Kunzle, David. The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century. Los Angeles, USA: University of California Press, 1990.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels. Hong Kong: Phaidon ress. 1996.
The history of comics is coterminous, as many things are, with certain technological changes. Interestingly, though, the technology is more often something that comics 'piggyback' on than something that directly affects the art itself.
Circa 1450, movable type hits Europe. Gutenberg is the traditional inventor of this system, but there are other candidates. It may be the case that the recognised inventor is simply the inventor we happened to recognise. The idea of movable type is a logical enough solution to a common enough problem that it's certainly conceivable that more than one person thought of it independently, and indeed Korean and Chinese printers indisputably invented it hundreds of years before any Europeans.
At any rate, by the mid-15th century, thanks to movable type, Europe suddenly had a very flexible, and therefore much cheaper way to print words. This did not help with illustrations, of course, which were still largely done with block printing (carved blocks of wood), but once there was more paper floating around, more of it could have what we think of as comic strips printed on it. In this period, roughly early Renaissance (depending on which country), things resembling comics could be found in illustrated broadsheets.
In the Early Modern period, the technology for directly reprinting images moved through a few separate stages. At this point, I haven't researched them enough to equate specific artistic turns with the technologies. But broadly speaking, copper etchings were invented around the same times as movable type, which allowed for fairly precise lines drawings and even grey-scale images, but the plates wore out after about a hundred uses before they had to be re-etched. Lithography, which allows much more subtlety of lines and even colours, didn't come around until the end of the 18th century. Meanwhile, incremental improvements of image printing techniques happened that, though they did not fundamentally alter the technology, did improve the cheapness and general quality. This directly affected the printing of comic strips.
Between the mid-15th and 19th centuries, comics were printed in broadsheets, using wood blocks and/or etching depending on time, place, and funding. Etchings make cleaner images, but are very expensive to produce. Wood blocks are cheaper, but take a long time to make with any precision and wear out even faster. Comics ('strips' or 'bands' of images) were printed in broadsheets initially, somewhat akin to being printed in newspapers in the late-19th/20th centuries, though broadsheets weren't the same as newspapers, and that difference is important. They were not regularly printed. They did not attempt what we now call 'journalism.' They were one-off, money-making ventures that might write about or depict a topical reference, but they didn't report, as such. If we're looking for a modern parallel, they're more like blogs than anything else.
In the 18th century, comics started to be printed in magazines, and some artists earned enough reputation to have whole books devoted to just their picture narratives. Hogarth is without doubt the most famous and critically appreciated. By the 18th century, printing technology was good enough that Hogarth could create complex, detailed paintings, consisting of six (The Harlot's Progress) to twelve 'panels' (Industry and Idleness). Every image is densely packed with not only the central characters, but sometimes dozens of side characters, and objects that represent the central themes. The sheer density means that a story of only a half-dozen panels requires the same attention as a short novel, but because one's eye roams each panel looking for all the incidental details, Hogarth's work encompasses both linear (sequential) reading, and non-linear 'viewing.' It should be noted, though, that the medium itself was still associated with the lower- and lower-middle classes, and Hogarth's artistic successes didn't coincide with great economic success. He didn't make a lot of money, and his work was not, in his lifetime, accepted into the 'higher' arts.
In the 19th century we see two things that change comics again. Most directly, lithography was invented, a printing process that allows for finer imagery and colours, though at a price. Magazines became cheaper to produce, and therefore cheaper to purchase, and therefore more popular. They were also purchased and read under circumstances that distributed them widely across Europe, but also forced them to be less and less time-consuming to read. They were sold at train stations as cheap, consumable, disposable reading, and they had to be written to take into account the constant stopping and starting of a train voyage. Short, funny and/or adventurous stories are favoured. The trains had nothing directly to do with producing comics, but because the magazines that contained them, as well as printed material of a similarly disposable nature, were sold at train stations, the trains became a (metaphorically) organic distribution network. People buy them at one stop, read them on the train, and then either leave them for the next passenger, or throw the away at the next stop, much like modern newspapers.
By the middle of the 19th century, comic strips genres have shifted from the moralising tales of the Early Modern period (I.e., Hogarth and all heirs/immitators), to humour, action, and horror, in that order, and those are still the dominant genres of comics storytelling in the 21st century. Once the medium was regularly distributed there was, despite the extremely short narrative length inspired by train travel, the possibility of regular characters, which we first see in English in 1884 with Ally Sloper's Art Union. It was still a mix-media magazine, not a 'pure' comic book, but the strips were the main draw. By the 1890s, Sloper made enough money that imitators stepped in, and they immitated primarily the comics, though the magazines were still mixed. American strips followed a different path, though, appearing primarily in newspapers, and from there, we know the history: strips were collected into pamphlet-form comic 'books,' the books eventually contained original material rather than reprints, and the American comic book industry grows from there.
