he was pretty much continually publishing stuff. Yeah. That same
(16:12):
year he also published another piece of fiction called The Presbytel,
and he became the professor of rhetoric at the Academy
of Geneva, and it was actually tenure for that particular
position that he was waiting to secure. Before that wide
release of Monsieur Gebau. In the late eighteen twenties, he
had been working on art in the text for a
series which would come to be known as Histoire de
(16:32):
Monsieur Vaubois and also Voyage at Aventures did Ductor Fists
and East Mr Cryptogam but he didn't publish any of
these for a number of years after he started working
on them. Yeah, he was just a busy be all
the time and had stuff always in the works. Uh
So his Trial to Monsieur Carapin was top first next
(16:54):
published album of sketch based storytelling, and this was actually written, drawn,
and published all in eighteen thirty seven, So it's kind
of an outlier in his work because it was all
done in the same year. And this particular comic satirizes education,
which of course was something that was a big part
of his life through the story of Monsieur Cleppin's hiring
of one problematic tutor after another for his many children,
(17:18):
Like the character had a herd in the comic, it's
just loads of children in every frame, And it was
a critique against the really rigid systems of education that
we're being favored, and like how people would get obsessed
with one approach to educating children and just be really
stuck in that rut. Because Top for himself disliked this
sort of rigid approach to education because he thought it
(17:40):
really just came with a lot of bureaucracy and was
a pain in the butt. Les Amours de Monsieur vou Bois,
which was created in seven, was also published in eighteen
thirty seven, so ten years later. And once again the
main character, whose name translates to old Wood is kind
of a buffoon, and then the plot enters around a
young woman that he falls in love with, although, much
(18:04):
like top for his other work, has a narrative to
meanders and two other topics. Yeah, he really would, you know,
kind of invented that. Meanwhile, back at the Hall of
Justice kind of approach, like he would just kind of
dart away from the story and tell some other backstory
things periodically. But this entire story is really pretty dark humor.
(18:24):
A lot of the jokes about Monsieur of vieu bois
failed suicide or about his failed suicide attempts when he
separated from his love or he is imprisoned, both of
which happened an awful lot in the course of the story. Uh.
And at one point Monsieur of vie Bois actually thinks
he is dead for a full two days, so he
lies very still and then he sits up very skinny. Um,
(18:46):
so he maybe doesn't have a full grasp of how
like actual metabolic things happen but there are also in
the story a lot of monks who worked very hard
to keep these lovers apart. But ultimately the story does
end with the pair being happily married. If you had
a really dark sense of humor today, then that the
jokes might be funny. Yeah, but maybe maybe not. Otherwise
(19:07):
we'll talk some more about some jokes that just don't
feel terribly hilarious these. Yeah. So, by the end of
the eighteen thirties, uh Top for his work had become
more famous, and that fame had also become problematic. He
had this market model of trying to maintain a scarcity
of his work to drive up the price, but pirated
versions were coming out which were being sold all over Europe, so,
(19:30):
due to a lack of international copyright law at the time,
this was not illegal. To try to combat the problem,
Toper released a new edition of the popular histoire that
Monsieur Beaubois with a lower price that matched the impostors
price of the counterfeit copies of his work. And he
(19:50):
continued to have problems with knockoffs, so that didn't really
fix it. Yeah, that pretty much persisted throughout his career.
In eighteen forty, Top for published the worth of seven
comics he produced in his lifetime. This one titled Mischief
Pencil and it was initially created in eighteen thirty one.
Again that's nine years prior to publication, and it's uh,
this really interesting tale, as many of his start small
(20:12):
and then they kind of spiral out of control. It
begins with an artist that loses a sketch when the
wind blows it away, but this runaway drawing catalyzes this
series of crazier and crazier events that nearly leads to
World War, but that crisis is narrowly averted. He was
also continuing to publish other more traditional work. A collection
of top First short stories was published in France in
(20:35):
eighteen forty one. This collection was titled Nouvelle Genevois or
New Geneva. It's a It was very well received critically
and it gave his fiction another layer of credibility. Politically,
things really shifted in Geneva in the early eighteen forties
and that actually impacted Top First work as well. Rodolph
(20:55):
was very conservative, and when the Radical Party of leftist
liberals were kind of elected into power, he used his
voice as a writer to speak out for the conservative agenda,
and his friends actually found him to be rather fanatical
about this, like they kind of thought he had maybe
gone a little too far. But he started publishing regularly
in Le de Geneve, which was a conservative paper that
(21:17):
he actually helped launch. It had a very short run
because this was not popular opinion and they really couldn't
get a foothold, and it only ran from eight to
eighteen forty three. So we're about to get to the
part where finally Toper's art comes to North America. And
before we do that, we're gonna take one more pause
for a little sponsor break. Uh So, in eighteen forty two,
(21:47):
top first work made its way across the Atlantic to
become what is regarded as the first comic book published
in the United States, and that title was The Adventures
of Obadiah old Buck. That was the name that the
eighteen thirty seven publication His Twild and Mischief of Vieu
Bois was given when it got here, and that was
considered the first comic book in Europe, but for the
(22:09):
North American audience in English Obediah old Book, and it
was not offered as a solo title for purchase. It
was actually a supplement to a newspaper. I love the
name Obediah Old book. It's pretty great. I apparently can't
say it very well, but I love that. His next book,
Voyage on Zigzag, which was published in eighteen forty three,
was based largely on accounts he had written as a
(22:32):
young teacher on hiking trips with his students. And there
are some illustrations in this book, but it's really more
like a novel with illustrations and not a comic book. Yeah,
and most of the illustrations are not in his sort
of silly style. They're a little bit more formalized, and like,
here's a scenery that we came across. I'm imagining and
it's like stardust. Yeah, that's not entirely off the mark. Um.
(22:56):
You can actually find that online. Most of these are
archive third archive dot org. Uh. Some of his original
stuff is a little tricky to read because the um
the captions are not only in French, but he had
very curly Q writings. It's a little dicey to read,
but you can find them online. Um. And in eighteen
forty two, Top four published essayfe uh So he was
(23:20):
aware that what he was doing by pairing captions with
framed story beats was unique and he had gained a
level of fame for it at this point. So he
wrote about his style of crafting narrative in this book,
and then he wrote another book about his work three
years later called Essay The Physiognomony, and that second book
on his visual storytelling speaks a lot about creating character
(23:42):
and identity through drawing, and it's also something of a
defense of his work. Uh. It has a little bit
of a didactic angle where he's trying to teach readers
how to approach and appreciate this new medium. Essaystography is
widely considered to be one of the first, if not
the first analytical studies of the comics form. So not
(24:03):
only was he basically the person who developed this form,
he was also the first person that wrote criticism and
analysis about that form as a medium, which is pretty incredible.
In it, he discussed not only how stories can be
told in the visual medium, but he also talks about
possible future technologies and advancements that might shift the end results,
(24:24):
such as the addition of color. And not surprisingly, since
we've already told you that he was had figured out
this way to do these really rough, quickdoodle sketches. Uh.
