Comics E-Book

Rogério de Campos

• Herausgeber: Edições Sesc SP
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Coleção Deslocamentos
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 152

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

In the first book of the Movements series, journalist Rogério de Campos reconstructs the history of this centuries-old art of narrating myths, fables, exploits, social conflicts, existential chasms or even everyday scenes: comic books. Starting out from 5th-century BC storytellers of illustrated sagas, Campos retraces the course of the language he encountered in the 1827 book Les Amours de Mr. Vieux Bois, by Switzerland's Rodolphe Töpffer, the birth of modern comics. Panel by panel the book parades Sun Wukong, Popeye, Angelo Agostini, Krazy Kat, Wonder Woman, Mad magazine, Hugo Pratt, linus magazine, H.G. Oesterheld, Guido Crepax, Crumb, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Garo magazine, Moebius, Zap magazine, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Marjane Satrapi, Frigidaire magazine, Akira, Taiyo Matsumoto, Marcelo D'Salete... As the author states about the early days of modern comics: "When we start looking into the 19th century, we find talents all around the world. Caran D'Ache hailed from Russia but found in Paris an ideal environment, so great was the number of magazines and artists. London also had its magazines and artists, such as George Cruikshank and George du Maurier. Portugal boasted the talent of Bordalo Pinheiro. And Spain had Mecachis. Anywhere in the world where there were magazines and newspapers, somebody was drawing cartoons and comics. One might even call the 19th century the 'golden age' of comics, so numerous were the talents and innovations". And further ahead, about the place of comics: "They [comics] play a key role in public health by narrating the country's life, by helping to link dreams to the real lives of people." Published in Portuguese and English, the Movements series is edited by the writer Tiago Ferro.

Leseprobe

How comics are yet to be invented

Warning: This book should be called A Small, Brief, Subjective, Incomplete History of Comic Books That Apologizes in Advance for Not Mentioning or Saying Very Little About People Like Maria Aparecida Godoy, Flavio Colin, Helena Fonseca, Nicole Claveloux, Juscelino Neco, Aline Kominsky, Alan Moore, Alex Toth, Bill Elder, Alvaro de Moya, Ciça, Luiz Gê, Fulvia Serra, HQ Mix, Laerte, Josep María Berenguer, Mitie Taketani, Antonio Altarriba, Paul Gravett, Julie Doucet, Rafa Campos, Lora Fountain, Will Eisner, Karen Berger, the Guys at Fierro, Kim, Cynthia B., Rubens F. Lucchetti, Paul Buhle, Melinda Gebbie, Jesus Cossio, Jorge Rodrigues, Wolinsky, Marcelo Campos, Alison Bechdel, the Guys at Dumdum, Ragu and Sociedade Radioativa, Lizzie Bordello, Allan Sieber (...) and the Author Begs Mercy From the Mentioned, the Poorly Mentioned and the Non-Mentioned, From the Critics, Academics, Professional Fans (...) and Offers as the Sole Justification for Such a Superficial, Dubious Work (...) That He Merely Intended to Show the New Generations That Things Were Not Always as They Are, Although There Have Always Been Those Who Made Sure the Existing Situation Was Eternal. History Should Not Be Viewed as a Burden, but as a Source of Inspiration for New Revolutions. But that title, in full, would be bigger than the book itself, so let’s settle for what is on the cover.

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

Harvey Pekar

Contents

Presentation

Preface

Western history panel by panel

1. PHAD

How India invented comics (and cinema too)

2. LITTÉRATURE EN ESTAMPES

The Swiss schoolmaster who invented comics, which, in turn, invented cinema!

3. COMICS

An American invention, just like hamburger

4. FUMETTI

How it was actually the Argentinians and Italians who invented comics

5. MANGA

In May 1968, the streets invented comics!

6. FRANCE

“Comic strip” becomes “bande dessinée”

References

About the author

Presentation

The different forms of social interaction, like culture itself, are permeated by communication, a need manifested since prehistoric times as attested by cave incisions and painting. Throughout history, the succession of events strings together the development of devices and mechanisms to spread information and reduce distances.

In the context of remote interactions, for instance, the current reach of digital networks provides unprecedented dynamism. With the significant increase in access to and content production for this means of distributing information, we are daily exposed to an extraordinary body of data on the most diverse subjects.

