Transatlantic Picture Stories: Experiments in the Antebellum American Comic Strip

Transatlantic Picture Stories: Experiments in the Antebellum American Comic Strip

In 1895, the cartoonist Frank Beard spoke in an interview about his sense of the history and possibility of comics in the United States. The interviewer wrote that Beard was “to some extent, the father of the American cartoon,” citing the artist’s stint of thirty years of drawing comics. At the time, Beard was promoting his illus-trated magazine Ram’s Horn and his new project of picture Bibles. When asked about the origins of comics in the United States, Beard cited humor magazines of the 1850s, especially T. W. Strong’s publica-tion Yankee Notions, as the site of their inception. Beard noted, “the first paper that published cartoons was the Yankee Notions . . . . Then Nicknacks [sic] appeared, which was followed by the Comic Monthly.” The well-known turn-of-the century publications Puck and Judge, Beard said, “were later creations . . . and now the daily newspapers are publishing their cartoons” (Frank Carpenter, “Interview with Frank Beard,” Deseret News, September 1895, 8).

Beard went on to link these works to storytelling and especially the genre of the picture story. “Pictures,” he said, can often tell stories quicker and better than words.” With this latter observation, Beard was referring to a watershed moment in the history of graphic narra-tive in the United States. With the first issue of Yankee Notions in 1852, US comic artists began a robust period of experimentation. In particu-lar, they appropriated the format of the multipanel picture story that they had encountered in their readings of French and Swiss comics. Unlike the English tradition of single-panel caricatures and cartoons, French and Swiss visual humor commonly divided panels, allowing for extended stories and elaborate sequences of actions and movements.

Alex Beringer

American Literature, Volume 87, Number 3, September 2015DOI 10.1215/00029831-3149333 © 2015 by Duke University Press

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Published by Duke University Press

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For US artists, this shift was crucial. As Beard alludes, mid-nineteenth-century artists’ experimentation with this style of storytelling set the stage for the explosion of creativity in the comics in mass dailies and glossy humor magazines of the 1890s, and thus for modern comics.

Beard’s genealogy contradicts standard histories of comic strips in the United States. Most recount US comic strips as beginning with Richard F. Outcault’s newspaper series Hogan’s Alley in 1894. A few defer to Frederick Opper’s Happy Hooligan at the turn of the century. Beard’s emphasis on sequential storytelling is significant. Nineteenth-century US comics are conventionally described as a tradition of single-panel cartoons, usually with a political undertone like that of Thomas Nast’s famous political caricatures. The elaborate narratives of multipanel picture stories were associated with French and German graphic narrative. If they appeared in histories of comics, earlier strips from the United States are dismissed as mere compilations of pirated illustrations, pilfered from superior publications abroad.1 Americans, we are thus frequently told, would have to wait at least until the 1880s and 90s for the more elaborate strips that signaled a robust engage-ment with the rhythms and cadences of daily life.

The three publications mentioned by Beard require us to revise this long-standing version of the history of graphic narrative. Even a cur-sory glance through Yankee Notions, Nick Nax, and Comic Monthly dis-pels any misperceptions about their purported lack of sophistication. Cartoonists in the States were, in fact, publishing original, highly sequential strips in high volume at least as early as the 1850s. Over the course of their run, these publications boasted circulations in the tens of thousands and employed a who’s who of major US illustrators, including Augustus Hoppin, J. H. Howard, John McLenan, J. H. How-ard, and Frank Bellew.2 Humor magazines in the United States, more-over, were distinguished from both the prestigious literary magazines and from book illustration by using art as primary form of narrative. Works included “The Adventures of Jeremiah Oldpot,” “The Precoci-ties of Master Springles,” Carl A. Carleton’s “Young Fitznoodle,” and Hoppin’s “Jonathan Abroad,” all serialized through multiple issues, in some cases lasting as long as twelve months. And far from mere deri-vations, US humor magazines were adamant in their policies of chart-ing a distinctively “American” style of visual storytelling. Just as Emer-son hoped for the end of “our long apprenticeship” to Europe, comic artists argued that graphic narratives should, as one editor wrote, “fix

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on the honest, home-writ page” (Strong 1846, 3).3 Within this national-ist project, artists most commonly focused on exploring the rhythms and cadences of everyday life in America. They teased out the subtle humor and excitement in subjects as mundane as traveling down Broadway or eating dinner at home.

In doing so, US comic artists developed a distinctive set of visual nar-rative conventions. Figures such as Bellew, McLenan, and Howard experimented with novel approaches to caricature, movement, and depiction of time. Much of the richness of visual archive in Yankee Notions, Nick Nax, and Comic Monthly resides with the diversity of styles for organizing the narrative flow of the comic strips. In contrast to later works, comics of the 1850s are more likely to organize their transitions in ways that do not follow a tight sequence of actions. It is common to see transitions based on movement from scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and subject to subject. The result is a style of graphic narrative that does not fit neatly into our existing models. Consequently, the significance of this archive extends beyond its revision to the peri-odization of comics in the United States; it also brings into focus how the creation and consumption of images was defined in large part by a taste for experimenting with new and different ways of depicting narra-tive experience.

While it may seem odd that this rich archive has been so understud-ied, its omission can be explained by looking to the technological and logistical obstacles faced by previous scholars. Yankee Notions, Nick Nax, Comic Monthly, and other works were meant to be disposable and ephemeral. As a result, the magazines themselves are extremely frag-ile and are dispersed across dozens of archives and unwieldy micro-fiche collections. Research was conducted by individual scholars visit-ing archives, locating partial runs, and then comparing their findings. This type of collaboration produced the important annotated guide American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals (1987), edited by David E. E. Sloane. Sloane’s book features nearly fifty distinct authors, providing a series of bibliographic overviews of each magazine. It is rightfully considered the most comprehensive overview of the genre and thus foundational to the study of periodical humor in the United States. However, its limitations are particularly acute when it comes to examining visual material. Where the humorous stories and jokes in the magazines could be easily transcribed and reproduced, the illus-trations were generally available only to the individual looking at the

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magazines or in fragmentary selections. Sloane’s authors thus spoke in very general encyclopedic terms, referring, for instance, to cartoons being “important to the character” of a magazine or to a publication featuring a “captioned cartoon narrative that often appeared through several pages” (Nickels 1987, 324).

Recent digital humanities initiatives are rapidly offering avenues for scholars to build on the foundation created by Sloane and others. Proj-ects like HathiTrust, Google Books, and the American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Series have made visual material avail-able in ways that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. Collections that would have taken decades to assemble can now be pre-pared in a matter of hours. Additionally, the technology allows for rapid broad-based comparisons of materials stretched across the archive. From the standpoint of visual humor, this is particularly important. A researcher can rapidly scan through and survey the breadth of differ-ent types of illustrations, observing broad patterns in the artwork and composition of these materials. What emerges is a newly coherent pic-ture of recurring forms, conventions, and themes with which comic artists were experimenting.