Top Ferm makes clear his opinion that you do not
need to be a great artist to make what he
called literature and prints, but you have to be able
to quote invent some kind of drama. And he also
(24:45):
takes that opportunity to address critics who would demean the
simplicity of the art in this style for not seeing
its value. And he wrote, quote, if only the one
or two critics who attack the failings of these little
books or who tease their stylistic follies, would instead emphasize
a useful way of thinking, it is not true that
they would well have reached readers who would not go
(25:06):
searching for their sermons, as well as those who are
rarely found in novels. What was that noise monster came?
This argument reminds me of a conversation that uh we
actually had earlier today about um, real historians and and
how a lot of the history podcasts that are really
(25:27):
popular are not by real historians, meaning like people that
have a PhD in a tenure track position. Um and
uh And a lot of times my response is well,
maybe if you are a like academic historian. Look at
what's being successful about these podcasts and apply that to
(25:49):
your academic podcasts. Yeah, see how that works, which is
narrative usually, which is what basically what he's saying right there.
Maybe don't fuss over the technique of my art, but
actually take a moment to appreciate the story. I'm telling
you something useful with your time. He didn't really say
that to them say that. He was more like, look,
it's really cool. Additionally, the autography that was used in
(26:14):
top for his work is something that he describes in
these these works. This method let the artists draw onto
paper with a special lithographic inc which would then be
used to print the image onto a stone. Then that
stone would be used to reprint the original And one
of the benefits of this technique was that the artists
didn't have to like do everything backwards onto the stone
(26:37):
to get it to print correctly. They could just put
their idea on paper as normal and then go from there.
So there's a series of plates and essays deutographies showing
examples of landscapes and comic sketches to show how these
methods could be used for a variety of different images.
So it had sort of a technical how to aspect. Yeah,
(26:58):
and so just to go a little bit more detail
on how stone lithography works. So you kind of grasp
this because it took me a little while to really
get the mental picture of what he was talking about. Um,
the stone in lithography is either a slab of actual
stone normally limestone, or the more modern version has a
metal plate. And so this special ink that was used
(27:20):
is oily or greasy like, it has a stickiness to it,
and so when the ink goes on to the stone,
it adheres really really well because of those oils, and
then this forms the print image which can actually be
used over and over because the stone gets a water treatment,
so the parts of it without this oily print on
it absorb all that water because they don't have the
ink on it. And then another ink is rolled onto
(27:42):
the stone and this does not stick to the west
part of the stone, but it does stick to those
parts that have been treated with the greasy ink. So
then that can have paper applied to it and the
stone is pressed and the images transferred to the paper
like magic. I being a crafty person, the second I
read this, I was like, I gotta do this haven't
done it yet, but it's going to happen, just rest assured.
(28:03):
So one of the downfalls of this method was that
sometimes the transfer wouldn't be quite perfect, and pieces of
a line might drop off of an image, there might
be a little gap in there. So for Tougher, this
actually UH fueled his passion to draw in such a
way that the everything would be really simple. So his
in his serialized narratives, UH, if a line was broken,
(28:25):
the concept should still remain and be really obvious. And
here's something he wrote about it. The graphic line, by
the very reason of what meetings it makes clear even
without the imitation being complete, admittedly demands enormous emissions of
properties and details, with the result that whereas in a
finished painting, the slightest discontinuity in the image simultaneously marks
(28:49):
an isore and a gap in the graphic line, by contrast,
monstrous discontinuities are neither stains nor gaps, even when they
are not as often happens desire fired by the author
and merely the happy use of a brevity method. I
like monstrous discontinuities. So that's my new punk band um
(29:11):
eighteen forty five was a really busy year for a
Dolf top Fur. In addition to essays Dephysy Young Pneumony,
he also published the comic Histoire d'Albert and. The plot
of this comic is about a young man with no
life experience and no marketable skills who searches in vain
for a career. So think back to the fact that
not long before this he had a conservative political paper
(29:34):
that failed. Because how this plays out is that when
this young man shows him to have shows himself to
have no talent and be suited for nothing else, he
becomes a radical leftist political journalist. It's my somewhat autobiographical comic.
Estoire de monsieur cryptogom also went into print in eighteen
(29:55):
forty five. A later unauthorized English language re print translated
the title to the Veritable History of Mr. Bachelor Butterfly.
This story is about an entomologist who specializes in butterflies,
on a quest to escape his jealous and zealous fiance
(30:17):
and to find a better match for himself. There are
a lot of really fun movement panels in this particular story,
including a segment where a progressively wider assortment of people
and animals are drawn into a circular chase on a
boat that all began with Monsieur Cryptogram. There's not an
R in there. Monsieur cryptogram running from the very possessive
(30:39):
fiance and it culminates in the sort of cyclone of
movement around on a ship's deck. Yeah, it's quite fun, Uh,
if you're into that sort of cyclonic thing. Uh. There's
an interesting piece of historical context here because this comic
involves a boat trip, as we just mentioned, to Algiers
or al Julia, And this was originally written in eighteen thirty,
which is an interesting time because France invaded and conquered
(31:03):
that country in eighteen thirty. But top for doesn't make
any mention at all of any of the political stuff.
They're just going to visit. Uh. It's almost as though
he included it to be current and topical, but he
didn't want to really get especially political in this particular instance.
Monsieur Cryptogram was first printed in a series of eleven
installments in the periodical Stresson. I feel like I said
(31:27):
that in terrible. My French is terrible. It's literally the
on lyast language I've studied. Businides English, and I say
it's so badly So that was an eleven installments from
January to April of eighteen forty five. Top for his
illustrations style needed to be refined for this pretty much
comic strip style printing in a wide circulation periodical, so
(31:48):
his original art was recreated with a style that was
more in line with magazine illustrations using woodblock, and of
course he still had this eye problem so he couldn't
do it. The French lithographer and Kared Toure artist Charles
amade Den, who worked under the pseudonym Sham, was the
person who created those new woodblocks with Top for supervising
and instructing the work, and as an aside, one of
(32:10):
the things he told him to do was go look
at all of William Hogarth's work. The cryptogram comic was
really popular, so much so that Little Stression soon ran
another comic strip style story by another artist, So basically
a new type of feature in a print publication had
(32:30):
been born from Top for his work. Yeah, this is
one of those things that when I was reading it,
because we work in a company that has done internet
content for a long time, it reminded me of those
times when like a thing works and you just want
to do it over and over to get you know,
the successful engagement. So it's like, quizzes are great, let's
make a million. Um. It's kind of the same thing.
Everybody loves that comic. Who else draws a comic? Uh,
(32:51):
and they put it right in that magazine. I feel
like we're also with us. We're on the way to
having funny papers. Yes. Uh. And so when cryptogom Story
was printed officially, this time as The Strange Adventures of
Bachelor Butterfly in New York in eighteen forty six, it
consequently became the second sequential art comic printed in the
United States. The Ductor Festus was created in eighteen thirty one,
(33:13):
but not published until eighteen forty six, so fifteen years later.
The narrative for this one is that the titular doctor
wants to go see the world, and he sets out
on a series of travels that leave nothing but chaos
in his awake, but he is completely oblivious to all
the chaos he is causing almost all the time. And
(33:34):
this one, like others we've mentioned, definitely has some humor
and you've got to use the air quotes that does
not come off as funny at all to a modern audience.