The dazzlement often caused by new technologies and their fertile possibilities should not distract us from the obvious, reflected in the words of the French sociologist Dominique Wolton: “It cannot be said often enough that at the end of the networks and satellites are men and societies, cultures and civilizations. That changes everything and explains the importance and complexity of communication”.

As builders of our own history, legitimizing democratic access to multiple world views requires enabling everyone to enjoy the distinct means of information available, a reality yet to be achieved since a significant part of humanity is still deprived of such conditions.

By viewing book publishing as cultural and educational heritage, Sesc strives to spread and democratize knowledge, bringing together different actors in a process whose key component is audience diversity.

In this context, the initiative to publish the Movements series, edited by the writer Tiago Ferro, aims to contribute to the expansion of different kinds of knowledge, providing access to and familiarity with propositions that comprehensively address digital media and the world of video games and comic books. The series seeks to offer elements and tools that help provoke reflection, highlighting the changes brought about by these media and examining their historical pathways.

In the first title, Comics: A Brief History of Comic Books for the Benefit of New Generations, the publisher and journalist Rogério de Campos investigates the possible origins and transformations that marked the trajectory of the comic book genre. Delving into this territory through references dating back to 5th-century BCE storytellers of illustrated sagas, he presents the history of comics in narrative paths that draw as much on myths and fables as on daily life stories and events at the limits of civilization.

The fascination with comics spans generations, attracting different audiences at different stages of life. May this book contribute to expand the frameworks of this form of expression – essentially composed of words and pictures – and enhance the experience of reading in a time of continuous technological insertion empowered by digital networks.

Danilo Santos de Miranda

Regional Director of Sesc São Paulo

If you think that comics is the stuff of American nerds or underground artists, or even a pastime for small kids, well… like me, you will discover by the end of this book that you knew next to nothing about the subject.

According to the author, everything starts in the East. At a fair distance from superheroes or consumer society misfits, we will learn about the tradition of the Bhopal priests in India, who told stories supported by illustrated scrolls. Yes, that also kicked off what would someday be known as the seventh art. Many similarities between different artistic forms inclined to telling stories through pictures are presented in this book.

These Indian proto-comics were largely responsible for the spread of Buddhism in East Asia, as the author explains, and one of the most famous characters of this tradition would be admired in the future by none other than Mao Zedong. Mao would use graphic language to advertise the advantages of communism, thus contacting a Maoist group from Venice whose members included the young Italian Milo Manara, who, in turn, would become one of the most important comic artists in the world.

It is not the case of following here in detail these historical plots traced by Rogério de Campos. They are precisely the jewels of this brief but unusual and hardly light history of comics. Many unsuspected threads are pulled with important consequences for the understanding of modern Western culture as a whole.

Note the following list: Bob Dylan, Sex Pistols, Picasso, Superman, Mad magazine, Asterix, Roberto Marinho and Victor Civita, Mickey Mouse, Hemingway, James Joyce and Bertolt Brecht, Peppino di Capri, Andy Warhol, Lacan and the Frankfurt School, Black Panthers, FBI, Nixon, Moebius, Druillet, Alain Voss, Marvel, Monica and Friends, Fran Miller, Jeff Bezos, and many, many other names feature in this book. From this one may infer that we are in the broader field of the history of culture, with major political consequences.

Cutting to the chase, what we have here is a different history of Western culture, or an alternative history of modernity, or, if you will, the B-Side of Western history. With its roots in the East, the picture sketched by the author interconnects politics, art and also marketing. The symbolic forms flee, dodge, confront and at times conform to the appeals of industry. This intricate knot sheds new light on the meaning of our times within a longer historical span.

This book can and should be read by comic book fans, by anyone who is interested in the subject but has never delved into this universe, and also by those who think that it is all merely cartoonish and trivial.

As expected from an author who takes a political stand (and the inherent risks), the current times are addressed in topics ranging from the cultural industry driven by the Digital Age, projected from Silicon Valley and its promises of virtual democratization, to the risks to the very existence of life on the planet (no, it’s not science fiction), with Donald Trump’s unstable finger on the nuclear button (yes, he is a real character...).

