ORIGINS of the American Comic Book 0

[Bookery]

^ thats my take also. And for that reason I think you can make the argument that ff1 was the most important book ever published. Before I get flamed I'm not sure if I subscribe to it myself but you can make a pretty reasonable argument for it as the momentum from early marvel has been the wind thats kept this ship sailing for 50 years now

 

Now you're just being coy... is this an argument for Famous Funnies, Fantastic Four, Four Favorites, Famous Feature, Family Funnies, Fantastic Fears, Fightin' Five, Fearless Fagan, Foxy Fagan, Fast Fiction, Feature Funnies, Fighting Fronts, Film Funnies, Flippity & Flop, Frankie Fuddle, Freedom Fighters, Frisky Fables, Frontier Fighters, Funny Fables, Funny Films, Funny Folks, Funny Frolics, Funny Funnies or Fury of Firestorm?

 

Slightly different arguments can be made depending upon the answer....

 

 

Someone has opened an Overstreet lately

 

OR... I may be bizarrely obsessed with collecting only alliterative titles!

(Though I was told by Colton Waugh they were all illiterative).

 

 

[Cat-Man_America]

^ thats my take also. And for that reason I think you can make the argument that ff1 was the most important book ever published. Before I get flamed I'm not sure if I subscribe to it myself but you can make a pretty reasonable argument for it as the momentum from early marvel has been the wind thats kept this ship sailing for 50 years now

 

Now you're just being coy... is this an argument for Famous Funnies, Fantastic Four, Four Favorites, Famous Feature, Family Funnies, Fantastic Fears, Fightin' Five, Fearless Fagan, Foxy Fagan, Fast Fiction, Feature Funnies, Fighting Fronts, Film Funnies, Flippity & Flop, Frankie Fuddle, Freedom Fighters, Frisky Fables, Frontier Fighters, Funny Fables, Funny Films, Funny Folks, Funny Frolics, Funny Funnies or Fury of Firestorm?

 

Slightly different arguments can be made depending upon the answer....

 

 

Someone has opened an Overstreet lately

 

OR... I may be bizarrely obsessed with collecting only alliterative titles!

(Though I was told by Colton Waugh they were all illiterative).

 

 

 

[font:Times New Roman]Alas, Waugh seemed to think all comic books were f 'd up, not that his POV was biased.

 

His comments on comic books as being inferior to comic strips reminds me of the scientists hired by the tobacco industry to do health research.

 

As Warren Zevon so eloquently put it in Desperados Under the Eaves, some outcomes are entirely predictable.

 

[/font]

[MrBedrock]

I was so illiterate that I missed the alliterative/illiterative distinction in Tim's post

That's some funny shiznit right there.

[dgarthwaite-migration]

This isn't going to be popular and it's 100% speculation. I believe that comics are merely a byproduct of the motion picture technology as it was developed. The earliest device which was used to project pictures was the magic lantern.

 

Projection lanterns appear to date back as far as 1420. (http://www.magiclantern.org.uk/history/history3.html)

 

Here is a nice site covering the subject.

http://www.magic-lantern.eu/

 

"There has been some debate about who the original inventor of the magic lantern is, but the most widely accepted theory is that Christiaan Huygens developed the original device in the late 1650s.In the fifteenth century, however, Giovanni Fontana, a Venetian engineer, had already created a lantern that projected an image of a demon. And other sources give credit to the German priest Athanasius Kircher. He describes a device such as the magic lantern in his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. There are possible mentions of this device associated with Kircher as early as 1646. Even in its earliest use, it was demonstrated with monstrous images such as the Devil. Huygens's device was even referred to as the "lantern of fright" because it was able to project spooky images that looked like apparitions. In its early development, it was mostly used by magicians and conjurers to project images, making them appear or disappear, transform from one scene into a different scene, animate normally inanimate objects, or even create the belief of bringing the dead back to life. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern#History )

 

As light sources became better, Edison was eventually able to make a camera that captured moving images. This is when comics started expanding as a form of art. I contend that there is noting particularly original about "comics" and that it is a byproduct of the moving picture technology that was simply displayed in a different form.

 

The desire for word balloons would have been part of the natural evolution of this technology.

 

Check out the rare uncut Magic Lantern transparencies from France.

 

http://www.toverlantaarn.eu/transparency_1.html

 

Seeing this technology would have been the equivalent of seeing a comic.

 

DG

 

 

Edited April 14, 2013 by dgarthwaite

[BLBcomics-migration]

This isn't going to be popular and it's 100% speculation. I believe that comics are merely a byproduct of the motion picture technology as it was developed. The earliest device which was used to project pictures was the magic lantern.

 

Projection lanterns appear to date back as far as 1420. (http://www.magiclantern.org.uk/history/history3.html)

 

Here is a nice site covering the subject.

http://www.magic-lantern.eu/

 

"There has been some debate about who the original inventor of the magic lantern is, but the most widely accepted theory is that Christiaan Huygens developed the original device in the late 1650s.In the fifteenth century, however, Giovanni Fontana, a Venetian engineer, had already created a lantern that projected an image of a demon. And other sources give credit to the German priest Athanasius Kircher. He describes a device such as the magic lantern in his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. There are possible mentions of this device associated with Kircher as early as 1646. Even in its earliest use, it was demonstrated with monstrous images such as the Devil. Huygens's device was even referred to as the "lantern of fright" because it was able to project spooky images that looked like apparitions. In its early development, it was mostly used by magicians and conjurers to project images, making them appear or disappear, transform from one scene into a different scene, animate normally inanimate objects, or even create the belief of bringing the dead back to life. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern#History )

 

As light sources became better, Edison was eventually able to make a camera that captured moving images. This is when comics started expanding as a form of art. I contend that there is noting particularly original about "comics" and that it is a byproduct of the moving picture technology that was simply displayed in a different form.

 

The desire for word balloons would have been part of the natural evolution of this technology.

 

Check out the rare uncut Magic Lantern transparencies from France.

 

http://www.toverlantaarn.eu/transparency_1.html

 

Seeing this technology would have been the equivalent of seeing a comic.

 

DG

 

 

We discussed magic lantern evolution more than a decade ago on the Plat list I began in 1999.

Here is a Hy Mayer 1896 comic strip from Truth to bolster aspects of your thesis statement.

I was running this puppy for years in the Victorian article in Overstreet.

Truth is the very same magazine which Outcault first intro's "Yellow" Kid.

Last few years powers that be there have been deleting the visual aid

rendering the words of the text harder to comprehend for the novice

exploring the origins coupled with evolution of the comic strip.

 

 

There is a short text running down the left side

- tiny, not sure how well it will show up here.

in the dark blue/grey area which reads per tier:

Our Artist

Draws -

A Picture

Before The Kinetoscope

 

While the origins of the comic strip are what I stated previously,

there is a definite evolutionary trail which runs concurrent with the origins of film production.

Comic strips which tell stories in the main are merely story boards for film

 

 

[dgarthwaite-migration]

Coming from a technology industry, I've come to realize that most "inventions" are merely tweaking that which has already been done in another context or setting. While it's nice to think that comics were invented by visionaries and pioneers with an original concept, quite often all they do is change one little thing and it appears as though they had an original idea. Those little changes can result in big changes over time. I laugh a little when I see people like Neal Adams creating "motion comics". It's already been done. It's called "animation".

 

DG

[BLBcomics-migration]

The sequential story telling comic strip per Topffer in the late 1820s using stone lithography pre-dates invention of camera concepts by a couple decades. Topffer used stone lithography in the beginning when he began printing them up in the early 1830s.

 

By the 1840s Daguerreotype concepts were being applied to printing

 

http://inventors.about.com/od/dstartinventions/a/Daguerreotype.htm

Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital [Paperback]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1454900024

A Thumbnail History of the Daguerreotype by Kenneth E. Nelson

http://daguerre.org/resource/history/history.html

 

and Topffer's later comic strip books reflect this advance in technology.

 

ALL of Topffer's seven comic strip books are back in print now via wonderful translations by Prof David Kunzle from the Univ of Mississippi which can be ordered via Google searches to further one's education in to the origins of the comic strip book.

 

Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer

http://books.google.com/books/about/Father_of_the_Comic_Strip.html?id=12dQAAAAMAAJ

Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips

http://books.google.com/books?id=vJ_UADzj18oC&source=gbs_similarbooks

 

After the discussions we had on the Plat list more than a decade ago, there is no doubt that magic lantern concepts played a key role as well. All this stuff is inter-connected, just like and no different than "popular culture" inter-relates with various advances today which gets us such cool "super" hero movies which have captured imaginations world wide.

[BLBcomics-migration]

 

How to sell over stock comic books in the late 40s

[Bronty]

Those were almost completely ignored by this crowd. I thought to myself "why bother" - they are S.O.S., some might say Stuck On Superman, a more apt wording would be Stuck On Stupid, but I digress....

 

 

 

 

Don't want you thinking I haven't addressed your perceived concern that I put words in your mouth. Hopefully this is a direct enough quote for you.

[Cat-Man_America]

 

How to sell over stock comic books in the late 40s

 

[font:Times New Roman]Love the entrepreneurship! If I'm reading it right, at 5/50 cents there wasn't any cost break to the consumer and the reseller's only expense was the twine.[/font]

 

 

[BLBcomics-migration]

 

I wish to thank those of you who placed orders with BLBcomics this past week or so.

Got "buried" in more than 100 orders from those of you who remain mostly silent it seems expressing

your empathy to help out oldest daughter Katy as she continues to heal from Stevens Johnson Syndrome.

 

As a reward, am placing some more comics business photo pics and such here for your edification.

I have been able to come up for "air" a bit to continue the sorting process of the primary research artifact archives

which are going in to this book I am once again working on as I find "spare" time I call Comic Book Store Wars.

 

The above is a blow up of the below page circa 1951 or so

 

 

 

 

 

 

[BLBcomics-migration]

Here is a partial page blow-up of a comics rack from 1946.

The tid bit of "info" on this page says comic books had "peaked"

from some 40 million a month during World War Two.

Some said they dropped to a "mere" 27 million

but Independent News hastens to point out the numbers

were "only" down to 34 million.

Such were the days before Television made its inroads in to the

attention span of Americans and their entertainment.

 

[Bronty]

Those were almost completely ignored by this crowd. I thought to myself "why bother" - they are S.O.S., some might say Stuck On Superman, a more apt wording would be Stuck On Stupid, but I digress....

 

 

 

 

Don't want you thinking I haven't addressed your perceived concern that I put words in your mouth. Hopefully this is a direct enough quote for you.

 

Cat got your tongue? Never known you to not type a 43000 word reply before.

[BLBcomics-migration]

 

This next tidbit is a double page spread. Two winters back during a 'deep freeze' of some 20 below zero the old water meter in my rented warehouse burst sending cascading water some eight feet in the air, a small river flowing in to a portion of my comics business research archives.

 

Spent the next couple days doing triage saving and preserving same best I could.

 

Hence, the "water mark" on these two pages which shows innards of a distributor in New Jersey. I have many such pics going in to my comics business history book. My main problem is going to be figuring out what to leave out of Comic Book Store Wars as I define its parameters.

 

Hope you find some of this stuff fun as I plan on posting a lot more here. It is kind of trade off of sorts. The more vintage comics artifacts I get sold, the more time I have to sort thru all this kind of stuff, the more you here end up seeing. This is my version of a "kick starter."

 

I will continue to ignore the "peanut gallery" who seem to have a hard-on attacking my research efforts. I also wish to publicly apologize to Bill Ponsetti whose comments I said a couple times earlier in this thread were "silly."

 

In finally figuring out where he was coming from, I completely misinterpreted he was discussing "now" in 2013 towards the future regarding "super" hero characters as "content" while I was completely immersed in the past discussing evolution of the "form" or, more so to the point, "format" of a comic book as this wonderful art form evolved in America since the 1840s, so, consequently, neither one of us were communicating properly.

 

Obviously Superman et al were are and will forever more have far larger impact as "characters" on any given world wide contest agenda of popularity than that long ago guy named Obadiah Oldbuck.

 

And again, I thank those of you who see fit to support what ever efforts I am able to make in sharing those huge volume of research data I collected back when I was able to make it around the country in days of yore. Katy thanks you also. She is coming back from a horrible place slowly but surely stronger than before.

[BLBcomics-migration]

 

How to sell over stock comic books in the late 40s

 

[font:Times New Roman]Love the entrepreneurship! If I'm reading it right, at 5/50 cents there wasn't any cost break to the consumer and the reseller's only expense was the twine.[/font]

 

 

The full page from which this pic was taken has the caption "How to Sell More Comic Books in December" with a lot of tips in the text for a retailer on how best to market comic books. Pretty soon when I come across it again I will post the whole page.

 

Keep in mind the guy in this pic also expended bucks on sign paper as well as the markers to make the signs. -

 

As the days progress there will be a lot more of this type of stuff to check out. My Number One Concern is getting Katy healed, body, mind & soul. Her recent medical nightmare experience has taken a lot out of my baby girl (who is now 33).

[BLBcomics-migration]

Yo Bronty, am unsure of what you are writing about. Many a time I am simply making a quick reply at the bottom of a thread. What I am now realizing is it answering the last person's post on any given thread. Have now learned to answer specific posts like I am here now. Am I uneducated re the ways & means of posting in CGC slab land? Yup, guilty. Am pledging to not simply answer at the bottom of a thread, but I hasten to add what you are making motion on, silly me.

[MrBedrock]

The way I understand it is this... if we buy stuff from Bob to support Katy then we will get rewarded with more pictures of old news racks.

[mrmyst]

The way I understand it is this... if we buy stuff from Bob to support Katy then we will get rewarded with more pictures of old news racks.

[comicdonna]

Where's the slabs?

[BLBcomics-migration]

Mister Evans,

you do not have to do any thing.

One first has to contain empathy.