For example, after Festus creates an uproar at a mill
that results in a great deal of confusion, there are
three panels in sequence in which the first one is
a miller beating his wife. She in the next panel
(33:56):
beats their son, and then in the third panel, the
sun beats their donkey. Because there's this whole case of
misplaced blame, they're all blaming each other because he has
left this mess in his wake. Um. So it's like,
there's part of me that tries to imagine the people
in eighteen forty six and that's hilarious, but I'm like
your monsters. Well, and reading that part of the outline
(34:17):
reminded me of when I was a kid and my
mom and I went to all the local community theater
productions of every musical they ever did, and one year
they did South Pacific, and there is a joke in
South Pacific that is literally about assaulting someone, and I
was I remember sitting there surrounded by grown ups because
I was the fourteen or something, who were all finding
(34:38):
this hilarious, and I was just like, wait, this is
not a funny joke. I don't understand. Yeah, there's dark humor,
and there's people beating each other and so funny. So
even as he was writing essays the Physiognominee and arranging
for the publication of several of his sketch stories in
the mid eighteen forties, Tougher was not do doing well
(35:00):
in terms of his health. He had started having health
problems as early as eighteen forty three. He had an
enlarged spleen, although it's not really clear exactly what had
caused that uh and he had traveled in the years
eighteen forty three to eighteen forty five to the springs
at both Leave, Switzerland and v France for treatment of
this problem, but unfortunately he did not find any relief
(35:23):
in the so called water cure. His condition only got
worse and it made the pain much worse. Um when
he died on June eighth of eighteen forty six, top
Fur was still working and he had several projects in
process at the time, and he was allegedly observing the
doctors at the baths that he would go to at
the encouragement of a cousin to see if he could
find some humorous story in it. But his failing health
(35:46):
really left him too weak to do a whole lot
creative that was new, and he was only forty seven
when he died, so there was really a lot more
he could have created. That last part is both charming
and sad to me, like the idea that he was
watching doctors going is there a funny story here? Touching?
So top Fir became incredibly famous in his own lifetime
(36:08):
for his graphic stories, but he was not universally praised
for them. A critical essay written by German novelist Friedrich
Theodore Visher begins quote, what sort of scroll is this?
Is this what Greta praised? I can hardly believe my eyes.
Is this how our childish, our own childish scribbles looked
(36:29):
when we turned boyish fantasies into silly caricatures. But in truth,
Visher actually thought that top Forer was doing something really interesting.
Those opening lines in that essay were an effort to
mimic the criticisms that had already been lobbed at top
first work, and Visher actually found these seeming simplicity of
this art and stories to be pretty complex when you
(36:51):
actually looked at it more thoughtfully. In his essay continues quote,
but on closer inspection these capricious, lawless networks of lines
coalesced into the most decided characterization. This quite craven slovenly
drawing becomes a well considered and systematic instrument in the
hand of a man who makes sense of nonsense, is
(37:11):
wise and delirium, and steers his mad steed to its
certain destination following the rules of a secret calculation. You
think it leaps forward on its own, but no, there
is a coachman on the box seat. You just can't
see him. So it's interesting to look at how people
have considered Topper and his work over the years. One
(37:33):
word that comes up a lot when describing his work
and his world view is naivete. Topper biographer David Kunzel
addressed and dissected this whole idea in a two thousand
and seven book about the artist. So in it, Kunzel
makes the case that simply by virtue of not featuring
themes of overt sexuality in his work, which is very
(37:53):
common in French writing and art at the time, and
this prevailing characterization in the nineteenth century of Switzerland's people
being inherently sort of innocent uh Top for his own
sharp wit and morality stories have sometimes been characterized into
this naive image. Considering that Hogarth, who was known for
these morality narratives, is the one influence that Top proclaimed,
(38:17):
it's pretty logical to conclude that the lack of adult
themes in his work was a lot more about his
moral compass and his desire to appeal to a broad audience,
and not an indicator that he just had a wide
eyed innocence about the world. It's also worth noting that
even from the beginning he was sharing his work with
his students, so all along he was showing this to
(38:37):
children as well as adults. Yes, so that might explain
why he wasn't going for the super adult themes. And
after his death in eighteen forty six, almost immediately top
for his works were published in an anthology titled Histos
on his Thump. One of the things that he was
working on before he died was a story called Brutus Calico,
(38:58):
and this unfinished manuscript for the story as part of
the University Library in Geneva's permanent collection, and today there
is actually a monument to Rodolf top For with a
bust of the artist a top a marble pillar that
sits in Geneva Art. Spiegelman, who created the graphic novel Mouse,
which is incredible, said this of Topper in an interview
(39:18):
where he was talking about toppers writings and about this
new genre that he had created, and this is his quote.
He had a deep understanding of what comics were. He
understood that comics existed someplace between writing and drawing and
was its own language. So as you wander through Comic Con,
if you're one of the people that came for that,
(39:39):
look at all that sequential art and think about Rodolf
top for and that's what we got on him. Yeah,
so that was our show. We definitely want to take
a moment and think everyone in New York Comic Con presents,
particularly Matt Wizowski, Collette Oliver, and Andrew Sposito, who too
(40:00):
look amazing care of us. We were, as always, so
honored to be part of their programming and it was
a super fun night. And thank you also everybody who
came out to see us. We know the show was
a little later in the evening. It's we ended basically
at my bedtime. Uh and and traffic was terrible that night,
so thanks so much. Everybody came out, who came out,
(40:20):
and a lot of folks stayed behind afterwards to say
hello to us. So thank you, thank you, thank you
all our gracious and wonderful listeners who were there that night. Yeah,
you made it just an incredible evening. And I feel
like we should give a special thank you to our
younger listener, Nathaniel, who brought us amazing gifts and was
charming and delightful. Yes, thank you so much, Nathaniel. Yeah,
(40:41):
I have a little bit of listener mail. I'm gonna
keep it short. I'm not going to read her whole
her whole letter because our episode is a little lengthy. Um.
It is from our listener Kim, who writes hello and
well wishes from Washington, d C. I love the show
and discovered the archive episodes this past summer. They were
great way to learn a little something while I delved
(41:02):
into my new hobby of embroidery. You to make an
excellent team in the way you approach subjects and the
integrity of your research is such a credit to you
both and the respect you hold for history. She goes on,
She's lovely and she mentions that um, one of the
things she sent us in this parcel was a little
batch of vintage postcards, particularly those with a dresses of
(41:25):
a few of the first ladies. Oh yeah, it's such
a good little parcel. It's like a It's like one
of those things that I'm going to keep on my
desk and when I'm having a credit d I'm gonna
pull one out at a time. So it's like a
slow unpack for me, where I go, Oh, a delight man.
Because Kim is a very organized woman. She sent us
a huge list of episode suggestions, but she categorized them,
(41:48):
which was amazing by people, events, general, histories, and miscellaneous.
And it's lovely and far more organized than I would
ever be. So I can't play how much I appreciated Kim.
Thank you for all of the beautiful postcards. Like I said,
They're gonna brighten my days when I'm having a rough
one or just want a little smile for no good reason. Uh.
And again, thank you, Thank you. Thank you to New
(42:09):
York Comic com Presents and everyone who came to the
live show. If you would like to write us, you
can do so at History Podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com. You can also find us at missed in
History dot com, which is our website, and from there
it's your launching point to all of our social media.