But no pessimism stems from this obscure present. Rogério de Campos tosses the bottle into the sea, real and virtual, of writing and images, but especially for those who are still sensitive to the more delicate and sophisticated human creations, declaring their faith in comic artists spread all over the world: “Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures”.

Tiago Ferro

In Rajasthan, India, the Bhopas are storytelling priests. They go from village to village carrying fabric scrolls depicting scenes and characters from the region’s epic myths. These scrolls, called phad or par, serve as portable temples and also to illustrate the stories told by the Bhopas. During all-night performances, called jagarans, the Bhopas play a kind of two-string fiddle, the ravanhatha, and tell and sing the adventures of glorious warrior demigods of the past. Simultaneously, they point out with a stick the corresponding images on the scrolls erected before the viewers. A female assistant known as Bhopi (often the priest’s wife), besides supporting the singing, holds a lamp to light up the details indicated by the Bhopa.

Seen in daylight, the phad looks merely like a beautiful decorative cloth. But seen at night in a jagaran to the sound of music, the spotlight and the Bhopas’ narration, it becomes something akin to cinema. A cinema that has existed for centuries. Some researchers see clues of the presence of these narrators of illustrated stories as early as the fifth century BCE. In southern India they were called kalamkari, while in the northeast they were known as nat or bhat; in Bangladesh they were called patuâ, and in Tibet they were named ma-ni-pa. In Indonesia, they originated the shadow play theater known as wayang.

Being nomads, these storytellers spread around the world with their scrolls, which in Persia became known as parda, in China as bao-chüan (treasure scrolls) and in Japan as emakimono or simply emaki, the luxurious predecessors of kamishibai (paper theater), which preserved its popularity into the early 20th century.

That was how Buddhism progressed throughout East Asia. Monks would use picture scrolls to tell stories that explained Buddhism. In Japan, it was known as e-toki (deciphering images). One of the most popular stories in the Far East was precisely that of a Chinese monk, Xuanzang, who took a long trip to India in the 7th century in search of the sacred Buddhism-teaching scrolls. Over the years, Xuanzang’s journey started taking on a mythical nature. In the ensuing versions the monk was increasingly accompanied and protected by Sun Wukong, the mighty monkey king, a character probably inspired by Hanuman, the ape god of Hinduism and hero of Ramayana. Sun Wukong can leap a distance of 54,000 kilometers. Such is his strength that he carries an eight-ton staff (which he can reduce to the size of a needle he carries in his ear). He is able to transform each one of the 84,000 hairs on his body into objects and even replicas of himself. He is immortal and, like Anansi or a more selfish (but more successful) Prometheus, constantly challenges and deceives the gods. Sun Wukong became one of the most popular characters in Chinese culture. Mao Zedong was a fan, viewing the courage, diligence and boldness of the monkey king as an example for the Chinese people.

The Chinese communists wished not only to change the country but also to create the “new socialist man”. A new Chinese citizen for the new China. This entailed getting rid of myriad traditions, like the terrible practice of foot binding (which mutilated the feet of young girls to make them permanently small). Another task was to provide the entire Chinese population with access to education and the country’s cultural treasures. As part of that effort the communist government encouraged the production of picture story versions of Chinese classics, including Journey to the West, the epic novel written by Wu Cheng’en in the 16th century, based on the pilgrimage of Xuanzang. That is how Sun Wukong ended up in modern comics. As far as is known, the Chinese comic book version of Journey to the West was first published in the West only in 2008 by the Brazilian publisher Conrad[1]. However, in the 1960s the Chinese government published several editions of lianhuanhua (as Chinese comic books were called) in western languages as a means to publicize the regime abroad. In general, they were fairly pamphleteering, depicting heroic episodes of the Long March led by Mao, for example, but it is possible that a few comics with the adventures of Sun Wukong were translated at the time. Such a comic book might have reached Venice, where at that time there was a Maoist collective whose members included a young man called Milo Manara. He was in charge of designing the collective’s posters and pamphlets. His career as a comic artist would only start in 1969, when he was hired to draw the adventures of Genius, an imitation of Diabolik, which was already successful as a photonovel. Manara’s first great comic book, both in ambition and number of pages, only came out in 1976. It is called Lo scimmiotto (The Monkey) and tells the story of Sun Wukong. Incidentally, in Japan Sun Wukong is called Son Goku, a name quite familiar to manga fans as the protagonist of the Dragon Ball series, which tells the story of a powerful monkey boy.

