Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Great Comics Artists Series) - Softcover

Kunzle, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1578069483 ISBN 13: 9781578069484

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2007

Synopsis

Sixty years before the comics entered the American newspaper press, Rodolphe Töpffer of Geneva (1799–1846), schoolmaster, university professor, polemical journalist, art critic, landscape draftsman, and writer of fiction, travel tales, and social criticism, invented a new art form: the comic strip, or “picture story,” that is now the graphic novel. At first he resisted publishing what he called his “little follies.” When he did, they became instantly popular, plagiarized, and imitated throughout Europe and the United States.

Töpffer developed a graphic style suited to his poor eyesight: the doodle, which he systematized and also theorized. The drawings, with their “modernist” spontaneous, flickering, broken lines, forming figures in mad hyperactivity, run above deft, ironic captions and propel narratives of surreal absurdity. The artist's maniacal protagonists mix social satire with myth. By the mid-nineteenth century, Messrs. Jabot, Festus, Cryptogame, and other members of the crazy family, comprising eight picture stories in all, were instant folk heroes. In a biographical framework, Kunzle situates the comic strips in the Genevan and European culture of the time as well as in relation to Töpffer's other work, notably his hilarious travel tales, and recounts their curious genesis (with an initial imprimatur from Goethe, no less) and their controversial success.

Kunzle's study, the first in English on the writer-artist, accompanies Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips, a facsimile edition of the strips themselves, with the first-ever translation of these into English.

About this title

About the Author

David Kunzle (1936–2024) was professor emeritus of art history at the University of California and author or editor of Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870; Cham: The Best Comic Strips and Graphic Novelettes, 1839–1862; Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer; Gustave Doré: Twelve Comic Strips; and Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

From the Inside Flap

A critical study of the Swiss artist who created the comic strip

Reviews

Frequently cited as the inventor of the comic strip, Töpffer, a Swiss teacher whose artistic vocation had been thwarted by poor eyesight, started producing his whimsical pictorial narratives, in 1827, for the enjoyment of friends. But, after Goethe praised the strips, Töpffer was emboldened to publish them, and they became wildly popular. The strips develop from satire—"Monsieur Jabot" concerns the disastrous affectations of a would-be dandy—to something far more bizarre: in "Monsieur Pencil," a dog trapped atop a telegraph pole brings Europe to the brink of war. As David Kunzle notes in his accompanying biography, the apparently casual style of the drawings masks considerable sophistication. Late in life, Töpffer produced an essay expounding a theory of the doodle, and demonstrating that, to a viewer, even an approximately drawn face seems to possess character.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1578069483
• ISBN 13: 9781578069484
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224