But justin kis you want to go direct, we're missed
in History pretty much everywhere you go. If you would
(42:29):
like to check out past episodes, you can do that
in our website. As we said, that's missed in History
dot com. We have a full archive of every episode
that has ever existed over the show, long before Tracy
and I were ever involved, and we have our current
episodes and any that Tracy and I have worked on
have show notes. So come and visit us at missed
in history dot com and we'll all explore history together.
(42:55):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff Works dot com. Two four
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, we recently were lucky enough
to be part of New York Comic Con Presents, which
we have talked about before, but is the parallel evening
programming for New York Comic Con. So today we are
(00:22):
sharing the audio of that recording, which was made at
Hudson Mercantile. It is all about the man who was
often credited as being the creator of the first comic
book in the Western world, and we are definitely going
to get into all the qualifiers around that in the
course of the show. So h it is a full episode,
so let's hop right in and hear it. Hello, and
(00:53):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh, Tracy.
Humans have always communicated your pictures pretty much always always.
It goes back literally to the earliest known cave paintings,
and we have come to be as a species very
acquainted with the idea of pictures in a series that
tell a story. Yeah, sorry, I know you were selling
(01:15):
tranced by my voice. I just went to a special
place I did so, but that that concept not just
of pictures but of pictures one after another telling a
story like that started somewhere. And one of the people
that's often latted is the father of the modern comic
book which uses that pattern, is Rudolph top Fer. But
(01:35):
before we talk about him, we actually have to talk
about um the fact that that title as father of
the modern comic book comes with some pretty serious qualifiers. First,
I'm gonna ask Tracy to mention one that came up
while we were talking today that I did not include
in this outline. I was sure the Biou tapestry that
tells a story with a lot of pictures in a
particular order. It's from a very long time ago, And
(01:57):
I mean there's all kinds of pottery that's got stories
noted in pictures. And as I mentioned earlier, even previous
podcast subject William Hogarth sometimes actually gets a nod as
the creator of sequential art, at least in the Western world,
because of his print series that he did, like a
Rake's Progress. Those are the ones on the boots Um
and Marriage Ala Mode. But while those featured stories that
(02:21):
did play out over a series of successive images, they
reach on a full size print, so it wasn't like
a thing you could just look at and get the
whole story at once. The viewer would have to work
their way like physically through a room where they were hung,
or in a big, huge folio style book where they
would have to flip each page. Yeah, today you can
scroll down correct the elections of it on the internet
(02:42):
with the much smaller but at the time it was
a big gallery situation. So Rodolf Tougher actually cited Hogarth
as an influence in this his writing and his visual storytelling.
He mentioned in particular the series called Industry and Idleness,
which is published in seventeen already seven And we didn't
talk about that specific one in our previous episode about
(03:04):
the life of Hogarth, but it's a series of twelve prints.
I'm a little saddened by the topic. They were intended
to give working children a sense not of how life
might get better one day and maybe we would have
child labor laws and stuff, but of how important hard
work and mindfulness to duty are and then ignoring the
(03:27):
importance of one's of those things would invite a life
of misfortune. So keep on working, kids. It's good for you,
super good for you. And it's actually no mistake that
top for singled out that particular series because the two
other Hogarth series that we mentioned, A Rake's Progress and
a Marriage All the Moode had actually both been created
(03:47):
as a series of paintings before they were then turned
into engravings for mass production. But Industry and Idleness was
a little bit different, and that it had been made
with the intent of mass production from the start, presumably
because so many working children really needed these lessons um
and it was priced to market to a wide audience,
so it was priced not to be great art, but
(04:08):
to be something consumed by middle and lower classes. Uh.
And as top for was not a painter, which we'll
talk about why, and he did eventually position his own
work in a similar way. I feel like I should
qualify that and say he did some paintings, but that
wasn't really his vocation, as we'll learn. But it made
sense that he would choose Industry and Idleness, something that
was purposely intended for wide range consumption, as the item
(04:32):
of William Hogarth's work that he would write about. Yeah,
and of course he's not the only person in all
of Western art history that had this sort of series
of pictures. You could even say that the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel is a form of sequential art because
it's a series of pictures that are telling a story.
But I mean, that's obviously not a book. You don't
turn pages on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But there is
(04:54):
a narrative that's being communicated in the artwork, and narrative
comical art in Asia has been traced as far back
as scrolls attributed to a priest named Toba Sojo in
the eleventh century, and the Hokusai manga, which was first
published in the early eighteen hundreds, are examples of sketches
by Hokusai which convey narrative in a similar way, but
(05:15):
they're kind of grouped on a on one thing together.
They don't separate out with frames. Um, they had more
of this free form approach to conveying the story. So
there weren't frames, as I said, there weren't captions, uh,
And we're going to talk about those kinds of concepts
though in this episode. And they did, though, eventually integrate
both of those things into manga. Of course. Some more
(05:35):
modern examples that sometimes come up as the origin of
sequential art and comics include the popular strip The Yellow
Kid which ran at the end of the nineteenth century
in newspapers and the United States. Um, the Yellow Kid
was influential, particularly in the popularization of word balloons to
convey dialogue. So you know, comics have a whole visual
language to them, with that being one part of that language.
(05:57):
I'm just gonna draw word balloons with my hands apparently. Uh.
And Top for his work, though predated by the Yellow
Kid by several decades and combined other comic elements that
we would recognize the day. Yeah, the the Yellow Kid
was also one of the first things that was actually
used as a merchandizing opportunity. There was you could get
all the Yellow Kid everything when it was popular. That's
(06:19):
one of those things that I actually would love to
do as another episode one day. Um. But making the
case for giving Top for his share of the credit
and creating this genre, We're going to turn to the
words of a prolific writer when it comes to discussing
comics as a medium, and that is Scott McLeod and
in his book Understanding Comics, he wrote, the father of
the modern comic in many ways is Rodolph Top, for
(06:40):
whose light satiric picture stories starting in the mid eighteen hundreds,
employed cartooning and panel borders, and featured the first independent
combination of words and pictures seen in Europe. And even
the term sequential art didn't exist when top for was alive.
