The Complete Comic Strips

"All the people whose books I’m choosing didn’t use pictures as a crutch. They weren’t failed or unformed writers who needed pictures. They excelled in the prose tradition and in the picture-making tradition. They used each as a corrective for the other. Things you can’t communicate with words you can show, and things you can’t show you can convey with words. That’s how movies work, that’s how theatre works, and the paper form of all that is the picture story. Töpffer’s work consists of highly sophisticated stories, 100 pages or longer. His stories are told through drawings and handwritten text combined on a page. In Western culture, there’s a great taboo against placing text within a picture, so he put the text below each picture, but they worked together. The stories are very entertaining and interesting, very dense and imbued with his handwriting. It wasn’t until the 1860s that you could make a reproducible drawing as effortlessly in print as you could on paper. Previously, another technician would take your drawing and translate it into either a wood etching or a steel engraving. With lithographic printing that step was obviated. That’s when Töpffer’s career took off. He was there at the right moment to combine pictures with text. He was the first person in Western culture to make a large body of literary picture stories. Töpffer was trained to be a writer and his father was painter, so he grew up in a picture-making culture. That’s why he was able to do both. He was a Genevan, from the French-speaking part of what became Switzerland. Because he wrote in French, the tradition he started first developed there, but was pirated all over Europe. By 1842 his work was bootlegged in America."