Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe TÃ pffer (Great Comics Artists Series)

Kunzle, David

ISBN 10: 1578069483 / ISBN 13: 9781578069484

Published by University Press of Mississippi, 2007

About this Item

Good - Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name - GOOD Oversized.

Seller Inventory # M1578069483Z3

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe TÃ pffer (Great Comics Artists Series)
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1578069483
• ISBN 13: 9781578069484
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

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 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.