Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Picture Stories and Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Kunzle models a critical approach that's noteworthy, so I'm noting it. We can see this approach in his introductory comments, but also all the way through it. Basically, he describes and reports, for the most part, rather than aggresively analysing. His descriptions have critical weight, of course, but in their hands-off, arm's-length approach, that weight is towards a historical rather than a literary position.
Kunzle's book is more or less a survey of image-narratives from, as its title suggests, 1450 to 1825. To even embark on that study, however, to find a historical cut-off point, requires defining his study, which he does by, not surprisingly, defining the art form in question. That definition is oddly mixed. There are four features. "The first, and most obvious, distinguishing characteristic of the comic strip is the sequence of images" (2). This basically covers the Eisner/McCloud definition. Second, the "pictorial" content "must be considered as its primary feature" (2), which means that imagery, and not text, must bare the narrative load. This point is related to, but not the same as, the common definition of comics as the combination of pictures and words. Kunzle neither necessarily includes or excludes text from comics, which once again links the Eisner/McCloud definition to his work.
At this third point, Kunzle's definition starts to include elements that his conceptual successors dropped. Comics must be a "mass medium" (3), which he defines as "mobile; it travels to man, and does not require man to travel to it" (3). Trajan's Column or Egyptian tomb decoration (the old stand-by examples of sequential art in the Ancient world) do not count because the viewer has to travel to them. Therefore, "There was no such thing as a mass medium [...] before the invention of printing" (3). Kunzle's definition of 'mass medium' is, then, about the same as Benjamin's conception of "reproduction." So it's not just that mass media travel with the reader/viewer, but that they are, in all practicality, infinitely reproducable.
Ironically, however, with a lot of the comics Kunzle describes, the artists would create three different art objects: the original paintings (including preliminary sketches), copper plates that would be used in the printing process, and then the effectively limitless number of copies. None of these can be easily called the original. All three are different works of art.
Unfortunately, this point of the definition gets muddied by a couple of factors. Kunzle refers to printing here in terms of movable type, the Gutenberg printing press, but seems to rather blithely dismiss previous printing methods. I don't know enough about pre-Gutenberg printing to say definitively, but I think it's fair to assume that someone, somewhere in Europe used wood blocks to print sequential images. This is a somewhat speculative point, though. I can neither confirm nor deny it. I merely put it forth as a possibility.
Once we move into modern, signal- or data-based art, though, we have a problem. Radio and television are undoutedly mass media. They communicate to 'the mass.' They are aimed at the broad spectrum of society, rather than one particular class (though that has changed significantly since the explosion of cable). However, before recordable media, you couldn't so much bring these media with you as you could bring the receiver technology with you, and even then, that was only possible with the invention of portable radios and television sets. This meant that you couldn't study the art at your leisure, as Kunzle's definition implies, but that you had to wait for a particular broadcast. Once recordable audio and video technology became common, Kunzle's definition of mass media makes sense again, but, interestingly, it applied only to music at the time of the book's publication; people had records in 1973.
Film is another interesting counter-example. Like traditional theatre, the audience needed to go to film, at least before video tapes. The theatre space can qualify as a community space, as Hall argues in The Popular Arts, and arguably that social function translates to film theatres as well, but in a room where no one is allowed to speak and the audience is in near pitch darkness, it's hard to imagine a broad social interaction. Instead, we have the isolated anonymity of the crowd, or the pseudo-exhibitionism of making out in the back row. But Kunzle's quite specifically not talking about art as a community activity. He's talking about art as objects that individuals can stuff into their pockets and take home. His conception of what it means to be be a 'mass media' is useful, but extremely limited, and very much based in invidualism, which is just wierd. It functions only if we apply to the particular historical period he studies. Once we have to contend with film, radio, and eventually television, it falls apart.
Kunzle's last point of definition is where the descriptive/loosely historical (rather than literary) position becomes clear. He claims nothing less than that "Whether it is considerd morally harmful or moraly useful, progressive or reactionary, the modern comic strip has undeniably strong moral content" (3). However, he excludes Bible scenes, because they are not "original productions of the printing press" (3), and because their "morality is of a traditional, not topical character" (3), which, if you think about it, is circular reasoning. Comics are, in part, that which is the product of the printing press, therefore anything that happened before the printing press is excluded from the category 'comics.' Comics are, in part, that which is contemporary, therefore anything that is not contemporary is excluded. He similarly excludes comic strips that depict "technical processes and engravings of courtly ceremonials" (3) because they aren't moral, even though they fit his descriptive definition in every other way.
If I were to guess, and that is what I'm about to do, I'd say that the basic notions of mass media appeal and contemporary social commentary are such common factors in the comics that Kunzle researched that he, eroneously, included those two ideas as necessary to the medium itself. Here we see the categorical fallacy that I've mentioned over and over again. Simply because these are common aspects of the art in question, anything that does not have those aspects is excluded from the category. Once again, the category itself is conceived of in rigid terms and used to exclude, rather than conceived of the mere intersection of several observable phenomenon and changing to fit new data. Kunzle has every right to limit the scope of his study to contemporary sequential art narratives of Early Modern print culture, but it is inappropriate to project the dimensions of that study onto the entire art form.
Posted by orion at August 21, 2006 4:38 PM