comics history

Comic books are, at least, as old as movies. Their first steps were set in the beginning of XXth Century, in the search of new ways of graphic and visual communication and expression. Usually, comic books are also associated with the prehistoric paintings in caves and Egyptian hieroglyphics, all of them visual narratives of juxtaposed images. The existence of words was not mandatory, but with the adoption of symbols to represent them -- letters --, they were soon added to give more information and boost the narrative flow. The improvement of press and printing technology were strong factors to the development of the medium.

Among the precursors can be mentioned Swiss Rudolph Töpffer, German Wilhelm Bush, French Georges ("Christophe") Colomb and brazilian Angelo Agostini, but it is usual to associate the first comic book to Richard Fenton Outcalt's creation, The Yellow Kid, in 1896. Outcalt essentially synthesized what had been made before him and introduced a new element: the balloon, a space where he wrote what the characters said, and that pointed to their mouth with a kind of tail.

The bases for a brand new kind of art were set, and the adventure begun. In the first decades of its life, comic books were essentially humoristic, and this is the explanation for the name they carry to date in English language. Some of those days' creations can be read until today, and are among the best stories in comic book's History: Little Nemo in Slumberland (by Winsor McCay), Mutt & Jeff (by Bud Fisher), Popeye (by E. Segar) and Krazy Kat (by George Herriman). However, comic books have other denominations, such as Italian fumetti (smoke, an allusion to the shape of the balloon), French bande dessiné; (drawn strip), Japanese manga and Portuguese história em quadradinhos (story in little squares), much more comprehensive.


Stories' themes were mostly about children and pet's frolics, and from that age comes the designations kid strips, animal strips, family strips, boy-dog strips, boy-family-dog strips and whatever else could be created. Such designations still apply, even to more intellectualized strips, such as Calvin and Hobbes.


The crack of the Stock Market in 1929 was a turning point in comic book's history, and in the 30's comic books grew up, starting to picture adventures. Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, Chester Gould's Dick Tracy and Hal Foster's adaptation of E. R. Borroughs' Tarzan were those days paradigms, now known as The Golden Age. Three essential types, the science fiction, detective stories and jungle adventures spread their tentacles, respectively based in each of the above stories. While Foster's Tarzan was a full of action, without balloons adaptation of the book by Borroughs, and Gould's Dick Tracy was partially inspired by the gang wars of Chicago (where Gould lived), Flash Gordon was a product of total imagination of Raymond, which would give also Secret Agent X-9, Jim of the Jungle (competing with Dick Tracy and Tarzan, respectively) and Rip Kirby. Foster did also a historic masterpiece on comics, Prince Valiant, medieval adventure with academic accuracy. About this time was created the first costumed character, the Phanton, written by Lee Falk and masterly drawn by Ray Moore. Falk is one of the best comic book writers of all time and probably the one that stood more time with the same character -- more than 50 years! Falk also created Mandrake the Magician, with pencils by Phil Davis.



(About this time there were great comic books in other places besides USA, like France and Belgium, but they were barely known out of their birth countries. Of particular interest is Belgic Hergé's Tintin, who practically created the clean line style, and had lots of followers (and imitators)).


The outcome of this process was that the birth of a typically American comic was born: the super-hero, with Siegel and Shuster's Superman. Superman is a landmark -- for a lot of people his début is the start the Golden Age -- in Comic book History, a perfect archetype, the model to lots of characters and one of the most perfect myths of modern ages. Lots of academic studies and dissection works have been made about him along his near 60 years of life. And lots of bucks, too. Both his creators died in the nineties, without a small fraction of this fortune, because they sold the rights of the character in 40's to DC Comics.

The Comics evolved, and spread its arms, becoming part of mass culture. In the period 1940-1945 some four hundred super heroes were created, mostly based in Superman's model, though only a few survived. Two of them deserve to be highlighted: Batman, created in 1939 by Bob Kane, a darker character (inspired in Da Vinci's flying machine and Zorro) whose fame would exceed Superman's in the 80's, and Captain Marvel, by C.C. Beck, a yon boy that earned magical powers every time he said the magic word Shazam!, an acronym of names of old gods. A lot of characters were enlisted and went to the World War II, and comic books became ideological weapons to increase soldiers and people moral. The greatest icon of those war days is Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Captain America. To say the least, in the cover of his first magazine, Captain America battled no one other than Adolf Hitler himself.