That phrase was actually coined by will Eisner more than
a century later in his publication Comics and Sequential Art. So,
(07:05):
having established at this point that there really isn't just
one person that we can give all the credit to
for the genesis of the comic book, and acknowledging that
we are definitely focusing on sequential art in the Western world,
We're going to start in on the life of this
one man who was unarguably a huge part of creating
this genre that we all know today as comic books
(07:26):
and thus comic con Why we're all here, well, why
some of us are here? Uh so. Topper was born
on January thirty one, sev in Geneva, Switzerland. His father
was Wolfgang Adam. Adam Adam is a normal word I
can say, I mean, you can spruce it up. His
(07:51):
father was Wolfgang Adam Topper, and he was a German
painter who had moved to Switzerland and then made that
at his home the met here in New York actually
has some of his paintings in their collection, but they're
not currently on display. You can see them on the
internet though. Yeah, the Mets website has everything. If I'm
remembering correctly, It's like a painting and a sketch. Might
(08:11):
be a painting and two pencil sketches, but you can
see his dad's work. Uh. And Rodolph was almost a
phrase that I mentioned in and Tracy made a quizzical
puppy face. He was almost uniquely completely Swiss. And the
reason that I chose that phrasing is because he stayed
in Geneva pretty much his entire life. He didn't even
travel very much. He just loved being there. Um. He
(08:33):
went to Paris briefly as boy for school in the
nine school year, but that was really the only time
he left Geneva for any length at all. Uh. He
would occasionally make short excursion trips to hike in the
Alps close to home, but that was it. Yeah. He
was not a big world traveler, not even a europe traveler,
even though it was all very close by. He also
(08:54):
had poor eyesight, and it was while he was away
at school that it was recognized that this poor eyesight
was a degenerative eye disease. So he had been interested
in art and had wanted to do art from an
early age, and he thought his vision problems meant that
he wouldn't be able to follow in his father's professional footsteps,
so he turned his interests to literature, although he kept sketching,
(09:17):
and so because his vision was really poor, he developed
a very fast and casual way of drawing, which actually
enabled him to capture moments, idea and ideas really quickly
in a visual form using I mean a very small
number of strokes. Yeah, and we're going to talk a
little bit about why he ended up prizing that simplicity
in terms of his drawing style later on, as he
(09:39):
turned it into more of a profession. But top first
schooling led him to a career in education, so he
started teaching in eighteen twenty two, and he taught in
a number of boys schools in Geneva over the course
of the next couple of years. Not long into his
career as an educator, though, he struck out on his
own and he founded his own boarding school in eighteen
(10:00):
where he had married a woman named and Francois. I
wrote down how to say this. He had married a
woman named Anne Francoise Luannier in the previous year, and
the two of them eventually had four children together. And
even though Radolph was invested in his teaching career, he
never stopped crafting stories, either in writing or by sketches.
(10:22):
And he would take these hiking trips in the summer
with his students. These are his brief little sojourns into
the Alps from his school, and then he would kind
of make a diary of them in words and pictures
with his own story embellishments. And these accounts were actually
the beginning of the visual storytelling that would eventually lead
to his sequential art. And doing this art really filled
(10:42):
a void in his life. He continued to develop visual
stories basically as a hobby. It offered him a creative
outlet that being a teacher and an administrator didn't really
Sometime in eighteen seven he started drawing images in sequence
with captions to tell the stories, and he started sharing
his work with other people, which at first was all
he really intended to do, just kind of handed around
(11:04):
to his friends. He just wanted to amuse himself and
his friends and his students in a creative way. And
we're going to talk about a pretty major figure who
actually encouraged this educator to start publishing his picture stories
and kind of create a new career for himself. But
before we do that, we're gonna pause for a little
sponsor break. Okay, back to Rodolf. So a famous name
(11:33):
in literature is in part to thank for Rodolf top
For deciding that he should publish these am using little
sketch stories, and that is Johann Vogang von Gerta. The
two are acquaintances, and top For actually sent him some
of his work at one point. Gerta was already quite
old at this time and he immensely enjoyed this way
of representing narrative in this new style, and he is
(11:54):
largely credited with encouraging top For to go to print
with these comical stories. Those was risky for him to
do though, I mean, this was considered a pretty lowbrow
form of entertainment, and because he was an educator, associating
himself with such a lowbrow thing could damage his career,
and unfortunately we know he did go forward with it.
(12:14):
But when top first first example of lett on his thomp,
which translates roughly to graphic literature, was published in eighteen
thirty three. Gerta had already died of heart failure, so
he didn't see his his encouraged accomplishment come to fruition.
But that series it was published was his wild Demonschieur Jabeau,
and it published the year after Guerta's death, but it
(12:35):
had been created actually two years before that, in eighteen
thirty one. This will come up over and over that
top Fur was publishing things that he had been sitting on,
in some cases for more than a decade at a time,
and the publication of Monsieur Jabeau was also plagued with problems.
Tougher his relationship with this printer had soured while they
were working on it. There was a lot of bickering
(12:56):
between the two of them about both money and damaged art. Yeah.
Top Forer had ordered and paid for a full run
of several hundred copies of this comic, but initially he
only wanted it to go out to friends. But words
soon circulated that a wide release into bookstores was coming,
and top for blamed the printer for spilling the beans
(13:18):
about this. The artist had held back the majority of
copies for two reasons. First, he wanted to wait until
his professorship was tenured so that even if his reputation suffered,
his income was still going to be secure. Uh. Second,
he wanted it to seem like his room work was
kind of rare before it went into a wider publication
(13:40):
to try to drive up the price, and public knowledge
that a release was on the way was going to
ruin that effort to create a false scarcity as a
marketing tactic. At the same time, though, Top made ten
times the cost of ten times the cost of having
the print run on that first run of Monsieur Jebo. Yeah, Like,
this is one of those things I'm always reluctant to
(14:01):
ever tell a comic book creator because because nobody just
out of the gate makes ten times what they put
into something. Um, but he just took off like a
rocket right out of the gate. Uh. The character Monsieur
Jabou is something of a social upstart and a climber,
so he was already starting with his satire immediately. Uh So,
Jabeau puts on airs to try to imitate the manners
(14:22):
of a man in high society, but in the end
he just comes off as a buffoon, Jabeau became really
really popular as a character, and even top For himself
sort of loved him. So he actually makes appearances in
other comic books by Top for his kind of like
a cameo. So in a strange way, Jabou's buffoonery did
in fact gain him entry into society. And as Holly
(14:45):
alluded to, before Monsieur Jabou's adventures were made public, Tougher
had all kinds of other projects that were already in
the works. He was a prolific creator, not just of
these sketched out stories, but also of more traditional fiction
in an essays. By eighteen thirty, his writing was regularly
featured in the monthly journal I'm going to just go
(15:06):
ahead and start with the frenchifying in the English words.
His work was regularly featured in the monthly journal La
BiblioTech Universal digenev and that is essentially Universal Library of Geneva. Yes,
so that was a couple of years before he started
printing his little comics. Um But the series that he
wrote for the journal, which was called Reflection Minu Popo
(15:28):
dun Genevois, was a review of paintings in Geneva. It
was essay work and critiques, and these writings were later
republished in collected form across two volumes. After top first death,
in eighteen thirty two, his story La BiblioTech demon or
My Uncle's Library was published. That is a tale about
young love and tragedy. The main character falls in love
(15:52):
with a young woman who dies. It was generally was
generally well received and was called charming by its critics.
