ABSTRACT
This chapter compares and contrasts the development of critical discourses, in both French and English, concerning the origins of the formal aspects of comic books in earlier artistic practices. It provides the importance of theoretical approaches to art history, using ideas such as appropriation and conceptualism that would have been unimaginable in the 1960s, and focus on the relationship between comics and contemporary art practices. The chapter considers the continuing impact of this early scholarship and how the ideas presented have been critically revised in academic texts from the 1990s to the present day as Comics Studies has emerged as a discipline internationally. The origins of the comic book form and the search for examples of proto-comics are here evaluated in relation to two main issues: the specific art-historical methods and methodologies used and the desire to elevate the status of comic books by establishing a canonical lineage for the form.
