Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Topffer (Great Comics Artists) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Topffer (Great Comics Artists) Book

Sixty years before the comics entered the American newspaper press, Rodolphe Topffer of Geneva (1799-1846), schoolmaster, university professor, polemical journalist, art critic, landscape draftsman, writer of fiction, travel tales, and social criticism, invented a new art form: the comic strip, or "picture story," that is now the graphic novel. At first he resisted publishing what he called his "little follies." When he did, they became instantly popular, plagiarized, and imitated throughout Europe and the United States. Topffer developed a graphic style suited to his poor eyesight: the doodle, which he systematized and also theorized. The drawings, with their "modernist" spontaneous, flickering, broken lines, forming figures in mad hyperactivity, run above deft, ironic captions and propel narratives of surreal absurdity. The artist's maniacal protagonists mix social satire with myth. By the mid-nineteenth century, Messrs. Jabot, Festus, Cryptogame, and other members of the crazy family, comprising eight picture stories in all, were instant folk heroes. In a biographical framework, Kunzle situates the comic strips in the Genevan and European culture of the time, as well as in relation to Topffer's other work, notably his hilarious travel tales, and recounts their curious genesis (with an initial imprimatur from Goethe, no less) and their controversial success. Kunzle's study, the first in English on the writer-artist, accompanies Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips, a facsimile edition of the strips themselves, with the first-ever translation of these into English.Read More

from£24.95 | RRP: £24.99
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £22.77
  • 1578069483
  • 9781578069484
  • David Kunzle
  • 1 May 2007
  • University Press of Mississippi
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 207
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.