In the 40's, the magazine format of comic books as we know today was created, as well as one of the best comic books ever conceived, Will Eisner's The Spirit, an anthological work that last twelve years with the help of soon-to-be-known famous names, like Bob Kane (creator of Batman), Jack Kirby and cartoonist Jules Feiffer. With only seven weekly pages, inserted in the Sunday supplement of a journal, Eisner created a full encyclopedia of comic books, using each of the comic books' basic elements in a new and creative way, beginning each story with a different logo for The Spirit, with an intense use of perspective and shadow. With subjects far more mature than the typically super-hero's stories, The Spirit is the starting point for a series of tales dealing with everyman's life and problems, usual subjects in later Eisner's works. Aside with Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, The Spirit is one of the best comic books of that decade (if not the one ever made).


The 50's staged the greatest witch-hunt of comics ever, and a lot of prejudice from those days still remains. Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham wrote a book, The Seduction of the Innocent, where he accused comic books of causing youth corruption and juvenile delinquency. Among any other weird subjects, he accused comics of inciting youth to violence (what had already happened with rock'n'roll). A Comics Code was then created destined to limit and rule on what could appear (and what could not) in the pages. It destroyed all horror titles from EC Comics, except for one, an humoristic mag, that remains until today: Mad.

Another great story was born those hard days, an apparently innocent strip about a group of children: Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. Charlie Brown, the main character, is a 6 year old boy, born to loose. He symbolizes the insecurity, the ingenuity, the lack of initiative; an eternal hopper. His dog, Snoopy, is a philosophic beagle in the top of his red house. This strip starts the thinking and intellectual age of comics, with a greater valorization of the text over the images. The other great name of the 50's intellectual comics is Jules Feiffer, who retracted paranoia and obsessions of compulsive people from the American society with a free, undefined drawing style, without background, mainly in monologues, in the Village Voice. In times of limited freedom of speech and witch-hunt, the creators (in theater and in movies as much as in comics) used apparently inoffensive stories to say in the interlineation what they wanted. Walt Kelly's Pogo is another example, which used small animals in the swamps of Florida to discuss politics.

In Europe, by those days, was created one of the best comic books ever made, the French Astérix, by René Goscinny (text) and Albert Uderzo (pencils), in Pilote magazine, in 1959. With a huge humor sense, great historic research, wonderful pencils, Astérix is without any question, a masterpiece. The stories of the inhabitants of a gaul village, in 50 b.C., mixed adventure, jokes about mostly European countries (and their people), Latin quotes, caricatures of French personalities from the 60's and detailed backgrounds in an easy reading narrative. In 1977 Goscinny died, but the story didn't end: Uderzo followed drawing and, then, also writing the albums -- until today. Astérix is the top-one best seller in French.


In the sixties we can see the remake of the super hero with the Marvel Comics, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Lee and Kirby already worked with comic books and super heroes, but then, they had the opportunity of creating an entire new fictional universe. The surprise was that the characters had some kind of weakness or defect in opposition to their super powers. Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, Thor, Hulk, X-Men, Iron Man, Dr. Strange were the first of an empire that soon would turn Marvel in the number one in comic book market. But the most popular character and one of the most interesting super heroes ever created is the Spiderman, the secret identity of frail and shy teenager Peter Parker.



Times changes, and so comic books, in sixties. Examples of what we call today adult comics became more usual, opening space for the creation of stories such as French Barbarella, by Jean Claude Forest; argentine Mafalda, by Quino; Italian Valentina, by Guido Crepax; north American Fritz the Cat, by Robert Crumb (who introduced the underground in comic books); and for the embryonic works in science fiction and fantasy of Parisian penciller Jean Giraud, who later would be better known as Moebius. In all those works it could be seen sex, violence, intellectual insight, critics to the society, use of color and page design in very different ways and intensities than what has been done so far. Comic books are not more only for kids; they grew up and sophisticated themselves in unexpected ways. Adult comics existed since the first times, but they increase in number in the 70's. Conventions and exposition in museums began at the end of that decade, as much as academic studies.