I'm I chuckled because it's like the young woman dies,
but it was very charming. Um between his critical essays
as fiction and these sketched out stories. From that point on,
he was pretty much continually publishing stuff. Yeah. That same
(16:12):
year he also published another piece of fiction called The Presbytel,
and he became the professor of rhetoric at the Academy
of Geneva, and it was actually tenure for that particular
position that he was waiting to secure. Before that wide
release of Monsieur Gebau. In the late eighteen twenties, he
had been working on art in the text for a
series which would come to be known as Histoire de
(16:32):
Monsieur Vaubois and also Voyage at Aventures did Ductor Fists
and East Mr Cryptogam but he didn't publish any of
these for a number of years after he started working
on them. Yeah, he was just a busy be all
the time and had stuff always in the works. Uh
So his Trial to Monsieur Carapin was top first next
(16:54):
published album of sketch based storytelling, and this was actually written, drawn,
and published all in eighteen thirty seven, So it's kind
of an outlier in his work because it was all
done in the same year. And this particular comic satirizes education,
which of course was something that was a big part
of his life through the story of Monsieur Cleppin's hiring
of one problematic tutor after another for his many children,
(17:18):
Like the character had a herd in the comic, it's
just loads of children in every frame, And it was
a critique against the really rigid systems of education that
we're being favored, and like how people would get obsessed
with one approach to educating children and just be really
stuck in that rut. Because Top for himself disliked this
sort of rigid approach to education because he thought it
(17:40):
really just came with a lot of bureaucracy and was
a pain in the butt. Les Amours de Monsieur vou Bois,
which was created in seven, was also published in eighteen
thirty seven, so ten years later. And once again the
main character, whose name translates to old Wood is kind
of a buffoon, and then the plot enters around a
young woman that he falls in love with, although, much
(18:04):
like top for his other work, has a narrative to
meanders and two other topics. Yeah, he really would, you know,
kind of invented that. Meanwhile, back at the Hall of
Justice kind of approach, like he would just kind of
dart away from the story and tell some other backstory
things periodically. But this entire story is really pretty dark humor.
(18:24):
A lot of the jokes about Monsieur of vieu bois
failed suicide or about his failed suicide attempts when he
separated from his love or he is imprisoned, both of
which happened an awful lot in the course of the story. Uh.
And at one point Monsieur of vie Bois actually thinks
he is dead for a full two days, so he
lies very still and then he sits up very skinny. Um,
(18:46):
so he maybe doesn't have a full grasp of how
like actual metabolic things happen but there are also in
the story a lot of monks who worked very hard
to keep these lovers apart. But ultimately the story does
end with the pair being happily married. If you had
a really dark sense of humor today, then that the
jokes might be funny. Yeah, but maybe maybe not. Otherwise
(19:07):
we'll talk some more about some jokes that just don't
feel terribly hilarious these. Yeah. So, by the end of
the eighteen thirties, uh Top for his work had become
more famous, and that fame had also become problematic. He
had this market model of trying to maintain a scarcity
of his work to drive up the price, but pirated
versions were coming out which were being sold all over Europe, so,
(19:30):
due to a lack of international copyright law at the time,
this was not illegal. To try to combat the problem,
Toper released a new edition of the popular histoire that
Monsieur Beaubois with a lower price that matched the impostors
price of the counterfeit copies of his work. And he
(19:50):
continued to have problems with knockoffs, so that didn't really
fix it. Yeah, that pretty much persisted throughout his career.
In eighteen forty, Top for published the worth of seven
comics he produced in his lifetime. This one titled Mischief
Pencil and it was initially created in eighteen thirty one.
Again that's nine years prior to publication, and it's uh,
this really interesting tale, as many of his start small
(20:12):
and then they kind of spiral out of control. It
begins with an artist that loses a sketch when the
wind blows it away, but this runaway drawing catalyzes this
series of crazier and crazier events that nearly leads to
World War, but that crisis is narrowly averted. He was
also continuing to publish other more traditional work. A collection
of top First short stories was published in France in
(20:35):
eighteen forty one. This collection was titled Nouvelle Genevois or
New Geneva. It's a It was very well received critically
and it gave his fiction another layer of credibility. Politically,
things really shifted in Geneva in the early eighteen forties
and that actually impacted Top First work as well. Rodolph
(20:55):
was very conservative, and when the Radical Party of leftist
liberals were kind of elected into power, he used his
voice as a writer to speak out for the conservative agenda,
and his friends actually found him to be rather fanatical
about this, like they kind of thought he had maybe
gone a little too far. But he started publishing regularly
in Le de Geneve, which was a conservative paper that
(21:17):
he actually helped launch. It had a very short run
because this was not popular opinion and they really couldn't
get a foothold, and it only ran from eight to
eighteen forty three. So we're about to get to the
part where finally Toper's art comes to North America. And
before we do that, we're gonna take one more pause
for a little sponsor break. Uh So, in eighteen forty two,
(21:47):
top first work made its way across the Atlantic to
become what is regarded as the first comic book published
in the United States, and that title was The Adventures
of Obadiah old Buck. That was the name that the
eighteen thirty seven publication His Twild and Mischief of Vieu
Bois was given when it got here, and that was
considered the first comic book in Europe, but for the
(22:09):
North American audience in English Obediah old Book, and it
was not offered as a solo title for purchase. It
was actually a supplement to a newspaper. I love the
name Obediah Old book. It's pretty great. I apparently can't
say it very well, but I love that. His next book,
Voyage on Zigzag, which was published in eighteen forty three,
was based largely on accounts he had written as a
(22:32):
young teacher on hiking trips with his students. And there
are some illustrations in this book, but it's really more
like a novel with illustrations and not a comic book. Yeah,
and most of the illustrations are not in his sort
of silly style. They're a little bit more formalized, and like,
here's a scenery that we came across. I'm imagining and
it's like stardust. Yeah, that's not entirely off the mark. Um.
(22:56):
You can actually find that online. Most of these are
archive third archive dot org. Uh. Some of his original
stuff is a little tricky to read because the um
the captions are not only in French, but he had
very curly Q writings. It's a little dicey to read,
but you can find them online. Um. And in eighteen
forty two, Top four published essayfe uh So he was
(23:20):
aware that what he was doing by pairing captions with
framed story beats was unique and he had gained a
level of fame for it at this point. So he
wrote about his style of crafting narrative in this book,
and then he wrote another book about his work three
years later called Essay The Physiognomony, and that second book
on his visual storytelling speaks a lot about creating character
(23:42):
and identity through drawing, and it's also something of a
defense of his work. Uh. It has a little bit
of a didactic angle where he's trying to teach readers
how to approach and appreciate this new medium. Essaystography is
widely considered to be one of the first, if not
the first analytical studies of the comics form. So not
(24:03):
only was he basically the person who developed this form,
he was also the first person that wrote criticism and
analysis about that form as a medium, which is pretty incredible.
In it, he discussed not only how stories can be
told in the visual medium, but he also talks about
possible future technologies and advancements that might shift the end results,
(24:24):
such as the addition of color. And not surprisingly, since
we've already told you that he was had figured out
this way to do these really rough, quickdoodle sketches. Uh.
Top Ferm makes clear his opinion that you do not
need to be a great artist to make what he
called literature and prints, but you have to be able
to quote invent some kind of drama. And he also
(24:45):
takes that opportunity to address critics who would demean the
simplicity of the art in this style for not seeing
its value. And he wrote, quote, if only the one
or two critics who attack the failings of these little
books or who tease their stylistic follies, would instead emphasize
a useful way of thinking, it is not true that
they would well have reached readers who would not go
(25:06):
searching for their sermons, as well as those who are
rarely found in novels. What was that noise monster came?
