Comics Had To Come First …

I have an assumption: There can’t be poetry comics before there were comics. So what and when was the first comics? And consequently what and when was the first poetry comics?

Let’s start by defining comics (not an uncontroversial task!).

• Wikipedia’s definition of comics reads, “Comics are a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically takes the form of a sequence of panels of images.”
• In his seminal “Understanding Comics” (p20) comics artist Scott McCloud landed on: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”
• Risking oversimplification, I’ve been using “sequential narrative drawings” as a good starting definition and one that makes sense to me, eventhough I recognize there are single-panel comics, abstract comics, graphic novels, often text (e.g. speech bubbles) with the drawings, etc. etc.

Now let’s look for early example of comics (or what could be called early comics or progenitors) that generally fit these definitions.

Among the earliest — and often called precursors to comic books — are Swiss caricaturist Rodolphe Topffer‘s (1799-1846) publications in the 1830s and 1840s. He used the terms “comedic story” and “picture story.” He’s often considered as the father of comic books for his work “Historie de Mr. Vieux Bois” (first published c. 1837). The story, told in drawings with text captions, moves from panel to panel. An uncredited translation of this work appeared in English c. 1842 as “The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck,” considered the first American comic book.

Comic books mass popularity continued to grow in America in the late 19th Century, starting with comics weeklies in the 1870s, which paralleled the rise of the number of newspapers. In the U.S. Sunday comics first appeared in 1889 followed by the first color comics in 1893. What we label as the golden age of comic books today started in the late 1930s with Action Comics (introducing Superman in Issue 1) in 1938 and Marvel Comics in 1939 (and still creating today). (For far more details than my condensed version provides, I recommend “American Comics: A History” by Jeremy Dauber (Norton, 2022). It’s a great primer.)

Book artist Lynd Ward (1905-1985) created six stories using sequences of woodcut prints between 1929 and 1937; works that ushered in the graphic novel. Basically sequential narratives, they use no words as they move from panel to panel (or in this case: page to page, print to print). There could be the case made that his “Song Without Words” (1936) is the first poetry comic, if our definition is wide enough to exclude sequential narratives without text. Ward noted in writing about this work, “The nearest I can come to identifying it is to say that if a sequence of images can be called prose, this could be considered a kind of prose poem.” Indeed.

I’m inclined to look for the first poetry comics among poets and artists who came to age in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and who created work with words and drawings. New York School artist Joe Brainard (1942-1984), San Francisco Renaisance poet Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), Canadian poet bpNichol (1944-1988), and late in his writing life New York School poet Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), for example, created work directly influenced by comics and/or picture poems. Their work could arguably fall under the umbrella of poetry comics, and be counted among the earliest, although the term didn’t come into play until David Morice (b. 1946) used it in the late 1970s for his DIY work.

Timeline: Prehistory

Warning: This incomplete history maps my journey as a poet learning about comics and doesn’t follow a strict chronological order.