This Friday a new edition of the Comic Fair opens its doors, now renamed Comic Barcelona. An inexcusable meeting for lovers of the ninth art and an artistic expression with much more history than it seems.
This weekend Barcelona becomes the capital of comics, a world that has gained dynamism and popularity in recent years. Gone is that time when comics were just a kid thing; or that the only adults who read them were either ‘peterpans’ who were still hooked on the adventures of Asterix, Tintin and superheroes or directly what everyone now calls geeks.
Unlike cinema, which has managed to vindicate and value its origins (the name of the Lumière brothers, for example, is more or less familiar to all of us), in sequential artas defined by the legendary cartoonist Will Eisner, still has a long way to go.
It can be said that the idea of using illustrations to tell a story is ancient. Keep in mind that literacy did not become widespread until the mid-nineteenth century and, therefore, when you wanted to tell something, the most efficient thing to do was to use pictures. It would be hard to find any civilization, no matter how ancient, that had not done so. Starting with him prehistoric art. The caves are full of drawings of all kinds of animals and sometimes, due to the way they are represented, it is intuited that they must have explained something. The case of Egyptian hieroglyphs could also be mentioned, or how the Roman emperor Trajan, in 113 AD C., he commissioned the construction of a column decorated with scenes of his victories against the Dacians.
It is true that if we stick to what the RAE dictionary says, which defines comics as a “series or sequence of vignettes that tells a story”, we must go forward several centuries to find the first examples. It is usually considered that one of the pioneers was ‘The Yellow Kid’, published in the US press between 1895 and 1898, but others had already been printed in Europe. For example, William Hogarth produced the six paintings ‘Marriage a-la-mode’ and the Swiss pedagogue Rodolphe Töpffer is considered one of the first comic cartoonists because he made stories with images in ‘L’histoire de Monsieur Jabot’.
These first steps coincided with the hatching of the press as a great means of mass communication. In addition, the improvement of the techniques of the printing process allowed the insertion of illustrations in its pages. In 1841, a famous London masthead called ‘punch’ was the first to use the word ‘cartoon’ to refer to the satirical drawings that appeared in the political press. Also in British lands, but somewhat later, the character ally sloper, fruit of the work of the couple formed by Charles Henry Ross and Émilie de Tessier. It was so popular with the working class that, despite starting out as a small comic strip, it became a weekly publication selling 350,000 copies.
In a world in which the other big media had not yet appeared, the press generated exorbitant business figures. Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, in the United States they disputed the cake William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, owners of the majority of headers in the country. It was a time of great growth due to the arrival of immigrants from all corners of Europe. Since they barely knew English, the two businessmen used the comics as a lure to sell them newspapers.
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The outbreak of the First World War changed everything from top to bottom. And it also had effects in the world of the press. Starting in the 1920s, more modern products began to appear, specifically aimed at child and adolescent public. One of the most successful was the Belgian magazine ‘Le Petit Vingtième’, where Hergé presented the adventures of Tintin. That was the beginning of Franco-Belgian comics, and later others like Asterix, Spirou… Meanwhile in the US, superhero comics soon proliferated: in 1938 it began to fly Superman and in 1939 it was founded Marvel. So many years later, popular culture continues to drink from the ink of those pages now adapted to new media, becoming series, movies and a thousand merchandising products.
The Bruguera publishing house
Beyond the inside story of the comic book world, the albums and the characters are also a great testament to their time. We have one of the most paradigmatic cases in our country with the works of the Bruguera publishing house, which through its vignettes portrayed Francoism thanks to the Carpanta, Zipi and Zape… and obviously Mortadelo and Filemon.
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