This argument reminds me of a conversation that uh we
actually had earlier today about um, real historians and and
how a lot of the history podcasts that are really
(25:27):
popular are not by real historians, meaning like people that
have a PhD in a tenure track position. Um and
uh And a lot of times my response is well,
maybe if you are a like academic historian. Look at
what's being successful about these podcasts and apply that to
(25:49):
your academic podcasts. Yeah, see how that works, which is
narrative usually, which is what basically what he's saying right there.
Maybe don't fuss over the technique of my art, but
actually take a moment to appreciate the story. I'm telling
you something useful with your time. He didn't really say
that to them say that. He was more like, look,
it's really cool. Additionally, the autography that was used in
(26:14):
top for his work is something that he describes in
these these works. This method let the artists draw onto
paper with a special lithographic inc which would then be
used to print the image onto a stone. Then that
stone would be used to reprint the original And one
of the benefits of this technique was that the artists
didn't have to like do everything backwards onto the stone
(26:37):
to get it to print correctly. They could just put
their idea on paper as normal and then go from there.
So there's a series of plates and essays deutographies showing
examples of landscapes and comic sketches to show how these
methods could be used for a variety of different images.
So it had sort of a technical how to aspect. Yeah,
(26:58):
and so just to go a little bit more detail
on how stone lithography works. So you kind of grasp
this because it took me a little while to really
get the mental picture of what he was talking about. Um,
the stone in lithography is either a slab of actual
stone normally limestone, or the more modern version has a
metal plate. And so this special ink that was used
(27:20):
is oily or greasy like, it has a stickiness to it,
and so when the ink goes on to the stone,
it adheres really really well because of those oils, and
then this forms the print image which can actually be
used over and over because the stone gets a water treatment,
so the parts of it without this oily print on
it absorb all that water because they don't have the
ink on it. And then another ink is rolled onto
(27:42):
the stone and this does not stick to the west
part of the stone, but it does stick to those
parts that have been treated with the greasy ink. So
then that can have paper applied to it and the
stone is pressed and the images transferred to the paper
like magic. I being a crafty person, the second I
read this, I was like, I gotta do this haven't
done it yet, but it's going to happen, just rest assured.
(28:03):
So one of the downfalls of this method was that
sometimes the transfer wouldn't be quite perfect, and pieces of
a line might drop off of an image, there might
be a little gap in there. So for Tougher, this
actually UH fueled his passion to draw in such a
way that the everything would be really simple. So his
in his serialized narratives, UH, if a line was broken,
(28:25):
the concept should still remain and be really obvious. And
here's something he wrote about it. The graphic line, by
the very reason of what meetings it makes clear even
without the imitation being complete, admittedly demands enormous emissions of
properties and details, with the result that whereas in a
finished painting, the slightest discontinuity in the image simultaneously marks
(28:49):
an isore and a gap in the graphic line, by contrast,
monstrous discontinuities are neither stains nor gaps, even when they
are not as often happens desire fired by the author
and merely the happy use of a brevity method. I
like monstrous discontinuities. So that's my new punk band um
(29:11):
eighteen forty five was a really busy year for a
Dolf top Fur. In addition to essays Dephysy Young Pneumony,
he also published the comic Histoire d'Albert and. The plot
of this comic is about a young man with no
life experience and no marketable skills who searches in vain
for a career. So think back to the fact that
not long before this he had a conservative political paper
(29:34):
that failed. Because how this plays out is that when
this young man shows him to have shows himself to
have no talent and be suited for nothing else, he
becomes a radical leftist political journalist. It's my somewhat autobiographical comic.
Estoire de monsieur cryptogom also went into print in eighteen
(29:55):
forty five. A later unauthorized English language re print translated
the title to the Veritable History of Mr. Bachelor Butterfly.
This story is about an entomologist who specializes in butterflies,
on a quest to escape his jealous and zealous fiance
(30:17):
and to find a better match for himself. There are
a lot of really fun movement panels in this particular story,
including a segment where a progressively wider assortment of people
and animals are drawn into a circular chase on a
boat that all began with Monsieur Cryptogram. There's not an
R in there. Monsieur cryptogram running from the very possessive
(30:39):
fiance and it culminates in the sort of cyclone of
movement around on a ship's deck. Yeah, it's quite fun, Uh,
if you're into that sort of cyclonic thing. Uh. There's
an interesting piece of historical context here because this comic
involves a boat trip, as we just mentioned, to Algiers
or al Julia, And this was originally written in eighteen thirty,
which is an interesting time because France invaded and conquered
(31:03):
that country in eighteen thirty. But top for doesn't make
any mention at all of any of the political stuff.
They're just going to visit. Uh. It's almost as though
he included it to be current and topical, but he
didn't want to really get especially political in this particular instance.
Monsieur Cryptogram was first printed in a series of eleven
installments in the periodical Stresson. I feel like I said
(31:27):
that in terrible. My French is terrible. It's literally the
on lyast language I've studied. Businides English, and I say
it's so badly So that was an eleven installments from
January to April of eighteen forty five. Top for his
illustrations style needed to be refined for this pretty much
comic strip style printing in a wide circulation periodical, so
(31:48):
his original art was recreated with a style that was
more in line with magazine illustrations using woodblock, and of
course he still had this eye problem so he couldn't
do it. The French lithographer and Kared Toure artist Charles
amade Den, who worked under the pseudonym Sham, was the
person who created those new woodblocks with Top for supervising
and instructing the work, and as an aside, one of
(32:10):
the things he told him to do was go look
at all of William Hogarth's work. The cryptogram comic was
really popular, so much so that Little Stression soon ran
another comic strip style story by another artist, So basically
a new type of feature in a print publication had
(32:30):
been born from Top for his work. Yeah, this is
one of those things that when I was reading it,
because we work in a company that has done internet
content for a long time, it reminded me of those
times when like a thing works and you just want
to do it over and over to get you know,
the successful engagement. So it's like, quizzes are great, let's
make a million. Um. It's kind of the same thing.
Everybody loves that comic. Who else draws a comic? Uh,
(32:51):
and they put it right in that magazine. I feel
like we're also with us. We're on the way to
having funny papers. Yes. Uh. And so when cryptogom Story
was printed officially, this time as The Strange Adventures of
Bachelor Butterfly in New York in eighteen forty six, it
consequently became the second sequential art comic printed in the
United States. The Ductor Festus was created in eighteen thirty one,
(33:13):
but not published until eighteen forty six, so fifteen years later.
The narrative for this one is that the titular doctor
wants to go see the world, and he sets out
on a series of travels that leave nothing but chaos
in his awake, but he is completely oblivious to all
the chaos he is causing almost all the time. And
(33:34):
this one, like others we've mentioned, definitely has some humor
and you've got to use the air quotes that does
not come off as funny at all to a modern audience.
