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In his new book, Lost Literacies: Experiments in the 19th Century US Comic Strip, literary historian Alex Beringer demonstrates how the birth of the genre of printed comic long preceded the Sunday Funny Pages. He elaborates in conversation with Tim Brinkhof, who introduces the colloquy…

Most people consider the introduction of the Funny Pages in the late nineteenth century as the birthday of the “modern” American comic strip. Alex Beringer is not most people.

A literary historian and professor of English at the University of Montevallo, Beringer dates the history of comics earlier, to roughly the mid-1800s, a period of prolific and uninhibited experimentation. He came to this understanding by piecing together the medium’s fractured archaeological record, diving through myriad online resources and archives. In the middle of the nineteenth century, New York-based artists followed the lead of their French and Swiss colleagues, particularly Rodolphe Töpffer, the “Father of the Comic Strip,” exchanging single-image political cartoons and caricatures for multi-panel sequences that, many believe, for the first time enabled them to play around with characterization, worldbuilding, and—well—storytelling.

Coming decades before the standardization of speech bubbles and panel borders, these early American comics seem to have little in common with their modern, more streamlined counterparts; they featured sudden and purposefully jarring jump cuts reminiscent of the yet-to-be-invented film montage or musical notes instead of text. One comic artist tells a story through shadows behind the curtains of a window; another, with hieroglyphs the reader must decipher with the help of a legend.

“The audience for this first wave of US comic strips was strikingly sophisticated in its reception of this material,” Beringer writes in Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip, which chronicles this oft-forgotten renaissance. Out from the Ohio State University Press, the book is one of hundreds of titles included in JSTOR’s Path to Open program, making scholarly books accessible online to wide audiences (read chapter four here, free of charge).

“The sense of flux—the idea that the visual language could turn on a dime—was often precisely the appeal,” Beringer observes in his chronicle of this oft-forgotten renaissance.

Foretelling the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s assertion that drawing is in itself a “form of knowing,” early comic strip artists and their consumers treated the medium as a philosophical exercise; Beringer quotes the observation by media scholars Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda that comics “enable an intense focus on how complexly woven stories unfold across time and space and, particularly, how these involve the reader…to generate meaning through interacting with, or themselves shaping, spatiotemporal form.”

While some early American artists blatantly plagiarized illustrations and formats that originated in France and Switzerland, others used them as a springboard, giving European drawings a decidedly American twist. For example, where Töpffer’s character Monsieur Vieux Bois (“Mr. Oldbuck”) satirized the European bourgeoisie, comics featuring his Yankee doppelganger, Jeremiah Oldpot (artist unknown), a New York tin merchant who leaves his family to prospect gold in California, often hinge on what Beringer defines as the contradiction between his “romantic view of himself as a rugged frontiersman and his attachment to consumer goods.”

Beringer discusses this and other critical facets of this period in comics history…

Read on for their fascinating exchange: “Lost Literacies Strips Down the Dawn of Comics,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.

* Scott McCloud, in his wonderful Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

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As we tell and show, we might ponder where all of this has led, recalling that it was on this date in 2007 that the then-latest entry in a comic-born franchise dropped: TMNT, the first animated entry in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film series, was released. The film (which was entirely computer animated), is set after the final defeat of their arch-enemy, the Shredder; the four Turtles — Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo (voiced respectively by James Arnold Taylor, Nolan North, Mitchell Whitfield, and Mikey Kelley) — having grown apart, reunite and overcome their faults to save the world from evil ancient creatures. It also features the voices of Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mako, Kevin Smith, Patrick Stewart, and Ziyi Zhang, with narration by Laurence Fishburne. 

TMNT ranked number one at the box office on its opening weekend, beating 300 (the top film of the previous two weeks), The Last Mimzy, Shooter, Pride, The Hills Have Eyes 2, and Reign Over Me, grossing $25.45 million over the weekend of March 23–25, 2007. That said, the film grossed (only) $95.8 million million worldwide, including $54 million domestically during its 91-day run in the 3,120 North American theaters… as the Rotten Tomatoes consensus read: “TMNT’s art direction is splendid, but the plot is non-existent and the dialogue lacks the irony and goofy wit of the earlier Ninja Turtles movies.”

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