The seventies are no more than a natural consequence of what had begun to happen in the sixties. Underground comics definitively conquered their space, been sold either in head shops or hand to hand. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton's Freak Brothers, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Dan Griffin are among the most known names, if you can say so, in underground. On the other side of the ocean, a few French pencillers -- Moebius, Phillipe Druillet, Jean Pierre Dionnet, and Bernard Farkas --, joined under the name of Les humanoides associés, created in 1974 a historic magazine, Métal Hurlant, that came to the USA in 1977, as Heavy Metal. Fantasy, science fiction, acid trips, rock'n'roll, naked bodies, incredible use of color, new ways of page design and literature are part of the confuse mix that made the success of the magazine. From Itally comes great fumetti, such as Ken Parker, by Berardi and Milazzo, Corto Maltese, by Hugo Pratt, and The Click, by Milo Manara.

In the end of the seventies Will Eisner returns to the comic's stage, inaugurating a new genre, the graphic novel, with A Contract with God. It is the first of a series of tales ambiented in the Bronx that would prove definitively that the master hasn't loose his hand.

http://www.geocities.com/soho/5537/hist.htm

Illustration History

Function
Illustrations can:

give faces to characters in a story;
display examples of an item described in an academic textbook (e.g. a typology);
visualize step-wise sets of instructions in a technical manual;
communicate subtle thematic tone in a narrative;
link brands to the ideas of human expression, individuality and creativity; and
inspire the viewer to feel emotion to expand on the linguistic aspects of the narrative.

[edit] History

[edit] Early history
The earliest forms of illustration were prehistoric cave paintings. Before the invention of the printing press, illuminated manuscripts were hand-illustrated. Illustration has been used in China and Japan since the 8th century, traditionally by creating woodcuts to accompany writing.[citation needed]


[edit] 15th century through 18th century
During the 15th century, books illustrated with woodcut illustrations became available. The main processes used for reproduction of illustrations during the 16th and 17th centuries were engraving and etching. At the end of the 18th century, lithography allowed even better illustrations to be reproduced. The most notable illustrator of this epoch was William Blake who rendered his illustrations in the medium of relief etching.


Illustration by Santiago Martinez Delgado.
[edit] Early to mid 19th century
In the early 19th century the proliferation of popular journals, which often serialised novels for mass-circulation, produced a boom in popular illustration. The medium moved away from steel engraving which was the standard in the early century towards wood-engraving which could more easily be incorporated into pages of text. Book and journal publishers would employ workshops of wood-engravers to render artists' drawings onto polished blocks of fine-grained yew or box-wood which could then be locked directly into the printing-chase with the metal type. Notable figures of the early century were John Leech, George Cruikshank, Dickens' illustrator Hablot Knight Browne and, in France, Honoré Daumier. The same illustrators would contribute to satirical and straight-fiction magazines, but in both cases the demand was for character-drawing which encapsulated or caricatured social types and classes.

The British humorous magazine Punch, which was founded in 1841 riding on the earlier success of Cruikshank's Comic Almanac (1827-1840), employed an uninterrupted run of high-quality comic illustrators, including Sir John Tenniel, the Dalziel Brothers and Georges du Maurier, into the 20th century. It chronicles the gradual shift in popular illustration from reliance on caricature to sophisticated topical observations. These artists all trained as conventional fine-artists, but achieved their reputations primarily as illustrators. Punch and similar magazines such as the Parisian Le Voleur realised that good illustrations sold as many copies as written content.


Walter Ratterman, Oil on Canvas, ca1927, Woman at a piano in elegant interior. Illustration for Good Housekeeping magazine.
[edit] Golden age of illustration
The American "golden age of illustration" lasted from the 1880s until shortly after World War I (although the active career of several later "golden age" illustrators went on for another few decades). As in Europe a few decades earlier, newspapers, mass market magazines, and illustrated books had become the dominant media of public consumption. Improvements in printing technology freed illustrators to experiment with color and new rendering techniques. A small group of illustrators in this time became rich and famous. The imagery they created was a portrait of American aspirations of the time.

A prolific artist who linked the earlier and later 19th century in Europe was Gustave Doré. His sombre illustrations of London poverty in the 1860s were influential examples of social commentary in art. He remained with the medium of monochrome engraving in his later more fantastical work, but other artists were discovering the possibilities of color, particularly under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and emulations of hand-printing techniques by the design-oriented Arts and Crafts Movement. Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane and Kay Nielsen were notable representatives of this style, which often carried an ethos of neo-mediævalism and took mythological and fairy-tale subjects. By contrast the English illustrator Beatrix Potter based her colored children's illustrations on accurate naturalistic observation of animal-life.