The significance of these strips goes beyond their status as evidence of an overlooked tradition of graphic narrative in the United States. They also provide an important window into the development of mod-ern graphic narratives. Their artistic innovations in areas such as cari-cature, narration, and depiction of movement were admired and absorbed by the influential generation of comic artists who emerged in the United States at the turn of the century. As innovative as they may be, many of the inventions of the early American comic strip signal nei-ther a record of “winners” nor “founders” of modern comics as we know it. Instead, the record is frequently one of lost visual literacies: ideas that fell by the wayside and did not become widely accepted as conventional elements of graphic storytelling. The stakes of exploring this multiplicity of visual literacies are greater than just the recovery of practical techniques; this is also an epistemological project. As Hei-degger contends, drawing is itself “a mode of knowing,” and so the act of rendering a character or depicting timing in a new way is to come up with distinctive conceptions of character and time (Heidegger [1971] 1977, 180). With this in mind, revisiting these sources means recon-vening with historically situated ways of thinking about human experi-ence within nineteenth-century American culture.

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At a moment when literary scholars are rushing to embrace graphic narrative as a vital element of the field, it seems essential to grapple with the diversity of comics histories in the archive as well. Much of the recent scholarly attention paid to comics has stemmed from inter-est in what the medium can reveal about the broader project of narra-tive representation. As Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda (2014, 1) note in a special issue of Critical Inquiry, comics “enable an intense focus on how complexly woven stories unfold across time and space and, particularly, how these involve the reader . . . to generate meaning through interacting with, or themselves shaping, spatiotemporal form.” And indeed, scholars have done an admirable job as they have begun charting the complex narrative work taking place within com-ics and graphic novels. The last few years have seen insightful research on subjects ranging from Alison Bechdel’s important work on memory to critical reassessments of modern classics like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. But this discussion of the diversity of narrative styles within comics has generally extended only to twentieth- and twenty-first-century comics. Earlier works have, in the meantime, been ignored or subsumed into a one-dimensional progress narrative that divides between “comics” and “proto-comics” (Ndalianis 2011, 113–14).4

These limitations are in no small part due to the unorthodox origins of graphic narrative as a subfield. Indeed, one of the primary weak-nesses of the initial wave of scholarship on graphic narrative is that it relies so heavily on the observation of artists from within today’s comics industry, such as Scott McCloud and Will Eisner, who tend to describe current industry practices as transcendent rules (see McCloud 1994 and Eisner 2008). As Thierry Smolderen (2014, 129) notes, the practices of a few artists from the late twentieth century have been naturalized as “a seamless craft that integrates all the tact-ful, rational choices one has to make to accomplish the job in a realistic and convincing fashion.” For Smolderen, “appreciat[ing] the nuances between different idioms of progressive action” necessarily involves understanding the ongoing negotiation between “existing visual lan-guages” and “new ways of seeing.” Critiques like Smolderen’s under-score the need for a historiography that traces the diversity of context-specific styles of creating graphic narrative and the extent to which the language of comics is a highly volatile, changing entity. Such insights help avoid the pitfall of treating current industry methods as

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the idealist model to which so-called “proto-comics” were progressing and in turn the realist standard from which all postmodern “experi-mental” comics diverge.

Highlighting the fundamental pastness of earlier graphic narratives thus promises to help denaturalize the appearance that conventions such as the modern cinematic grid and the dominance of linear action-to-action sequences (and the ways of thinking inherent in these forms) are somehow immanent to the creation of graphic narrative itself. We can thus hope to move from a historiography that looks not toward a telos of a singular form, but instead a history of experimentation and innovation—a family tree in which some branches lead to later gene-alogies and others stop, offering only the possibility of many counter-factual histories.

Francophone Appropriations and American Innovations

The shift in emphasis from a British tradition to a Francophone tradi-tion was spearheaded by Thomas W. Strong’s Yankee Notions in 1852. The editorial pages of earlier humor publications from the 1840s warred over which magazine would be the American counterpart to the British magazine Punch. Yankee Doodle, for instance, was not atypi-cal in regularly featuring illustrations of their magazine’s character “Yankee Doodle” shaking hands with Mr. Punch. When the rival pub-lication Judy folded, Yankee Doodle published a sarcastic obituary, attributing the failure to her “extravagant imposture” of pretending to be the wife of Mr. Punch while giving “coarse libels on the origina[l].5 By contrast, the trio of Yankee Notions, Nick Nax, and Comic Monthly echoed the apolitical leanings of the Francophone picture stories and their dynamic multipanel sequences while avoiding “the acids” per-ceived to emanate from the politically charged pages of Punch (“Pref-ace,” Yankee Notions, January 1864, 2). Strong proclaimed that his pub-lication should enjoy popularity “with not one class of people, but with all,” including “juveniles” in need of “a pill with sugar” and also “lovers with an appropriate touch of sentiment.” In both audience and content, these three publications were therefore far different than anything that had appeared in the United States in previous generations.6

Comics from France and Switzerland are often seen as the basis for the twentieth-century comic strip because they featured elaborate sto-ries with closely linked sequential frames. This Francophone strand of

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multipanel sequences marked a vital development in the broader his-tory of graphic narratives. They broke from the more widely known tradition of political and moralist cartooning. Unlike the pillars of the British tradition of caricature—George Cruikshank and William Hogarth—Francophone artists relied far less on caricature and typi-cally steered away from overt political commentary, instead preferring to chronicle the rhythms, subjects, and sights of French life. Attention was thus diverted away from the allegorical or the didactic in favor of sequences that focused on commonplace human behavior and move-ment. Subtle mannerisms and human peculiarities now took center stage in visual satire.

This strand of graphic storytelling traces its origins to the genre of the “picture story,” which enjoyed popularity in France from the 1830s to the 1850s. Starting with the works of Rodolphe Töpffer and gaining further popular appeal with volumes by Cham (Amédée de Noé) and Gustave Doré, the picture story was, as Smolderen (2014, 52) notes, regarded as a “novel in prints,” in which “the relationship between the illustrator and the writer would be inverted.” Later on, high-quality French humor magazines such as Charivari adapted and serialized these picture stories or developed original material expressly for the magazine format. In adapting these works to fit the format, images were generally shrunk down and stacked next to each other, shifting what had originally been one or two pictures per page into a grid pattern that resembles the modern comic strip (though, as Smolderen points out, the Charivari grid is not a direct forerunner to the modern comic grid, but instead, a comparable solution that evolved independently).7

