ABSTRACT
In the historically relative sense of the term, the medium of comics has always been experimental. That is to say, this word-and-image form that registers temporality spatially has pushed at the boundaries of the expected and acceptable with every fresh iteration, in every new format. It started in the 1830s, when Swiss teacher and illustrator Rodolphe Töpffer created what is widely considered the first modern comics, publishing seven histories en estampes – “engraved novels” – which drew on the novel and on the “picture stories” of William Hogarth to present hand-drawn and handwritten narratives arranged by sequential frames on the page. The famed writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed Töpffer, were he less frivolous, could “produce things beyond all conception” (quoted in McCloud 1993: 17). This expansion of categories continued – through the invention of comic strips in sensational newspapers in America at the turn of the nineteenth century (many of which remain aesthetic benchmarks for comics), to the “wordless novels” of the 1920s and 1930s, to the soft-cover, 30-plus page comic books that transformed American youth culture (and later came under a federal censorship code), to the underground “comix” of all shapes and sizes that introduced comics meant to be actually re-read, conceiving of themselves as modernist, and creating the groundwork for today’s “graphic novels.” Graphic novels – or graphic narratives as I prefer to call book-length works in the medium of comics, due to the preponderance of nonfiction work in the field – have vigorously expanded the rubric of “literature” over the past thirty years. Recently established comics publishers such as New York’s PictureBox, which focuses in large part on experimental comics, and mainstream publishers who have given comics dedicated lists (Pantheon, Abrams, and Hill and Wang, among others) are clear evidence of this claim. Comics keeps redesigning its possibilities and altering its major frameworks. Hence it is, at each new turn, already what we can consider a form of experimental literature. However, beyond format, this chapter is interested in comics form – that is, with how comics is experimental in its particular syntactical and grammatical procedure, for comics is a contemporary site that makes the issue of form dramatically legible.
