by Jon Lackman | 19 March 2007 | Modern
In the latest Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Patricia Mainardi discusses the invention of comics: “While the Swiss schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the comic strip, no one has yet analyzed the development of the visual language of comics. This essay traces many of the signs, symbols, visual conventions and narrative strategies familiar in modern comics to the work of French artists in the 1840s and 1850s, in particular Cham and Gustave Doré.”