The work of Töpffer is especially influential for the development of this strand of graphic narrative. Sponsored by no less a figure than Goethe, Töpffer is noted for developing a highly sophisticated sense of timing and narrative sequence. By dividing his panels into distinct, sequential events, Töpffer could tell extended stories and portray sequences of actions. From a narrative standpoint, Töpffer’s work had as much in common with theater as it did with caricature or the sequential prints of Hogarth. Töpffer’s frames are presented in the proscenium view and borrow extensively from the classic conventions of restoration comedy and slapstick pantomime (see Willems 2008). Paired with Töpffer’s spontaneous and whimsical visual style, this allowed his work to enjoy a fast-paced sensibility that could play upon

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comic timing and repetition. His thematic sophistication is also nota-ble. Töpffer’s brand of picaresque was reminiscent of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Upstart characters such as Jabot (fig. 1) and Crypto-game disrupted the order of polite society, wreaking satirical havoc on subjects as diverse as bourgeois social climbing, the Catholic Church, and nineteenth-century science. Goethe would marvel at the flexibility of Töpffer’s storytelling with characters such as Jabot, a hero who was “always producing his personality anew in the most var-ied forms” (quoted in Kunzle 2007a, 52).8

Töpffer’s influence is quite apparent in the first issue of Yankee Notions with the serialized comic “The Adventures of Jeremiah Old-pot.” The series took its name from Töpffer’s Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois (which, in its English translation, was entitled “The Adven-tures of Obadiah Oldbuck”).9 “Oldpot” is equal parts homage to Töpffer and adaptation for an American audience. The artist of “Jeremiah Old-pot” took the absurdist pursuits of Töpffer’s protagonist and adapted them to the “Yankee” mindset, infusing the structure and style of the Töpffer picture stories with a self-consciously American flavor in its themes and humor. Where Töpffer’s original comic satirized the emerg-

Figure 1. Selection from Monsieur Jabot, reproduced in David Kunzle, Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips. 2007. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. Captions translated to En glish by David Kunzle.

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ing bourgeois classes in Europe, the “Oldpot” artist skewers the entre-preneurial spirit of the American self-made man. Rather than the love-stricken country dandy who appears in Töpffer’s comic, the protagonist of “Oldpot” is a tin-merchant living in New York who abandons his wife and children to pan for gold in California. Where Monsieur Vieux Bois’s ambitions lead him into parlors, picturesque meadows, and other scenes of bourgeois life, the protagonist of Oldpot’s adventures take him on a continent-spanning journey in which he encounters a veritable cross-section of American landscapes and social types, among them city-dwelling b’hoys, tinkering inventors, immigrant min-ers, and animal-worshipping Indians.

Among the strips’ highlights is their wickedly funny send-up of American consumerism (fig. 2). In an early installment, Oldpot visits the emporium of the unscrupulous salesman “Hoax’em Mac Scratchit,” who cons him into purchasing a host of unnecessary gadgets. Mystified by Scratchit’s claims of “Electro-Galvanic-Vulcanized-India-Rubber,” Oldpot equips himself with a slew of ridiculous costumes for survival in the wilderness. Much of the satire hinges on the contradiction between Oldpot’s romantic view of himself as a rugged frontiersman and his attachment to consumer goods. The interplay between the captions and images captures the back-and-forth between these dueling tendencies. In one frame, the captions highlight Mr. Oldpot’s inflated sense of self as a “hero . . . duly sensible of the perils which, in all probably, he will have to encounter.” In the next, they reveal Scratchit’s ability to exploit Oldpot’s meek urban tendencies with a snake-oil pitch that plays to his insecurities. Scratchit offers products such as the “Never-sinking, self-inflating, and everlasting diving apparatus” and the “Life-protecting, bone-defending, heat-securing, Indian-exterminating hunting dress for all nations,” and in doing so simultaneously strokes Oldpot’s ego and reminds him of the dangers he is supposed to be facing. Oldpot’s fron-tiersman self-conception is further deflated for the audience by the illustrations, which render him looking like an elephant or snowman underneath his accumulated goods and costumes. The whole sequence takes a further madcap turn with the embarrassed reaction of Mr. Old-pot’s children (fig. 3). Shocked at the foolish appearance of their father, the children’s “eyes start out of their head,” flying around like small butterflies, to be caught and retrieved by a horrified Mrs. Oldpot (and in a savage twist) the dog. The trajectory from mild vanity to mad-cap anarchy encapsulates the sequence’s basic operation of taking the

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Figure 2. “The Adventures of Jeremiah Oldpot,” Yankee Notions, March 1852, 92, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002804172s.

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manners and customs of Americans and throwing them into sharp relief through comedic timing and humorous storytelling.

Yankee Notions’s adaptation of and homage to Töpffer’s Vieux Bois serves as a useful example of the broader project that Strong and his fellow editors undertook in adapting the medium of graphic narratives to the sensibilities and tastes of American audiences. Jeremiah’s farce and journey through the landscape throws American manners and

Figure 3. “The Adventures of Jeremiah Oldpot,” Yankee Notions, April 1852, 117, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002804172s.

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customs into sharp relief. It is thus not only a study in mannerisms and customs, but also a broader allegory for American life. Strong specifi-cally demarcated Yankee Notions as an alternative to the news cycle’s attention to action and drama. “Our pages,” Strong wrote, “will embody all the good things that are constantly floating about society.” Strong identified his artists and writers less as romantic luminaries than as “preservers of jokes” who will draw out those rarely noticed “facetiae” that “sometimes find their way into the corners of newspapers, or serve to eke out a scanty column” (“Beloved and Honored Reader,” Yankee Notions, January 1852, 2). Strong’s definition of his writers and artists as “preservers” highlights a theory of realism that ran through all three publications. Even the names of the publications signaled this preference for the day-to-day. Nick Nax for All Creation plays on the term “knick knacks,” while Yankee Notions puns on the archaic sense of the word “notions” as “cheap, useful articles,” especially “buttons, hooks, ribbon, thread” (OED online). In each case, the suggestion from the moment a reader picked up the magazine was that he or she would encounter a playful study of the details—the knick-knacks—of American life.

Strong’s pronouncements for his magazine parallel the tradition of American literary fiction that ran through texts like Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809) and local-color humor. This strand of thinking favored close attention to folkways, speech patterns, and customs, studying, as Irving ([1819] 2009, 13) wrote, not “with the eye of the philosopher,” but rather with the “sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print-shop to another; caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, some-times by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape.” The artistic eye is a mediating link between the audience and an artist’s observation of manners, customs, ways of speaking, and acting. By this logic, no object of interest is too subtle or insignificant to capture the notice of his team of writers, illustrators, and engravers. The interest in the mundane was not devoid of its allegorizing tenden-cies. American fiction’s preoccupation with observation often legiti-mized American nationhood by locating an underlying sense of coher-ence within the young nation’s diverse people and regions.

