Rewriting Comics History

Paul Gravett traces the history of daily comics in a review.

From the piece...

You’d think by now that the history of a medium as global and influential as comics would be fully researched and written, but this is not the case. In contrast to the more varied and international perspectives available on film or literature, the majority of English-language reference books on comics plough through the well-worn furrows of the 20th century American newspaper strip and comic book, re-affirming old "truths" and historical "facts". Objectivity and lack of bias are practically impossible, because by putting into print your history, your version of the "facts," your inclusions and omissions determine who and what are significant. In the process, almost inevitably, supposedly "minor" or "peripheral" figures and events can be overlooked.

Writing history is a way of controlling history. As R.C. Harvey puts it in his book Children Of The Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip (University of Washington Press, $29.95, ISBN 0-29597778-7), "And we begin, as most historical surveys of this medium do, with The Yellow Kid (shown above in his first appearance, not yet in yellow, bottom left in a single-panel cartoon by Richard Outcault for Truth magazine, dated May 5th, 1895). To justify this, Harvey invokes the "Columbus principle," used by many comics historians since Coulton Waugh’s 1947 book The Comics which admits that the Vikings were the first to reach the New World, but Columbus’ "discovery" inspired others to follow him. Unfortunately, applied to comics, this approach conveniently writes off all that came before, in America, Europe and elsewhere, as precursors or "proto-comics," of interest perhaps but not the genuine article. After all, they don’t fit into the notion that this ‘new’ narrative medium began in America.