McCloud's Understanding Comics vs. Kunzle's Early Comic Strip

Introduction: Two Scholars, Two Visions of Comics

"Real kids don't read REAL books," proclaims a graphic image of the author and academic Scott McCloud from the pages of his book Understanding Comics (McCloud 1). This was his attitude towards comic strips, he states, when he was young and foolish — he regarded them as silly and juvenile, all about supermen in shiny tights rather than real issues. Then, gradually, his eyes were opened, and he began to understand that the comic was a true art form, worthy in its own right of serious consideration. Reading comics as a scholar taught McCloud about the way humans have evolved in relationship to print, the media, and even deeper philosophical issues regarding the primacy of the word over the image in Western culture. As a tribute to the comic's power, McCloud tells the history of the comic book in the form of an extended strip created by the author himself — a graphic novel about graphic novels that is at once playful and humorous, yet seeks to justify the existence of comics and their status as art.

In contrast, David Kunzle states at the beginning of his work The Early Comic Strip that it is silly "to ennoble" the comic strip's ancestry as a popular work by making it into one of the "great 'monuments' from the entire history of art" (Kunzle 2). For Kunzle, comics represent a disposable albeit interesting commodity of mass production — fascinating because of their lack of depth and meaning, not in spite of it. The ability of comics to be consumed by the masses, according to Kunzle, is what makes the medium powerful, and it is false and misleading to read comics as McCloud does, as expressions of deeper emotions.

Defining the Comic Strip: Form, Function, and Audience

The two men do not even agree on what exactly a "comic strip" is. Kunzle argues that early comics were anything but comic; rather, until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, what we would call comics were short narrative pictures with overtly propagandistic aims. It is misleading to call them comic since the comic strip "does not emerge until pictorial propaganda and the social cartoon become entirely comic in style, that is, in late 18th century England" (Kunzle 1). Kunzle prefers instead to call these works sequential art narratives. Early comics were often disseminated through broadsheets — single, large pages depicting the consequences of immoral behavior, whether public or private, such as Hogarth's A Rake's Progress. In the nineteenth century, newspapers became the predominant medium for comic strips, though they retained their partisan tone.

For Kunzle, what we think of as a comic strip or sequential art narrative had four distinct features. First, because of its popular audience, it had to be producible on a mass scale, rather than being something created for personal or public display like a painting or a limited-production book. It must be a narrative — that is, involve a "sequence of separate images" — it must rely upon images rather than text to tell its story, and it must tell a story that is moral, topical, or funny. This is why it appeals to children and the so-called "uneducated" — people who are poor, or people seeking entertainment that is unreflective and easily consumed.

Mass Production, Popular Media, and Artistic Value

However, for Scott McCloud, the fact that comics reach a popular audience does not mean the medium cannot stimulate thought. In fact, many of the political and historical examples in Kunzle — who focuses on early and late eighteenth-century British broadsheets — seem highly complex to the modern reader in terms of the issues they tackle, such as human vice and political corruption. Rather than locating early comics as something distant in history and making sweeping pronouncements, McCloud ends his text by turning directly to the reader: "This book is meant to stimulate debate, not to settle it," he tells us. "I've had my say. Now it's your turn" (McCloud 216). Popular media such as comic strips are not popular because they are easy to understand, McCloud argues, but because they invite the reader to become part of the narrative through imagination.

This accounts for the durable popularity of the superhero — Superman could fight Nazis during World War II and remains relevant to readers today. A comic hero can stay constant yet always seem pertinent to the reader's daily life, much like the ongoing work of a newspaper political cartoonist. McCloud agrees with Kunzle that mass production is critical to the genre. McCloud defines comics as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequences, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" (McCloud 9). The visceral response comics elicit from all readers should not be undervalued. Part of McCloud's championing of the medium may also reflect his broader focus, while Kunzle tends to examine narrow historical or political works designed to produce a singular response because of their purpose as topical propaganda rather than art.

McCloud, like Kunzle, sees the printing press and the advent of moveable type as a critical factor in the beneficial power of comics — not as evidence that it is an inferior or disposable commodity. The disdain Kunzle expresses toward a medium in which the visual supersedes the text can be traced to a broader Western attitude, partially shaped by the invention of printing, but perhaps originating even earlier — possibly in a deep cultural distrust of graven images, though neither author addresses this directly. Western culture has long maintained that words and pictures must be divided, and that "the word" is superior in value to the image, which is considered merely surface in meaning.

Conclusion: Comics as Both Disposable and Profound

Kunzle may be at a disadvantage because he wrote his book before Maus and other graphic novels began to reconfigure the modern conception of comics. And he is valid in pointing out that comics can be disposable, even crude, and that one must not be too quick to valorize all comics uncritically. But that is true of any art form — works of art can encompass both the high and the low, and simply because a medium is popular, whether comic strips, novels, or films, does not mean that an individual work cannot embody its medium in a near-perfect fashion and stretch the limits of what that medium can achieve.

Works Cited

Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip. Volume 1: The Early Comic Strip. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.