For example, after Festus creates an uproar at a mill
that results in a great deal of confusion, there are
three panels in sequence in which the first one is
a miller beating his wife. She in the next panel
(33:56):
beats their son, and then in the third panel, the
sun beats their donkey. Because there's this whole case of
misplaced blame, they're all blaming each other because he has
left this mess in his wake. Um. So it's like,
there's part of me that tries to imagine the people
in eighteen forty six and that's hilarious, but I'm like
your monsters. Well, and reading that part of the outline
(34:17):
reminded me of when I was a kid and my
mom and I went to all the local community theater
productions of every musical they ever did, and one year
they did South Pacific, and there is a joke in
South Pacific that is literally about assaulting someone, and I
was I remember sitting there surrounded by grown ups because
I was the fourteen or something, who were all finding
(34:38):
this hilarious, and I was just like, wait, this is
not a funny joke. I don't understand. Yeah, there's dark humor,
and there's people beating each other and so funny. So
even as he was writing essays the Physiognominee and arranging
for the publication of several of his sketch stories in
the mid eighteen forties, Tougher was not do doing well
(35:00):
in terms of his health. He had started having health
problems as early as eighteen forty three. He had an
enlarged spleen, although it's not really clear exactly what had
caused that uh and he had traveled in the years
eighteen forty three to eighteen forty five to the springs
at both Leave, Switzerland and v France for treatment of
this problem, but unfortunately he did not find any relief
(35:23):
in the so called water cure. His condition only got
worse and it made the pain much worse. Um when
he died on June eighth of eighteen forty six, top
Fur was still working and he had several projects in
process at the time, and he was allegedly observing the
doctors at the baths that he would go to at
the encouragement of a cousin to see if he could
find some humorous story in it. But his failing health
(35:46):
really left him too weak to do a whole lot
creative that was new, and he was only forty seven
when he died, so there was really a lot more
he could have created. That last part is both charming
and sad to me, like the idea that he was
watching doctors going is there a funny story here? Touching?
So top Fir became incredibly famous in his own lifetime
(36:08):
for his graphic stories, but he was not universally praised
for them. A critical essay written by German novelist Friedrich
Theodore Visher begins quote, what sort of scroll is this?
Is this what Greta praised? I can hardly believe my eyes.
Is this how our childish, our own childish scribbles looked
(36:29):
when we turned boyish fantasies into silly caricatures. But in truth,
Visher actually thought that top Forer was doing something really interesting.
Those opening lines in that essay were an effort to
mimic the criticisms that had already been lobbed at top
first work, and Visher actually found these seeming simplicity of
this art and stories to be pretty complex when you
(36:51):
actually looked at it more thoughtfully. In his essay continues quote,
but on closer inspection these capricious, lawless networks of lines
coalesced into the most decided characterization. This quite craven slovenly
drawing becomes a well considered and systematic instrument in the
hand of a man who makes sense of nonsense, is
(37:11):
wise and delirium, and steers his mad steed to its
certain destination following the rules of a secret calculation. You
think it leaps forward on its own, but no, there
is a coachman on the box seat. You just can't
see him. So it's interesting to look at how people
have considered Topper and his work over the years. One
(37:33):
word that comes up a lot when describing his work
and his world view is naivete. Topper biographer David Kunzel
addressed and dissected this whole idea in a two thousand
and seven book about the artist. So in it, Kunzel
makes the case that simply by virtue of not featuring
themes of overt sexuality in his work, which is very
(37:53):
common in French writing and art at the time, and
this prevailing characterization in the nineteenth century of Switzerland's people
being inherently sort of innocent uh Top for his own
sharp wit and morality stories have sometimes been characterized into
this naive image. Considering that Hogarth, who was known for
these morality narratives, is the one influence that Top proclaimed,
(38:17):
it's pretty logical to conclude that the lack of adult
themes in his work was a lot more about his
moral compass and his desire to appeal to a broad audience,
and not an indicator that he just had a wide
eyed innocence about the world. It's also worth noting that
even from the beginning he was sharing his work with
his students, so all along he was showing this to
(38:37):
children as well as adults. Yes, so that might explain
why he wasn't going for the super adult themes. And
after his death in eighteen forty six, almost immediately top
for his works were published in an anthology titled Histos
on his Thump. One of the things that he was
working on before he died was a story called Brutus Calico,
(38:58):
and this unfinished manuscript for the story as part of
the University Library in Geneva's permanent collection, and today there
is actually a monument to Rodolf top For with a
bust of the artist a top a marble pillar that
sits in Geneva Art. Spiegelman, who created the graphic novel Mouse,
which is incredible, said this of Topper in an interview
(39:18):
where he was talking about toppers writings and about this
new genre that he had created, and this is his quote.
He had a deep understanding of what comics were. He
understood that comics existed someplace between writing and drawing and
was its own language. So as you wander through Comic Con,
if you're one of the people that came for that,
(39:39):
look at all that sequential art and think about Rodolf
top for and that's what we got on him. Yeah,
so that was our show. We definitely want to take
a moment and think everyone in New York Comic Con presents,
particularly Matt Wizowski, Collette Oliver, and Andrew Sposito, who too
(40:00):
look amazing care of us. We were, as always, so
honored to be part of their programming and it was
a super fun night. And thank you also everybody who
came out to see us. We know the show was
a little later in the evening. It's we ended basically
at my bedtime. Uh and and traffic was terrible that night,
so thanks so much. Everybody came out, who came out,
(40:20):
and a lot of folks stayed behind afterwards to say
hello to us. So thank you, thank you, thank you
all our gracious and wonderful listeners who were there that night. Yeah,
you made it just an incredible evening. And I feel
like we should give a special thank you to our
younger listener, Nathaniel, who brought us amazing gifts and was
charming and delightful. Yes, thank you so much, Nathaniel. Yeah,
(40:41):
I have a little bit of listener mail. I'm gonna
keep it short. I'm not going to read her whole
her whole letter because our episode is a little lengthy. Um.
It is from our listener Kim, who writes hello and
well wishes from Washington, d C. I love the show
and discovered the archive episodes this past summer. They were
great way to learn a little something while I delved
(41:02):
into my new hobby of embroidery. You to make an
excellent team in the way you approach subjects and the
integrity of your research is such a credit to you
both and the respect you hold for history. She goes on,
She's lovely and she mentions that um, one of the
things she sent us in this parcel was a little
batch of vintage postcards, particularly those with a dresses of
(41:25):
a few of the first ladies. Oh yeah, it's such
a good little parcel. It's like a It's like one
of those things that I'm going to keep on my
desk and when I'm having a credit d I'm gonna
pull one out at a time. So it's like a
slow unpack for me, where I go, Oh, a delight man.
Because Kim is a very organized woman. She sent us
a huge list of episode suggestions, but she categorized them,
(41:48):
which was amazing by people, events, general, histories, and miscellaneous.
And it's lovely and far more organized than I would
ever be. So I can't play how much I appreciated Kim.
Thank you for all of the beautiful postcards. Like I said,
They're gonna brighten my days when I'm having a rough
one or just want a little smile for no good reason. Uh.
And again, thank you, Thank you. Thank you to New
(42:09):
York Comic com Presents and everyone who came to the
live show. If you would like to write us, you
can do so at History Podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com. You can also find us at missed in
History dot com, which is our website, and from there
it's your launching point to all of our social media.
But justin kis you want to go direct, we're missed
in History pretty much everywhere you go. If you would
(42:29):
like to check out past episodes, you can do that
in our website. As we said, that's missed in History
dot com. We have a full archive of every episode
that has ever existed over the show, long before Tracy
and I were ever involved, and we have our current
episodes and any that Tracy and I have worked on
have show notes. So come and visit us at missed
in history dot com and we'll all explore history together.
(42:55):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff Works dot com. Two four
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