But I now realize I have got ahead of myself and taken a Sun Wukong-like leap. So let’s go back to the Indian storytelling nomads. Just as they spread east, they also spread west, crossing Persia and reaching Europe. They are the cantambanchi of Italy and Spain, who inspired Cervantes to write El retablo de las maravillas. In the Netherlands they are known as liedjeszanger, and in Germany as bänkelsangers. I quote here from my book Imageria:

[…] the bänkelsangers […] wandered over current Germany from at least the 14th century, performing their plays with no actors. A singer-narrator, a violinist to provide the soundtrack and a canvas painted with a sequence of pictures telling a story. While narrating, the singer would point with a stick at the picture corresponding to the scene. Sometimes, at the most dramatic moments, the narrator would hit the canvas violently with his stick. A comic book for an illiterate audience. The tiny troupe performed in squares and fairs, with gala performances reserved for execution sites of criminals and heretics. Hence the main theme of bänkelsangs: stories of true crimes, filled with the most lurid details. The goal was to draw attention, because that was how the artists made a living: from the attention of their audience, measured by the number of coins they managed to collect during and after each performance. At the same time they had to avoid the attention of the authorities, whether political, military economic or religious. That is why the bänkelsangs, in the manner of current TV crime news, were generally sensationalist, shocking and brutal, but at the same time conformist, reactionary and moralistic. In Catholic regions they accused Luther of being an adulterer and Calvin of being a sodomite. In Protestant regions they denounced the sinful corruption of the popes. And everywhere they spread the most infamous rumors against Jews. Nevertheless, the bänkelsangers were frowned upon by the authorities. Their mere existence was subversive since they competed with the main official discourse, contending for the position of mediators of public opinion. Some artists were occasionally arrested on charges of theft, blasphemy or spying. Some ended up on the same scaffold that had been the main setting of their stories. The bänkelsangs are at the foundation of the work of Bertolt Brecht and, for Tom Cheesman, author of The Shocking Ballad Picture Show, play a key role in development of German literature.[2]

The bänkelsangs play a key role in the emergence of modern comics and journalism itself, especially of a more sensationalist nature. This tradition of narrators survived strongly into the mid-20th century. So strongly that the bänkelsangs were actually banned by the Nazis in the 1930s. At this same time, 2,500 kamishibaiya were performing in the streets of Tokyo. Each kamishibaiya put on around ten performances a day, each for an audience of at least thirty people. The researcher Eric P. Nash estimates that kamishibai audiences in Tokyo at that time numbered up to one million people a day[3]. It was in a kamishibai that the character Ogon Bat (Golden Bat), often cited as the first comics superhero, appeared in 1931. But the kamishibai did not only present fictional stories; they also commented on events, like a TV show. And when television started becoming popular in Japan in the 1950s, it was called denki kamishibai (electric kamishibai).

In the United States such illustrated narrations are called chalk talks and were very popular in vaudeville shows up to the early 20th century. In chalk talks, the narrator commonly draws pictures before the audience. Winsor McCay, the creator of Little Nemo, began his career by exhibiting his drawing skills in public, and even after becoming a highly successful comic artist would jeopardize deadlines and infuriate editors by insisting on taking performance tours in which he would draw while telling stories.

In 1972, the American underground comic artist Vaughn Bodé invented the Cartoon Concert, a show in which he would narrate and show slides of his comic strips. It was a huge success and Bodé even put on a performance in the Louvre. As known, Bodé was the main inspiration for New York graffiti artists in the 1970s and 1980s. Which makes us think how much those graffitied trains traveling through the city resembled the nomadic Bhopas carrying their phads.

Years ago I had the opportunity to see Eva Furnari, creator of the Bruxinha comic strips, telling one of her stories to a group of children in a cultural center in São Paulo while drawing the scenes on a large flip chart. The kids marveled at the drawings. The scene reminded me that, as a child, I really liked a TV show in which an artist (whether man or woman I cannot recall) would tell a story while drawing the adventures of a little girl, Hemácia, and the soldier Leucócito. Who was it, I wonder?

How comics were invented by the Chinese