In the comics themselves, the bent toward the mundane was mani-fested through short subject studies that highlighted the people and terrain of the United States. Carl A. Carleton’s “Blow-out in the Fifth

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Avenue” (fig. 4) followed the travails of a Young Fitznoodle, a man at a fancy party who must decide between his tastes for champagne and the host’s daughter. John McLenan’s “The First Segar” features the simple sequence of a man whose enthusiasm for cigars quickly wanes after his first attempt at smoking ends with overindulgence and illness. Domes-tic pets were also an appropriately mundane theme. In Bellew’s “Tricks upon a Canine,” the mischievous act of tying a helium balloon to a small terrier’s tail allows for observations of the dog’s confused reactions and thus an occasion to look inside even this crevice of the American house-hold.10 These subjects are neither the vice-ridden cautionary tales of Hogarth nor are they necessarily the anarchic improvisations of later comic artists George Herriman and Leslie Feininger. Instead, they offered the occasion for close observation of people’s daily goings-on. Whether it was a simple act of smoking a cigar, purchasing a dog, or

Figure 4. Carl A. Carleton, “Young Fitznoodle’s Blow-Out in the Fifth Avenue,” Yankee Notions, December 1857, 375.

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starting a farm, artists treated manners less as a means to an end than an end in itself. The result was a dynamic style of comic strip that placed the viewer in the seat of the observer and focused heavily on the process of observing manners and customs.

Manners of Movement

The archive of cartoons in Yankee Notions, Nick Nax, and Comic Monthly is strongly distinguished by an adventurous approach to different methods of organizing strips. Artists turned to a host of devices for guiding narrative, many of which would have seemed quite foreign to the audiences even thirty years later: comic artists organized strips around sustained character studies, guiding readers not through actions, but through various aspects of a subject’s life; they sewed dra-matic dialogue, poetry, and byzantine puns into their captions; they used circle-shaped spreads to reproduce the crowd at popular exhibi-tions. In all of this, artists in the United States were inspired by the form of the Francophone picture story, but they were also eager to strike out into new directions.

Much of the artists’ ability to experiment was driven by the freedom they enjoyed within the medium of the humor magazine. Where other outlets brought a host of stylistic and spatial limitations, humor maga-zines gave artists a free hand to develop their storytelling sequences. The decision to write for humor magazines seems, in several cases, to have been a conscious choice. McLenan, for instance, was one of the most sought-after book and magazine illustrators of his generation; he illustrated Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expecta-tions and regularly contributed to Harper’s Weekly and Harper’s Bazaar. Despite the opportunities for higher-profile options, he worked as the primary illustrator for Yankee Notions from the time of his arrival in New York until his death. While an artist like McLenan would have been limited to no more than a single page in his illustrations in Harp-er’s Bazaar, the humor magazines allowed him elaborate sequences that stretched on for as many as eighteen pages and could be carried over into future issues. This space and flexibility allowed artists and writers to experiment with new kinds of comic strips in ways that had been difficult to achieve in earlier publications.

These experiments in the comic strip were also significantly influ-enced by broader shifts in the history of visuality. Specifically, the 1850s

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marked an important period of transition in how timing and movement were understood in visual culture. This was, of course, years before the advent of the cinema, but it was also on the heels of what Jonathan Crary describes as a “revolutionary” moment with the emergence of “subjective” styles of viewership. American comics reflect the transi-tional nature of this period. They did not adopt the cinematic “grid” set forth by the famous Muybridge images. But they also came along dur-ing a period when artists and popular audiences were fast becoming attuned to concepts such as the persistence of vision and stereoscopic vision. Crary’s work has traced how the mid-nineteenth century sig-naled an important shift toward “subjective” styles of spectatorship. Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Marx all commented on an “increasing abstraction of optical experience,” in which vision was understood not as a transparent window into reality, but as a physiological sensation prompted by external stimuli. These theoretical conceptions found practical counterparts in the period’s visual technologies. Apparatuses such as Dageurre’s diorama and the phenakisticope reframed specta-torship as a passive experience in which a viewer was confronted with a sequence of distinct images and thus experienced the sensation of motion or the passage of time. In this sense, the newer techniques of observation posited a viewer who is receptive to forms of visual train-ing that highlighted the potential for sequences of juxtaposed images to simulate motion and gesture (see Crary 1990).

The style of movement seen in Yankee Notions, Nick Nax, and Comic Monthly can be distinguished from even the humor magazines of the 1840s. Sequential comic strips were not unheard of in the 1840s in the United States, but they generally relied on styles of cartooning in which the image is locked in place and the viewer moves his or her eye around a single frame, often reading through long script to make sense of the image. We see this model at work, for instance, in “The Celebrated Racer de Meyer” (fig. 5), an 1846 cartoon that lampooned Austrian pia-nist Leopold de Meyer’s tour through the United States. The image fea-tures a single scene with a complex system of allegorical caricatures; below is a long series of humorous explanations that diagram the other-wise obtuse details of the illustration. The image itself did not change as much as the viewer moved his or her eye around the page, picking out details from the byzantine image and using the elaborate text as crib notes for decoding the various elements of the allegory. Their visual framework resembled that of the panorama where viewers would enter a

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Figure 5. “The Celebrated Racer de Meyer,” Yankee Doodle, September 1846, 18, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.66322947;view=1up;seq=26.

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specially designed building where they would walk from place to place, inspecting the elaborate detail of an extremely large, elaborate canvas.

In contrast to the comics of the 1840s, the visual models of the 1850s are much more apt to posit a stationary observer who is presented with a series of images in order to simulate movement. As in the examples of “Jeremiah Oldpot” and “Young Fitznoodle,” viewers are prompted to imagine movements of gesture and space in-between panels. The eye spends less time revisiting the same image than drawing relationships between distinct images. These cartoons depend on a style of visuality that considers persistence of vision. And yet, it is a sense of persistence of vision prior to the cinema and thus distinct from fluid action-to-action sequences after the 1890s.11 Hence, although the sequences that appeared in Yankee Notions, Nick Nax, and Comic Monthly seem, at first blush, to adopt the boxy pattern of the later newspaper comics, the similarity is only superficial. The lack of a cinematic model can thus hardly be said to translate to a primitive or one-dimensional styles. On the contrary, there are many ways in which precinematic comics are actually freer to experiment with diverse styles of visuality. Absent the dominating influence of cinema, artists could turn to a host of ways of thinking about what could occur in the space between comic frames.

One of the most common subgenres to emerge was a sequence that utilized scene-to-scene transitions to simulate the experience of travel and tourism. In general, these “travelogue” strips followed a single character between various locales, creating loosely related tableaux that transported readers between scenes. In offering their readers these comics, artists responded to a widespread interest in travel among American middle-class readers. For many nineteenth-century Americans, travel implied a sense of personal transformation. To travel was to observe differences in other regions and thus come to a better sense of one’s own regional and national identity (see Brand 1991). This dialectic between the individual character and the landscape was the main focus of comic artists’ experiments with travel. The travelogue strips that appeared in the 1850s thus rarely feature much in the way of scenery. They are instead organized around the evolution of the indi-vidual character as he or she moves between new contexts and ever-shifting conventions for behavior. What appeared on the page, then, were the reactions of the individual subject undergoing psychological and physical transformations, catalyzed by the travel experience.