This sequence of events creates a couple of illusions in the history of the medium in America, and for that matter Canada as well. First and foremost, it creates the convenient historical appearance that America invented comics in the 1890s in their newspapers, with characters like The Yellow Kid and The Katzenjammer Kids, a historical fallacy still believed by many today, despite the mountains of counter-evidence available in European archives. Second, and perhaps more presently pressing, once we cut off comics history from artists like Hogarth, it does in fact appear that the medium itself has only ever been used for comedy, adventure, and horror, genres fit only for children. That illusion, in turn, makes it quite easy, though not logical, to conclude that the medium itself is capable of carrying only childish content. The dominance of American comics in the international English-language tradition, and the dissemination of these historical and generic myths, accounts in part for why English speakers regard comics as a sub-literate tradition while Continental Europe, Asia, and to an extent South America, all regard them as just another art form, though very rarely are they called a 'high' art form outside of the Franco-Belgian tradition (Tin Tin and Asterix are not to be underestimated).
If we follow comics through the English-language from the late 19th century to the present, we see similar shifts in the distribution technology, and in where they are read. Reading on a train made comics short and funny or exhilarating. Reading them in newspapers, traditionally also read in short sittings or while travelling and as a quick diversion amidst the news of the day, makes comics even shorter, a few panels rather than even a page at a time. Newspapers are also traditionally divided up amongst several people. Parents read the news, but pull the comics out for the kids. The very shape and format of the newspaper cements the conceptual difference between the prose, the adult/literate sections, and the comics, the childish/sub-literate sections. The move to pamphlets, comic books, further distances the medium from 'serious' writing.
If we leap ahead to the move from news vendors, pharmacies, and corner stores like 7-11 to speciality shops, which happened in the early 90s, we see a few things happen at once. The distribution network radically altered, of course, to service these speciality shops. Before the 90s, comic shop owners had literally to drive around the city meeting the delivery trucks at other stores. But Diamond Distributing, practically owned by DC Comics, stepped in to supply the 'direct market' in the early 90s. By the mid-90s, comics are no longer available outside of speciality shops. They are no longer consumable, throw-away products that parents buy to shut their kids up during shopping trips because they're not available in those stores. Furthermore, somewhere between the 60s and the 90s, they started to be 'collectibles,' and once they were located in their own special stores, where back issues could be bought and sold among aficionados, that transition was not only complete, but impossible to escape. And thus we see the 'speculator boom' of the 90s, which coincided with a shift in generic expectations.
Because of speculation, the Big Two started employing marketing gimmicks, like multiple covers (for the same content) and glow-in-the-dark covers, but they also committed to print runs in the millions, as opposed to the low hundreds of thousands, as was common before the 90s, and they launched more new titles in the 90s than they did since the CCA. Speculators, looking for special issues that would be worth money, effectively created a market place in which no comics would ever be worth anything because there were so bloody many of them. The insides of the books changed just as much.
Partly inspired by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, but also largely pushed by the realisation that the readers were older and constituted an insular community that wouldn't be as subject to attack as they had been previously (I.e., Wertham et al.), writers and artists (mostly artists) started writing so-called 'grim & gritty' comics. They were high on violence, bloodshed, and nudity, and they deformed the human body into positively ridiculous extremes of stereotypical masculinity and femininity. Todd McFarlane was the most mainstream of this movement, and his Spawn epitomised the violent end of that spectrum, but Frank Miller's Sin City combined the two, violence and sex, in ways that have to be seen to be believed.
If we look to the future (or even the present!) we see thousands of comics distributed over the internet. Aside from copyright-infringing 'scanlations' of commercial comics, there is a huge selection of newspaper-style strips, usually of only a few panels a day, that are shown for free and driven, economically, by sales of books after the fact or merchandising. We also see the rapid growth of the so-called 'trade paperback' edition, collections of individual comics into books, much as individual strips were collected into pamphlets in the 1930s. These new comic books are physically suitable to be sold in book stores, as opposed to speciality comic shops, and now have their own sections in those book stores, especially large chains like Chapters. Part of the popularity of manga is that they were already the right physical shape to be sold on book-store shelves. American comics followed the format with such gusto that, now, the 'monthlies' (pamphlets) are starting to be seen as lost-leaders for the later sales of collected editions. Ironically, comics are popular enough that the pamphlets are now, for the first time, being carried in the big bookstores on old, pharmacy-style metal racks, in their 'original' format. The stapled pamphlet has become iconic enough that it is surviving the move to a more profitable and respectable format.
Technology is, of course, just one element among many in the history of comics, or any art form, for that matter, but what's interesting is how much they end up 'piggy-backing' on incidental technology, like movable type and trains, and conveniently coincidental distribution networks, like magazines and the mainstream book trade.
Posted by orion at August 23, 2006 3:48 PM