The Man Who Invented Comics

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on March 27, 2007 Sign up now!

by Peter Sanderson, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 3/27/2007

For decades the conventional wisdom among American comics enthusiasts has been that comics are one of the nation’s few native art forms, like jazz, and for decades they have been wrong. The father of comics was Rodolphe Topffer, who was born in Geneva, Switzerland, at the end of the 18th century. In April, the University Press of Mississippi will publish the first English-language collection of Topffer’s work, Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips, compiled, translated and annotated by scholar David Kunzle.

Simultaneously with the release of this groundbreaking collection, the University Press of Mississippi is also publishing Kunzle’s critical monograph, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Topffer, which delves further into the historical background of this pioneering cartoonist’s work.

In the collection, Kunzle calls Topffer’s work “comic strips,” but that may be misleading, since we usually think of strips as being published in daily installments. Instead, Topffer usually published his comics stories in book form, calling them “histoires en estampes,” which Kunzle translates as “engraved novels.” In other words, those of you who assumed that the graphic novel format originated in the late 1970s are off by well over a century. Topffer published his first graphic novel, Histoire de Monsieur Jabot, in 1833. An earlier story that Topffer did, Les Amours de M. Vieux Bois, was published in the United States in 1842 as The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck. Thus the first American comic book was actually a Swiss reprint!

Sequential art—communication through a series of pictures—goes all the way back to prehistoric cave paintings on cave walls. Topffer acknowledged as an inspiration the 18th-century artist and satirist William Hogarth, who created series of paintings or engravings that told a story, such as The Rake’s Progress (1735). But Topffer’s picture stories are the first that unmistakably resemble modern comics: book-length sequences of panels that combine words and pictures.

Although cartoonists such as the 18th-century political caricaturist James Gillray had long been using word balloons, Topffer did not, and very rarely employed dialogue. Instead, he provided a running narration throughout each book in the form of captions for each panel. Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant is the prime example of a more modern comics work that utilizes captions rather than balloons.

A man of multiple talents, Topffer was a university professor, the head of his own boarding school, a writer of prose novels and short stories, a playwright, a journalist and an adviser to Geneva’s government. He was also a serious illustrator, although his drawings of faces and figures in his comics seem crude.

That doesn’t matter, because Topffer got so much else in his artwork right: he was an amusing caricaturist and a sharp observer of facial expressions and body language. Most importantly, he was not only inventing comics storytelling, but he was already a master of the craft.

The great surprise in Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips is that these pioneering comics from 160 years ago hold up so well and are still genuinely funny.

The first tale in Kunzle’s collection, “The Story of Mr. Jabot,” starts out quietly as a character study of a pretentious social climber. But Topffer steadily heightens the comedy with escalating slapstick, until Jabot, slipping on the floor during a dance, knocks down an entire conga-like line of dancing couples behind him, as if they were dominoes. Some pages later, Jabot obliviously finds himself sleeping in the same room as the woman he is courting. Imagine Blake Edwards directing Peter Sellers raising havoc at a 19th-century ball, and you’ll get the idea.

In other tales, the absurdity rises to Monty Pythonesque levels. For example, the title character of “M. Cryptogame” is not only swallowed by a whale but proposes to a “beauty from Provence” who is part of a whole community inside the whale’s tummy, and even holds a wedding ball that abruptly ends when all the partying upsets the whale’s stomach and he vomits the guests out.

Topffer employs absurdity to critique human weaknesses like political dilettantism, romantic self-indulgence and ivory tower intellectualism. In “Dr. Festus,” blindly submissive soldiers obey whoever is wearing their superior’s uniform, even when it is just hanging on a tree, its sleeves flapping in the breeze. One of Topffer’s favorite devices is to have people lose or exchange their clothes, losing and changing their roles in society in the process.

Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips is not only the first English-language collection of Topffer’s work but the first collection of Topffer’s complete comics oeuvre to be published in any language. The copious notes in Kunzle’s appendixes elucidate Topffer’s satiric commentary on the manners, politics and culture of his time. The story “M. Vieux Bois” turns out to be a parody of the unlikely plots and emotional excesses of 19th-century romantic fiction, especially the gothic novel. But the reader need not know these period references to appreciate Topffer’s timeless satire on human foibles and the absurdities of life.

With Topffer’s work at last readily available in English, perhaps soon American comics buffs will rank him alongside Americans like Winsor McCay and Richard Outcault as one of the great pioneering masters of the comics medium, whose work remains vividly alive to this day.