Among the most ambitious examples of the travelogue strip is Hop-pin’s “Jonathan Abroad,” a long sequence in which an American travels

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to Europe and the Middle East, coming into contact with the social types of Old World culture. The tone and content of this piece foreshad-ows the Amerocentric travel writing that Mark Twain would undertake nearly twenty years later with Innocents Abroad. (There is, in fact, ample reason to believe that Twain would have drawn inspiration from these travelogue strips, given that many of his early writings appeared in Yankee Notions [see Nickels 1987, 324–25].) Like Twain’s narrator in Innocents Abroad, Jonathan’s encounters with Europeans and Middle Easterners have less to do with exploring these cultures than with sit-uating the American Yankee among other cultures of the world. Jona-than listens to voices in the whispering gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral, muses on the strange dress of the French army, and rides a camel in Turkey. In each case, encounters with the locals provide a sense of how the brash American cavalier relates to the rest of the world.12

Later installments of “Jonathan Abroad” offer a much different vision of the American’s presence in the Old World. Shifting away from Jona-than’s breaches of social etiquette, Hoppin depicts the American encounter with ethnic Other with delicacy and admiration. Hoppin’s episodes in Paris and the Middle East are especially attentive to Jona-than’s sincere attraction to other cultures. In one series of frames, Jon-athan finds himself so taken with French culture and urban sophistica-tion that he cannot stop himself from giving money to the various charming French merchants he encounters. Grisette, a charming glove saleswoman makes him feel “as skittish as a four year old” (fig. 6). Jonathan is “so pleased with the operation” that he “is in dan-ger of exhausting all of his floating capital in gloves, to the detriment of his pocket, and his vows to Jermima.” This attraction to French beauty then recurs with a flower girl, a peripatetic post office, and a lemonade vendor on the Champs-Elysées.13 In each case, Hoppin dispenses with slapstick in favor of a sentimental tone. In doing so, he depicts his American subject as growing from the foul-mouthed outsider into a potentially cosmopolitan figure.

From the standpoint of depicting movement, Bellew’s “The Fight for the Championship” (fig. 7) from Comic Monthly is one of the most accomplished comics to appear in any of the humor magazines. Bellew’s comic is a fusion of the snappy exchanges of the burlesque, the hucksterism of the Barnumesque public spectacle, and precine-matic visual technology. In this elaborate sequence, we follow the stag-ing of a boxing match between British and American champions. The

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opening scenes play largely within the register of Barnum’s promo-tions as Bellew offers a series of tableaux that make outlandish claims about the American champion’s prowess. One scene features the mildly grotesque sight of the champion flexing to reveal two biceps on the same arm, accompanied by the caption stating that “his muscles are so greatly developed as to get in each other’s way.” We see him exercising in a winter coat, consuming large amounts of ale, and using enormous dumbbells, all as part of his transformation from out-of-shape retiree into a herculean figure. From here, the comic picks up speed as Bellew presents us with a series of action-to-action frames, diagramming the blow-by-blow movements of the fight itself. The fight, however, is not staged naturalistically, but instead by selecting

Figure 6. Augustus Hoppin, “Jonathan Abroad,” Yankee Notions, December 1854, 369.

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tableaux of the pantomime. The boxers undertake a choreographed dance that transforms the violence of prizefighting into whimsical farce. In frames 7–10, they mirror each other’s movements, leaping and twirling into synchronized gestures that are more pirouette than elbow drop. As the clumsy ballet progresses, Bellew injects spectacu-larly violent slapstick into the mix. At one point, the British champion punches his fist clear through his opponent’s chest cavity; the Ameri-can responds with a blow so fierce that it decapitates the Brit, prompt-ing a quick break in the action so that a trainer can sew his head back onto his body.

What makes this sequence so dynamic and ultimately so successful is not, I would argue, its anticipation of cinematic modes of visuality, with their emphasis on a fluid persistence of vision. Instead, it relies on the convention, common to apparatuses such as the phenakistiscope and stereoscope, of pausing and holding a pose for examination. The phenakistiscope was a spinning disc that operated on the same basic principle of retinal persistence as a flipbook, and could be slowed down or even stopped by the viewer. The result of was style of viewership in which the viewer, by speeding things up or slowing them down, would examine each distinct gesture in isolation. Hence, if we look back at

Figure 7. Frank Bellew, “The Fight for the Championship,” Comic Monthly, May 1860, 8–9.

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the sequence in frames 7–10, Bellew offers a way of reading motion that lingers on the different constituent parts of the movement, holding each gesture for comedic effect. The fact that we are following a series of action breaks rather than fluid cinematic motion allows Bellew to take viewers into other elements of the scene, darting off, for instance, to observe the shenanigans at ringside and within the crowd. The ref-erent is not merely the motion of the fighters in itself, but the process of mid-century spectatorship more broadly conceived. In this mode of thinking, the ability to look to one’s left or right to gauge the reactions of the crowd is just as vital to anything taking place on stage. It could therefore be argued that Bellew’s cartoon actually posits a broader vision than many postcinematic comics. Instead of a unidirectional focus on a single subject, the viewer is guided towards the simultane-ous movements of multiple subjects, thus simulating a 360-degree field of vision.

Other experiments with thinking about the nature of movement were not as successful as Bellew’s “Fight for the Championship.” To be sure, the pages of Nick Nax, Yankee Notions, and Comic Monthly are, in some respects, a junk heap of botched experiments and abortive attempts at reproducing motion. These failures are potentially even more interesting from a critical standpoint because they reveal the rich multiplicity of visualities that emerged in the vibrant, unstable period of precinematic experimentation in the comics of the 1850s.

One attempt to evoke a theatrical scene that is perhaps less success-ful is John McLenan’s “The Lonely Pollywog of the Mill Pond” (fig. 8). Here, McLenan literalizes the analogy between theater and comic strip by couching his sequential images within the text of a short play. The comic itself is arranged as a short theatrical scene between the bumbling swashbuckler “Tadpole Wriggle” and “Saguinetto . . . his enemy and rival” as they vie for the affections of “Dora Mushead.” McLenan’s text differs very little from a transcript for a comedic skit with one notable exception in place of many of the stage directions, inserts illustrations that indicate the way the slapstick should play out. In the comic’s climax, two swashbucklers, Tadpole and Sanguinetto, engage in a final standoff over their homely lady love, Dora Mushead.