The opulence and harmony of the work of the "golden age" illustrators was counterpointed in the 1890s by artists like Aubrey Beardsley who reverted to a sparser black-and-white style influenced by woodcut and silhouette, anticipating Art Nouveau, and Les Nabis. American illustration of this period was anchored by the Brandywine Valley tradition, begun by Howard Pyle and carried on by his students, who included N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Jesse Willcox Smith and Frank Schoonover.

A movement was started in Latin America by Santiago Martinez Delgado who worked in the 1930s for Esquire Magazine while an art student in Chicago, and later in his native Colombia with the Vida Magazine, Martinez a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright worked in the Art Deco style. Also in the 1930s the influence of propaganda art and expressionism was felt in the work of the British freelance illustrator Arthur Wragg. His stylised monotone shapes suggested the block-printing techniques used for political posters, but by this time the technology of transferring artwork to printing plates by photographic means had advanced to the extent that Wragg could produce all his work in pen and ink.


[edit] Post World War II period
Disregarded in their own day, the styles of illustration which have since come to characterize the 1950s and 1960s are magazine advertising and comic art. These styles even began to flow back into the mainstream of fine art in the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein (both of whom had worked as commercial illustrators). Not so admired have been the various styles of illustration associated with pop album cover in the 1970s, often based on airbrush techniques.

The 1950s and 1960s were another Golden Age of Illustration, with hundreds of Illustrators working. Illustrations appeared in magazines, on billboards, on magazine covers and on television. The use of Illustrators began to wane in the mid 1950s, but the genre continued to be seen regularly through the early 1960s. The artwork of Norman Rockwell, Harry Anderson, and Charles Kerins, epitomize the era.


[edit] Today
Starting in the 1990s, traditional illustrators confronted a challenge from those using computer software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and CorelDRAW. The use of Wacom tablets and similar apparatus also increased the ability of drawing and painting directly in a computer.

Today, many illustration students are made aware of the technology available, with equal emphasis placed upon more traditional illustration techniques. As a result, traditional and digital techniques are often used in conjunction with each other. One form of this is fusion illustration[citation needed] which crosses the boundaries of fine art and commercial art in a world where illustration, graphic design, typography, and photography work together.

While illustrations have been previously been considered just a small part of the creative and entertainment industries, they are becoming a new and significant factor in industries such as video games, movies, animation, advertising and publishing, the former three known for their use of concept art in pre-production.


[edit] Illustration art
Today, there is a growing interest in collecting and admiring original artwork that was used as illustrations in books, magazines, posters, etc. Various museum exhibitions, magazines and art galleries have devoted space to the illustrators of the past.

In the visual art world, illustrators have sometimes been considered less important in comparison with fine artists and graphic designers. But as the result of computer game and comic industry growth, illustrations are becoming valued as popular and profitable art works that can acquire a wider market than the other two, especially in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and USA.

a Cartoonist Job

A cartoonist is an artist who specializes in drawing cartoons. Traditionally much of this work was, and still is, humorous, and is intended primarily for entertainment purposes. Many traditional print cartoons are of the single-panel variety, and are published in print media of various kinds, for example, in magazines such as the New Yorker and Punch.
The term cartoonist is also applied to those who create more serious editorial or political cartoons, as well as those who create comic strips, comic books and graphic novels.
The word is sometimes used for those who create animated cartoons including manga, although a person working designing the visual part of animated cartoons is perhaps more commonly referred to as an animator.

Cartoon is...

The word cartoon has various meanings, based on several very different forms of visual art and illustration. The term has evolved over time.
The original meaning was in fine art, and there cartoon meant a preparatory drawing for a piece of art such as a painting or tapestry.
The somewhat more modern meaning was that of humorous illustrations in magazines and newspapers. Even more recently there are now several contemporary meanings, including creative visual work for print media, for electronic media, and even animated films and animated digital media.
When the word cartoon is applied to print media, it most often refers to a humorous single-panel drawing or gag cartoon, most of which have captions and do not use speech balloons. The word cartoon is not often used to refer to a comic strip.
The artists who draw cartoons are known as cartoonists.