On the Origins of Comics
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On the Origins of Comics New York Double-take BRIAN BOYD Comics can have almost no mass and yet be the most mass of mass arts: Garfi eld has had up to 263 million readers a day. Comics constitute a new art, just over a century old, and usually an unusually accessible one. So what can evolution add to our understanding of comics? Evolution lets us see comics, like almost anything human or even alive, in a panoramic context but also in extreme close-up, as close as a comics artist trying to grab readers’ attention in this frame or with that angle. And it can zoom smoothly between these two poles. Evolution offers a unifi ed and natu- ralistic causal system from the general to the very particular. Far from reducing all to biology and then to chemistry and physics, it easily and eagerly plugs in more local factors—in a case like comics, historical, technological, social, artistic and individual factors, for instance—the closer we get to particulars. Evolution accepts multilevel explanations, from cells to societies, and allows full room for nature and culture, society and individuals. In biology an adaptation is an evolved feature of body or behavior that offers a solution to a recurrent problem facing a species or a lineage, like binocular vision in primates, for judging distances in trees, or human manual dexterity, for tool manufacture and use. Problems emerge with life, and all life is problem solving (Bordwell, On the History; Gombrich; Popper). Evolution has itself evolved, as when it invented sexual reproduction and thereby vastly mul- tiplied the possibilities of genetic variation from which natural selection could select (Dawkins). It can also evolve as a problem solver. Nervous systems, minds, and fl exible intelligence permit animals to respond to particular problems too new, fl eeting, or atypical for genetic evolution to address. Social learning and culture, especially in humans, allow the rapid uptake or the deliberate inculca- tion of solutions that others have found, so that individuals need not expend time and resources attempting to solve them again from scratch. But solutions are not fi nal. They have costs, as well as benefi ts, and they themselves transform the problem landscape. The series of nutritional, hygiene, and medical solutions, for instance, that allowed us to lower human death rates over the last century has posed us unprecedented problems of overpopulation, resource depletion, and climate change. Benefi ts impose costs, and as in the solu- brian boyd 97 SP_AND_19_097-111.indd 97 12/3/09 5:05:05 PM tions of natural selection, cultural traditions or individual of Thebes, the bas-reliefs of Assyria and Borobodur, the Bay- inventions, benefi ts will always face trade-offs against costs. eux tapestry, the stained-glass windows of Chartres, Giotto’s Humans have evolved no special adaptation for read- Arena Chapel frescoes and Ghiberti’s Baptistry doors. Such ing comics. Comics on the other hand have been gradu- painstaking narratives require costly patronage, and although ally designed, culturally, to appeal to evolved—gradually and they can last centuries longer than throwaway comics, they naturally designed—cognitive preferences, and designed so can be seen in only one location. Moreover, though they can well that they appeal across cultures, to Japanese and French, depict characters or scenes, they cannot effi ciently tell stories to Fijians and Americans. Comics appeal especially to our without the support of language, but can only illustrate nar- dominant sense, vision, including trichromatic color vision ratives already familiar from myth, legend or history. Creating (a primate solution to the problem of object discrimination complex new stories almost always requires words. in the low light of an arboreal existence), to our capac- In the course of both natural selection and cultural ity for language (a solution to problems of social com- evolution, new forms often emerge that could persist and munication), and our adaptive inclination for storytelling. proliferate, but die out because conditions are unpropitious Storytelling maximizes social cognition in a fl exibly ultra- or chance eliminates the novelties before they can spread. social species through a kind of play-training: compulsive, While some of the sequential visual narrative traditions just pleasurable, high-intensity, often-repeated, like all play, and mentioned have endured, none thrives as a continuous live therefore cumulatively highly effective as tuition in social art. And despite eighteenth- and nineteenth-century devel- understanding (Boyd, Origin). Since comics, like other arts, opments like the series paintings of William Hogarth, the have been intricately designed by gifted designers to appeal cartoons of Thomas Rowlandson, the illustrations of Phiz or to human minds, the comparative success of comics, against George Cruikshank, the comic sketches of Hokusai or the other narrative forms, other arts or entertainments, and other captioned picture-stories of Rodolphe Töppfer, sequential preferences for our disposable time, should offer rich data to visual narrative did not emerge in a way that would fl ourish psychology: evidence for what we fi nd appealing and easy, around the world until the mid-1890s. for the proportionate strengths of human preferences. Why then and not before? Art Spiegelman, to my Storytelling delivers multiple benefi ts, in terms not mind the greatest of comics artists, calls comics “co-mix,” only of training in social cognition, but also of communi- a mix of pictures and words (Spiegelman, Maus to Now cating shared values and opening up imaginative space. But 74). Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid images for the New the very fact that storytelling offers solutions creates new York World and the New York Journal combined drawing and problems: how can its benefi ts be augmented or its costs words within the drawing, rather than only in captions, in reduced? One cost of storytelling is time. Language allows a way that would soon explode into full-fl edged comic only the serial transmission of information along a single strips (Ohio). channel. Though it can compress events in time, it still takes Often solutions to problems in one area will change time to tell them. But though they take time, orally trans- conditions in other apparently remote areas. Elaborate tech- mitted narratives, the only option for most of the history nologies derive ultimately from nature’s evolving social learn- of story, do not last. Writing and print solve problems of ing and enable cumulative social problem solving. Language dissemination in time and space. But language, especially emerged socially and cumulatively to solve problems of social in written form, suffers from a lack of the sensory imme- communication—and nature selected for those who could diacy our minds have mostly evolved for. A visual form of deploy language better. Writing too emerged socially and narrative would solve this by telling stories in non-serial, cumulatively to allow messages to be transmitted accurately sensorily rich, and durable forms. across space and time. Printing allowed written messages and Sequential images have therefore emerged independent- images to be disseminated indefi nitely. High-speed print- ly as ways of telling stories, in, for example, the tomb frescoes ing in the nineteenth-century opened up a new problem: 98 on stories SP_AND_19_097-111.indd 98 12/3/09 5:05:12 PM how to maximize the power of writing and printing for and beyond impatiently awaited every Sunday what had as many as possible. Near-universal education solved that become the comic supplement (Blackbeard and Crain 46). problem, but as education became more nearly universal in Art craves attention, and, if successful, ensures it. With- industrialized countries, a new problem arose for publishers: out intending to launch a new form, merely seeking to how to maximize the large market for reading now available. capitalize on what was attracting his audience most, illus- Stained-glass windows had reinforced hallowed stories to a trator Richard Outcault set comics in motion. In 1895 he population largely illiterate. Now the population was mostly drew for the New York World the fi rst of a series of amusing literate, how could those with presses at their disposal make images of urchins causing mayhem in New York tenement the most of this very different situation? districts. He lowered his own invention costs and his read- One solution for the newspaper press lay in the com- ers’ comprehension costs by availing himself of three ready- pulsiveness of fi ction. Serialized fi ction featured widely in made solutions, the nineteenth-century illustrator’s realistic, nineteenth-century periodicals. But fi ction serials posed a crowded, only slightly simplifi ed drawing style, familiar from problem. While they might attract readers and lure back illustrations of Dickens; the gag cartoon, familiar from Punch those wishing for the next installment, they took time to and elsewhere; and the juxtaposition of the poor and the read, and many with the interest in current affairs that comfortable or wealthy, familiar from Dickens or Twain’s newspapers satisfi ed did not wish to devote their news- The Prince and the Pauper, or in visual form, from iconic paper-reading time to something as untrue and uncurrent paintings like Ford Madox Brown’s Work or William Frith’s as fi ction. But a story with the almost immediate com- Derby Day. prehensibility of an image, and the guarantee of humor In a single panoramic image per issue, Outcault would that has dominated comics strips early and late, would add exaggerate the antics of his street kids for comedic effect. reliably to the value of any newspaper, as the New York Each drawing had a central theme (“Golf—The Great Soci- newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph ety Sport as Played in Hogan’s Alley”; “A Hot Political Hearst, locked in a circulation war, swiftly recognized in Convention in Hogan’s Alley”) on which Outcault would the mid- and late-1890s.