On its own, McLenan’s text offers few clues that the skit should be interpreted as farce—it merely reads as bad melodrama. Tadpole shouts “unhand the maiden,” after which point they engage in a “desperate struggle.” But when we add the illustrations into the mix, bad melo-

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Figure 8. John McLenan, “The Lonely Pollywog of the Mill Pond,” Yankee Notions, January 1855, 29, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101079230247;view=1up;seq=34.

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drama transforms into slapstick parody. In frame 2, Tadpole and San-guinetto play tug-of-war with Dora as if she is a rope. Then, in frame 3, things escalate further as the demon of the mill pond emerges. McLenan’s illustration shows Dora’s and Tadpole’s squires both sliced in half, their bodies strewn about like bisected tree trunks. The two swashbucklers, oblivious to the carnage, continue their clash. The illus-trations, in the meantime, are themselves evocative of the play of garish disguises and identities we expect from a burlesque skit. This is partic-ularly the case with Dora, who distinctly resembles a male actor in drag.

While this sequence bears almost no resemblance to anything appearing in modern comics, it nevertheless features what has often been cited as the very core of comic art: interplay between image and text. Neither visual nor textual language would be considered a com-plete story without the other. McLenan’s humor, in the meantime, would mean very little without the interaction. At best, it would be a transcript for a skit to be interpreted and produced by burlesque actors. Instead, McLenan attempts to offer a full “production” complete with the timing, outlandish slapstick, and even the gender play that so fre-quently accompanied live burlesque skits.

But in saying this much about McLenan’s “Lonely Pollywog,” it is important (and, I think, productive) to acknowledge its limitations: as much as McLenan clearly tries to reproduce the cadences and rhythms of the burlesque, I don’t think he is all that successful. The strip fea-tures a herky-jerky progression that can feel quite distracting, break-ing up the sequence of movements. We are guided to read the dialogue and then linger on an image to see how it would be combined with mannerisms. Next, we read more text, moving to another image to see how that scene would be hashed out on stage. And, if his later comics are any indication, McLenan himself might agree. In the years that would follow, McLenan rarely utilized play transcripts in his comics. He abandoned the format in favor of other experiments, some of which resemble the action-to-action frames of modern-day comics, others looking to different mediums for reference.

Surface, Depth, and Character

Among the most significant areas of experimentation for US comics artists were their innovations with conveying social types and char-acter. As I have noted, the ethnic and class caricature of Cruikshank

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and Nast are well known as dominant influences in Victorian cartoon-ing. Cruikshank and Nast relied heavily on single-panel caricatures that conveyed information primarily through physiognomic data. The racial and ethnic clichés of the hooked nose, exaggerated lips, or prominent forehead were primary devices for making social standing and interior character visible to audiences. Such stereotypes were in turn bolstered by pseudoscientific writing and photography, claiming to use measurements of heads and facial features to confirm racial and gendered hierarchies. The comics in US humor magazines, on the other hand, frequently turned away from this physiognomic sensibil-ity. Instead, they favored styles of constructing social identity based on the passage of time and on physical movement. Character and social information were thus conveyed using multiple panels, guiding the reader through various aspects of a character’s life or taking a reader behind the scenes in a subject’s life to show how outward appearances could be deceiving. This is not to say that US humor magazines avoided physiognomic caricatures altogether. However, conventional carica-ture was often paired with styles that used movement and negotiation of space as devices for conveying this information.

J. H. Howard’s “Miss Wiggins’ Physiognomic Experiments” (fig. 9) conveys a sense of skepticism about the Cruikshankian attempt to dis-cern inner character from facial features. In the sequence, Miss Wig-gins studies Johan Kasper Lavater’s writings on physiognomy and then attempts to contort her face to suggest personal traits that will make her attractive to male suitors. Each frame shows Miss Wiggins contorting her face, along with a caption describing how her poses are meant to woo each distinct lover. She performs as “young and artless to captivate the bookkeeper” and as “tragic to win the lawyer” with lit-tle success. It is only when she exposes her cleavage to a banker “past the age of her father” does the physiognomic experiment work. For Howard, the underlying gag—and message—is that physiognomy can reveal much less about character than ongoing observations of actions. The comic is thus at once a dismissal of facial features as accurate pre-dictors of social types and a demonstration of an alternative means of reading for typicality.

Many of these strips belong to a subgenre that we might designate as “multipanel character studies.” Multipanel character studies intro-duce us to a character and then guide us through various aspects of his or her private life. In the first frame we might be introduced to a man in

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his bedroom; in the next frame, we might see his workplace; in another frame, we might notice some anomalous or humorous element of his social life such as an odd habit or aberrant style of wooing a love inter-est. For instance, in “Study of the Stars: Police Astronomy,” McLenan deploys a series of puns that show different aspects of a policeman’s job, including “Falling Star” to indicate a botched arrest of a criminal,” “Evening Star” as he shoos away a young street urchin, and “Star of the First Magnitude” in his encounter with an obese mustachioed police chief.”14

Bellew’s “Mr. Yawn, The Celebrated American Traveller” (fig. 10) reveals the potential of the multipanel character study to deal with social identity in increasingly elaborate ways. Here, Bellew uses this medium to push against the tradition of racial and ethnic spectacle in America. Nineteenth-century middle-class American culture is well known for racist and Orientalist entertainments. From minstrelsy to Barnum’s curiosities to Chang and Eng Bunker, American popular cul-ture abounded with exhibitions that offered racial and ethnic other-ness as sources of amusement. These spectacles generally affirmed the superiority and normativity of white viewers who were positioned as unmarked observers. The unidirectional gaze at the subaltern body

Figure 9. J. H. Howard, “Miss Wiggins’ Physiognomic Experiments,” Yankee Notions, August 1865, 250.

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tended to authorize a reading that translated physiognomic visual data into simple, unambiguous interpretations of the social world.

“Mr. Yawn” turns the Orientalist logic of the freak show on its head. Bellew’s strip is a study of a white character, “Mr. Yawn,” who has just returned to the United States from Asia “impregnated” with eccentrici-ties and pretensions of foreign lands. But in his Orientalist appropria-tions, Yawn misrepresents Asian cultures and tends to select only those aspects that serve his own vanity. In this manner, it offers an elaborate exploration and critique of Americans’ Orientalist tenden-cies. Yawn’s physical appearance resists attempts to read his character based on the prevailing stereotypes of the 1850s. With white facial fea-tures and Asian dress, he is neither fully one type nor the other, but instead a perversion of both, failing to possess either the civility ste-reotypically attributed to the white subject or the mystical wisdom of the Asian stereotype. It is only through prolonged study of his actions and surroundings that the full exploration can be determined.

Bellew’s exploration of Yawn’s social type hinges on the way the for-mat of the multipanel comic strip allows for ironic reversals of surface appearances. We follow Yawn through a prolonged sequence, which repeatedly demonstrates his propensity for exploiting other Ameri-

Figure 10. Selected scenes from Frank Bellew, “Mr. Yawn, The Celebrated American Traveller,” Yankee Notions, August 1852, 271–75, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002804172s;view=1up;seq=283.

