Transatlantic Picture Stories
Experiments in the Antebellum American Comic Strip
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3525635 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alex Beringer (University of Montevallo, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 87 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 455-488 |
| Publication date | 2015-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00029831-3149333 |
| OpenAlex | W1411830434 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 12 |
It is widely assumed that the American comic strip "begins" in the 1890s with the multipanel sequences appearing in Sunday newspapers. This essay challenges this periodization by looking to an archive of humor magazines from the 1850s and 60s. As early as 1852, artists including Frank Bellew, John McLenan, and Augustus Hoppin experimented with the multipanel sequences they encountered in the Francophone "picture story." However, rather than replicating the Francophone genre, these artists sought to adapt it in ways that conveyed the rhythms and cadences of everyday American life. What emerges from this study is a newly coherent picture of recurring forms, conventions, and themes that constitute a distinctively American style of comic strip. From one perspective, this is a record of visual conventions that would dominate twentieth- and twenty-first-century comics. But it is also a history of visual languages that failed to take hold-lost literacies and potential trajectories in American comics
Art · Comic strip · Comics · French · Humanities · Literature · Media studies · Newspaper · Periodization · Perspective (graphical) · Sociology · Style (visual arts) · Visual arts · Comics and Graphic Narratives · History · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Narrative Theory and Analysis
Confidence Men and Painted Women
Bodies of Reform
The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
A History of American Graphic Humor (1865-1938)
Slippery Characters
The Refugee Speaks of Parvenus and Their Beautiful Illusions
Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Slippery Characters
Special Issue
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,2 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2019 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |