I don’t have too much more to say about David Kunzle’s long-out-of-print series, THE HISTORY OF THE COMIC STRIP, but I did want to post a couple of wacky examples from the book that caught my attention last week:

I plan on ripping these off as soon as I can.

On a side note, here’s what R. Crumb had to say about the book. Unbelievably, Professor Kunzle had never heard Crumb’s praise, so he was delighted when I forwarded him the quote from Hignite’s book. I still think that with a little editing, maybe whittling it down to a paperback format, this book could be re-released and sell quite well. Kunzle has two books on Rudolphe Topffer coming out soon: a collection of his strips, RUDOLPHE TOPFFER: THE COMPLETE COMIC STRIPS, and a monograph, RUDOLPHE TOPFFER: FATHER OF THE COMIC STRIP.

R. Crumb talks about David Kunzle’s The Early Comic Strip in Todd Hignite’s excellent In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists:

My awareness of this whole history was something that happened gradually, since that stuff is not available. Where are you going to see it? You’d have to go to some library that specializes in that and ask to look at it. It’s not reprinted anywhere, so it’s not known. So when I got that big book by Kunzle, it was a total surprise, how much material there was, and I’m sure that’s still just a drop in the bucket, you know, what survived, what he could get his hands on, and what he could actually show — I’m sure he could have done twice as much. So much of them are so crude, those little, postage stamp-sized panels of, like, husband-and-wife squabbles done in Russia or Germany or Czechoslovakia. Incredible stuff, but totally obscure. If you try to inform people in the art world of this history, they know nothing about it. A complete underground, unknown, history of popular art that the general art world knows nothing about. When Alfred Fischer, the curator of my show in Germany [at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne] came, I showed him this book and some other things and he was just speechless; it was all completely new to him. The crude, lowest level of popular arts.

What I love about Hignite’s book is that it focuses most of its attention on the cartoonists’ influences, personal libraries, and thoughts about the history of the form. As Hignite comments, “To varying degrees, these artists are collectors themselves, so the process of creating is interwined with other art: the working studio is also library archive, and museum.” Later in his interview, Crumb goes on to lament the difference between this kind of collecting versus “academic” interests:

It’s just that academia’s interest in this stuff is so lame….There’s a big difference between a collector-archivist and people in academia….In academia they get locked into this thing of having to narrow it down and narrow it down to this very particular specialty that they focus on, and they’re very proprietary about it, so that it scares them to actually scan the culture at large as we do and just pick out, “Oh, this is interesting,” o, “That’s interesting from this whole different area,” and then look into it; that’s a waste of their time. There are probably exceptions, but it gets narrower and narrower as there get to be more academic specialists and specialties. You have to be so specific about “you” things, and if someone else who’s not the expert volunteers some information, then it’s almost a threat.

More and more, my vision of comics as a type of collage – a spattering of pictures, words, influences, events, personal histories, books, whatever…go read the Lethem article, where he says, “In fact, collage…might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first.” — synched together in a unity of style, grows and strengthens in my head. Which is why reading — ammassing influence — is such an important part of the gig…

“Kunzle’s book…has gone virtually unnoticed by the comics community but is an enormously important work, covering nearly 400 years of forgotten European comics. Check it out!”

—Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Unfortunately, the two volumes of David Kunzle’s mammoth study are long out of print, and the used copies are selling on Amazon for hundreds of dollars. I e-mailed Professor Kunzle (he’s part of the Art History Department at UCLA) to see if there was any chance of seeing it back in print. He said no, but that he has two books on Rodolphe Topffer, a facsimile of his eight comic strips, and a monograph, coming out from University Press of Mississippi in April.

If you’re a comics geek and you’re ready to go back further than Little Nemo and The Yellow Kid, it’s really worth it to track down copies of these books. I got mine through interlibrary loan. Here are links to find the books in a library near you:

The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. I: Picture Stories and Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825

The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. II: The Nineteenth Century