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cans’ tendency to equate physical appearances with character. He brandishes his sword at the shoeshine for blacking his red Arabian shoes, threatens to throw the landlady “into the Bosporus,” and passes his common mutt off as a “hydrocephalic spaniel.” Through all of this, people accept Yawn’s abuses, based solely on their collective assump-tion that his haggard appearance substantiates his absurd claims to fol-low “Chinese custom” or “the sensible fashion of Turkey.” Bellew’s long captions, in the meantime, strike a sarcastic tone as they channel the flimsiness of Yawn’s justifications. Through all of this, it is Bellew’s ability to develop his subject through a gradual progression of vignettes that makes for such a richly nuanced character sketch. Bellew unfurls his character’s internal contradictions in snippets and, in doing so, embroiders his comic with textures and subtleties that elevate the idea of the character study from a momentary glimpse like that of the Cruik-shankian single-panel caricature into an extended negotiation between actions and physical appearances.

These types of explorations of the distinction between surface appearances and internal character responded to a broader crisis in visuality in nineteenth-century America. Modernization of American society created striking and often bewildering discrepancies between the public and the private self. While the egalitarian class relations of American society allowed one to remake and reimagine one’s class position, it also presented the danger of misrepresenting the self. This was, in many ways, the darker side of the self-made man, featured in Ben Franklin’s Autobiography. If a figure like Franklin could reinvent himself, climbing from printer’s apprentice to vaunted diplomat, inven-tor, and architect of American society, this also left open the possibility that appearances could be manipulated for illicit purposes. Middle-class writings of this period are deeply preoccupied with the human eye’s relative inadequacy in perceiving the nuances of American social identity. Conduct manuals warned the public of the constant danger of confidence men or other social climbers who would misrepresent their status and intentions. As Karen Halttunen (1982, xv) notes, these warn-ings were symbolic of a broader perceived crisis: “In what was believed to be fluid social world where no one occupied a fixed social position, the question ‘Who am I?’ loomed large; and in an urban social world where many of the people who met face-to-face each day were strang-ers, the question ‘Who are you really?’ assumed even greater signifi-cance.” Fears of criminal fraud notwithstanding, nineteenth-century

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audiences approached the specter of the confidence man with equal parts anxiety and fascination. In warning of these social chameleons, the conduct manuals described by Halttunen just as frequently betray an undercurrent of wonder and admiration at their process of transfor-mation. In the meantime, works such as Herman Melville’s The Confi-dence Man (1857) compared the dizzying nature of nineteenth-century class relations to an elaborate masquerade or theatrical spectacle (see Salazar 2010 and Browder 2000).

In this vein, a common pattern in the multipanel character study is its use of masquerade and theatrical disguise as organizing motifs. Regu-lar readers of humor magazines would have become quite accustomed to sequences that diagrammed the distinction between the disguised public self and a more authentic private self. From a visual standpoint, these cartoons posit a physical move from outward appearances to internal workings. The cartoon “The Ways of the Singer” (fig. 11) dem-onstrates the basics of this type of move with a simple peek-a-boo sequence in which an operatic tenor presents himself as a distinguished

Figure 11. “The Wayes of the Singer,” Nick Nax for all Creation, December 1856, 250.

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aristocrat to his audience in the first frame, only to be revealed as a drunkard in the next. “The Wayes [sic] of the Singer” offers a metaphor for a larger sense that many in American life were staging an elaborate impersonation. Like the tenor, people in polite society played theatrical roles, offering up a respectable facade in order to cover for unseemly realities. But, as the cartoon also suggests, multipanel comics could provide a way of putting these types of hypocrisy on full display.

A favorite source of subject matter for these “masquerade” sequences was the fashionable craze for large steel hoop dresses. Artists pro-duced dozens of cartoons showing the outlandish lengths that modern women went to project a respectable public appearance and the extent to which dress hoops were enlisted in serving feminine wiles and van-ity. Women are shown hiding articles such as groceries or even inap-propriate gentleman callers underneath their skirts. A piece by How-ard depicts an African American woman using her dress to conceal her features, resulting in an unpleasant surprise for would-be suitor. The skirts are shown blocking traffic on Broadway and creating prob-lems on narrow bridges.15 The general thrust of each of these cartoons is using visuality—either in the form of jokes, puns, or behind-the-scenes revelations—to allow viewers to cut through the facade of femi-nine decorum. Rather than a tool for meticulous self-presentation, the hoop skirt becomes the very means through which the viewer is encouraged to visualize women engaging in social mischief.

M. O’Boyle’s “The Steel Hoops” (fig. 12) is a notable instance because it turns the narrative flexibility of the Töpfferian picture story toward a searing critique of gender and class relations in the United States. In this surprising sequence, we trace the progress of a steel hoop from a

Figure 12. Scenes from M. O’Boyle, “The Steel Hoops,” Nick Nax for All Creation, December 1856, 234–36.

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dreary factory floor to a cozy middle-class parlor to a young woman’s dressing room. In depicting this transition, O’Boyle creates a dark analogy between the labor of the iron workers and the labor of fashion-able women, as the first and final frame bookend a continuum of vari-ous types of labor associated with the fashion craze. The most striking image in the sequence is the final frame in which a thin, plain woman stands in a dingy room, looking at the mirror, wearing only a slip and the steel hoop. Evocative of the sentimental illustrations that protested child labor, O’Boyle’s cartoon is hardly the misogynistic farce we might expect in a satire on women’s dresses. Instead, it invites contem-plation about broader capitalistic forces driving the fashion and hence the expectations on women. Implicit here is the notion that industrial production is not limited to the factory floor, but resides in multiple, unexpected places including the working-class woman who must arrange the dress as well as the upper-class woman who shoulders the physical labor of carrying the cumbersome apparatus. As the exam-ples of O’Boyle, Bellew, and others show, comic artists did much to break out of the physiognomic caricature as the primary mode of pre-senting social information. The idea of movement was crucial because it allowed for a reading of character that incorporated prolonged read-ings that delved through time and space. The reader was no longer bound to the momentary impression, but instead could discern charac-ter from multiple angles and explore its ins and outs with a more sophisticated viewpoint.

