The next one up is another Englishman, and like Gillray he wasn’t afraid to satirise and lampoon the English gentry, including the king himself. Richard Newton (1777 - 1798) as you can see, died young, at the tender age of only twenty-one, and he was another who used rude toilet humour in his drawings, though he differs from Gillray in that he also supported the cause of the abolition of slavery through his cartoons. Again, like his more famous contemporary, a lot of Newton’s work was on single panel drawings, which, even though they used speech balloons, don’t for me qualify as comics, but mere cartoons. However he did also draw sequential ones, which certainly do.
Sketches in a Shaving Shop (1794), shows different men all wanting to be shaved, and while it does not use speech balloons (the text being sort of suspended above the characters’ heads like ghostly writing floating in the air) and there is no actual narrative here, you can still look at them and see the very precursors to later comic strips. Similarly,
Samples of Sweethearts and Wives (1795) makes fun of the gentler sex at their least gentle, women when they are drunk. Whether this was meant to be a commentary on the disgrace of women being inebriated in public or not I don’t know, but given what I’ve read about these guys I would say no: Newton was just using their behaviour as a way to send up society and show them that, to be crude, no matter what they thought, their sh
it did indeed stink.
His other comics/cartoons include
Progress of a Player (1793) which shows the trials and tribulations of a struggling actor on the road to hoped-for fame,
Contrasting Husbands (1795), showing two different sides of the English husband (and wife),
Progress of a Woman of Pleasure (1794) cataloguing the fall of a servant into destitiution and inevitably prostitution, and
Clerical Alphabet (1795) which roundly mocks the clergy. He was, I think, the first satirist or cartoonist to use the figure of Death in his cartoons, as he does in
Undertakers in at the Death (1794). Few if any of these cartoons use speech balloons, the text either written underneath the pictures or floating above the characters.
Typhus was one of many terrible diseases prevalent in the eighteenth century, largely down to the completely unsanitary conditions people lived in and the general lack of personal hygiene, and it was this which done for Richard Newton, struck down in his twenty-first year, just as he was beginning to make a name for himself. Perhaps somewhere, the Grim Reaper was laughing as he drew his caricature.
It’s over to Holland next, where the Dutch artist and poet Willem Bilderdijk created an eight-panel story for his young son, a humorous narrative called
Hanepoot in 1807, though this was a private venture, not sold or published, only seeing the light of day almost two centuries later, in 1977, where it was recognised as one of the first examples of a Dutch cartoon.
As the nineteenth century gathered steam then (not literally, not yet, but later) and works of Gothic fiction, vampire fiction and horror all came onstream, it seems comics began to emerge a little more, as we have a slew of artists and even the very first magazine in the world dedicated exclusively to comics and cartoons.
William Charles (1776 - 1820), a Scot living in the USA, is credited with bringing the British style of political satire to America, with caricature and speech balloons, and how cool is it that a man born in the year of American independence should end up spending most of his life there? Charles did mostly one-panel cartoons, but he did illustrate
Tom, the Piper’s Son (1808) with sequential cartoons which use speech balloons. In 1810, François Aimé Louis Dumoulin (1753 - 1834) published a series of drawings based on the Daniel Defoe novel
Robinson Crusoe, thereby becoming the first comics artist from Switzerland, and Thomas Rowlandson, whom we met earlier, continued his career with perhaps the first real “adventure series”, that of Dr. Syntax, which sees, I think for the first time in comics or cartoons, the same character used in three different drawing sequences.
This begins with
The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812) and continues with
Dr. Syntax in Search of Consolation (1821) and finally
The Third Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of a Wife (1822). Technically speaking, and to stick to my own rules here, these aren’t comics as we understand them. They do have multi-panels but there are no speech balloons, hardly even any text, as they are based on books by William Combe. But they are really important to the development and history of comics for other reasons. For one, they are one of the first cartoons which, as i said above, feature the same character in different stories, and years apart. Second, they are the first cartoons to lead to a line of merchandise: hats, coats, mugs, puppets, all sorts of things were produced to capitalise on the popularity of Dr. Syntax. Finally, they were the first English cartoons to be translated into other languages for consumption in other countries.
Rowlandson did use other characters - John Bull, Johnny Newcome, Mary Anne Clarke - in continuation drawings prior to Dr. Syntax, but none were as popular and almost all were single panel drawings. And far, far, away, so far most people in England or even Europe could hardly even imagine it, in the distant land of Japan, Hokusai Katsushika (1760 -1849), usually just known as Hokusai, was pioneering new techniques in cartoons and laying the early foundations of what would become manga comics. In fact, the word
manga in Japanese means sketch, and Hokusai first used it in a total of fifteen collections of his work he called
Hokusai Manga, or
Sketches by Hokusai which have had a massive influence, not only on later Japanese and other Asian artists, but many in the west too, including giants such as Van Gogh and Whistler.
Hokusai, unlike other contemporaries in the west, did not work with pencil and paper initially but with wood and chisel, making his comics on woodblocks, his most famous work,
The Great Wave or
The Breaking Wave off Kanagawa, shown above Japan’s most famous artwork. He himself was dismissive of his own talent, claiming
"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing."
In a Japan cut off from the western world, and where outside influences were forbidden, Hokusai nevertheless managed to make contact with smugglers who had managed to import into the country the banned art works from Europe, and he learned all he could from them. In a weird kind of full circle, Hokusai being influenced by the west became the west being influenced by Hokusai. Ouroboros or what? He was one of the first, perhaps the first Japanese artist to move away from the popular style of depicting figures such as samurai and geisha girls, and to concentrate on landscapes in particular, inspired by the great European painters of the time. He also began including normal working people in his works, something that had not been done up to then. He created a whole seismic shift in the way Japanese art would be approached and executed, and certainly, if not the father of manga, can be considered surely its grandfather.
He also painted what I assume must have been at the time the largest single artwork, certainly the largest portrait ever, in the 200-square-metre
The Great Daruma in 1804, which he created with buckets of ink and a broom. His work with manga began when he was 51, as a way of quickly teaching students how to draw, with the manual
Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing in 1812, which was an instant hit. Though his own epitaph was typically humble and self-deprecatory -
“If only Heaven will give me just another ten years - just another five more years - then I could become a real painter” - the best tribute to the man comes perhaps from one of the Old Masters, when Degas himself noted of him that
"Hokusai is not just one artist among others in the Floating World. He is an island, a continent, a whole world in himself."