Coda

In an 1885 retrospective, the magazine Art Union reflected on the “boisterously Bohemian” spirit of comics in the 1850s. The author characterized this time as a vibrant period of accomplishment, even if the artists themselves received few of the accolades accorded to the artists whose work appeared in the newspapers and glossy magazines. “The geniuses of McLenan’s day,” the author wrote, “drank nothing weaker than whiskey, scorned the tailor and abhorred the barber.” Although cartoonists of the 1890s were better dressed and more widely respected, their work, according to Art Union, actually marked a regression from the previous generation. “In the past,” the author writes, “the idea was everything.” The newer works tend either toward

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the “unpolished skits” of Frederick Opper in Puck or the “inanities of humor, illustrated with the politest care” that would be seen in Life magazine’s famous Gibson Girl (“Caricature in America” 1885). The author’s characterization of the comics of the 1850s underscores a larger point that turns the common wisdom of comics history on its head: namely, it was possible for the generation immediately following Bellew and McLenan to see the historical trajectory as one of devolu-tion. For the Art Union writer, the 1850s seem like an Edenic moment, while the 1880s—a time now regarded as the “beginning” of modern comics—is the beginning of a regression toward frivolity and “unpol-ished skits.” And this should prompt one to question the current schol-arly tendency to characterize pre-twentieth-century comics as stepping-stones in a larger progress narrative. Perhaps what we often think of the beginning of modern comics in the 1890s was also the end of some-thing else.

I am not, of course, suggesting a historiography premised on the notion that comics somehow devolved or regressed. To do so would merely substitute one fallacy for another. Instead, I would like to close by suggesting that we take seriously the possibility of a sort of cultural relativity when it comes to our comparisons between past and present comics. Indeed, much of the acclaim directed at postmodern graphic novelists is made precisely on the basis of their ability to mediate human experience in new and interesting ways. Chris Ware’s perspec-tive on spatial thinking is among the reasons he so regularly draws comparisons to the fiction of Franz Kafka (Ball and Kuhlman 2010, x, xiii). Likewise, Alison Bechdel’s comics are often regarded as some of the most important contributions to LGBT literature—graphic or oth-erwise—thanks largely to her innovative “archival mode of reading” which incorporates found objects and photographs into the medium of graphic narrative (Cvetkovich 2008, 111). Are these postmodern breakthroughs really so different from the innovations of the 1850s? Parallel developments can surely be located, whether it be in the spa-tial negotiations of the travelogue strip or the fine characterization and complex allegories of the multipanel character study. If drawing is indeed “a mode of knowing,” then the work of Bellew, Hoppin, Howard, McLenan, and other artists from the 1850s could be said to represent myriad intellectual traditions within American culture.

University of Montevallo

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Notes

1 See Murrell (1967), Kunzle (1990), and Lefevre and Dierick (1998, 159). 2 For instance, Yankee Notions sold 33,000 copies per month in the first

year and at least 10,000 monthly issues toward the end of its run (Nickels 1987, 324).

3 “Yankee Doodle Come to Town” can be viewed via the HathiTrust Digital Library at babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.66322947;view=1up;seq=11. The materials cited in this essay that are available through HathiTrust were digitized through Google Books and are available on both sites. I have referred to the HathiTrust portal because it offers a combination of clear interfaces, searchable connections between volumes, and open-access materials that make it more useful for researchers. Periodical cita-tions not followed by a HathiTrust link may be located using Ebsco, which maintains permanent file links to the American Antiquarian Historical Periodicals Collection.

4 Characteristic of this general trend, Ndalianis relegates work prior to Hogan’s Alley (1895) to the status of “proto-comics.”

5 “Fatal Case of Destitution and Infatuation,” Yankee Doodle, February 20, 1847, 252, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.66322947;view=1up;seq=230.

6 Thomas W. Strong, “Beloved and Honored Reader,” Yankee Notions, Janu-ary 1852, 2, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002804172s;view=1up;seq=14.

7 See Smolderen (2014, 53–58, 127–29); and Kunzle (1990, 2:28–174). 8 Töpffer’s full oeuvre is reproduced in Kunzle’s Rodolphe Töpffer: The Com-

plete Comic Strips (Kunzle 2007b). 9 “The Adventures of Jeremiah Oldpot,” Yankee Notions, January 1852–

December 1852, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002804172s.10 John McLenan, “First Segar,” Yankee Notions, March 1856, 92–93; Frank

Bellew, “A Trick upon Canines,” Nick-Nax for All Creation, August 1857, 128.

11 See Gardner (2012, 7–13); and Smolderen (2014, 119–36).12 Augustus Hoppin, “Jonathan Abroad,” Yankee Notions, June 1855, 181–83,

babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101079230247;view=1up;seq=155.13 Hoppin, “Jonathan Abroad,” Yankee Notions, December 1854, 369.14 McLenan, “Police Astronomy, A Study of the Stars,” Yankee Notions, Feb-

ruary 1853, 40–41.15 Some examples include “Hoops Convenient Sometimes—A Warning to

Mothers,” Nick Nax for All Creation, December 1856, 248; J. H. Howard, “A Dark Suspicion,” Yankee Notions, December 1855, 374, babel.hathitrust .org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101079230247;view=1up;seq=252; Bellew, “The Skirt Movement,” Yankee Notions, January 1856, 9, babel.hathitrust.org /cgi/pt?id=njp.32101079230239;view=1up;seq=15; and McLenan, “A Hint

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to Ladies Who Wish to Combine Usefulness with Fashionable Elegance,” Young America, December 1855, 16, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101073365411;view=1up;seq=20.

References

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Brand, Dana. 1991. The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Browder, Laura. 2000. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Ameri-can Identities. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.

“Caricature in America.” Art Union 2, no. 5: 109, www.jstor.org/stable /20443111.

Chute, Hillary, and Patrick Jagoda. 2014. “Introduction.” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3: 1–10.

Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Cvetkovich, Ann. 2008. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1/2: 111–28.

Eisner, Will. 2008. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: Norton.

Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Cen-tury Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

Halttunen, Karen. 1982. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Mid-dle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Heidegger, Martin. (1971) 1977. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 149–87. New York: Harper and Row.

Irving, Washington. (1819) 2009. “The Author’s Account of Himself.” In The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, 1–8. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Kunzle, David. 1990. History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

———. 2007a. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi .

———. 2007b. Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi.

Lefevre, Pascal, and Charles Dierick, eds. 1998. Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century. Brussels: VUB Univ. Press.

McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial.

Murrell, William. 1967. A History of American Graphic Humor. New York: Coo-per Square.

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Ndalianis, Angela. 2011. “Why Comics Studies?” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3: 113–17.

Nickels, Cameron. 1987. “Yankee Notions.” In American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals, edited by David E. E. Sloane, 322–25. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Salazar, James B. 2010. Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America. New York: New York Univ. Press.

Sloane, David E. E., ed. 1987. American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodi-cals. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Smolderen, Thierry. 2014. The Origins of Comics from William Hogarth to Win-sor McCay. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi.

Strong, Thomas W. 1846. “Yankee Doodle Come to Town.” In Yankee Doodle, 2 vols., 1:3–4. New York: William Graham.

Willems, Philippe. 2008. “This Strangest of Narrative Forms: Rodolphe Töpffer’s Sequential Art.” Mosaic 41, no. 2: 127–38.

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Documents

Transatlantic Picture Stories: Experiments in the Antebellum American Comic Strip