Like the cuckoo clock, comics no longer a Swiss invention

June 28, 2013 2:14 PM

So the Scots pride themselves on basically invented everything that makes modern life worth living and now they can add comics to their list. William Heath's The Glasgow Looking Glass was first published in 1825, twelve years before Rudolphe Töpffer's Histoire de M. Vieux Bois.
posted by MartinWisse (18 comments total)

I am going to sit here and hold my breath until loud stripped pants and colored vests come into fashion again.
posted by The Whelk at 2:42 PM on June 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

All 2000AD readers know this.
posted by Artw at 2:55 PM on June 28, 2013

Well, that just looks like Punch and the political cartoons of... oh, wait, it's older, innit.
posted by Zed at 3:08 PM on June 28, 2013

A comic isn't just words with pictures. It's a sequential series of them that tells a story. I couldn't find any evidence of that.
posted by empath at 3:11 PM on June 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I am going to sit here and hold my breath until loud stripped pants and colored vests come into fashion again.

Well, be the change you want to see.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:17 PM on June 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

I've never been satisfied with the primacy of the border in that definition. What you're doing in your head as your eyes track over a long complicated single panel seems to me to be reading comics, to be much, much more similar to looking at panels in sequence than either is to looking at a single static graphic icon.
posted by Zed at 3:23 PM on June 28, 2013

The Bayeux Tapestry dates from the 1070's. Trajan's Column (113 AD) is even earlier.
posted by kyrademon at 3:31 PM on June 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Well, hell, if any old drawing that tells a story can qualify, I nominate Lascaux Cave! (Not really.)
posted by cacophony at 3:58 PM on June 28, 2013

In our house, any conversation may potentially have Mike Myers's old "if it's not Scottish, it's crap!" shouted into it (from a 20-year-old SNL skit.)

(It's particularly fun to hear the exaggerated, rolling-R brogue coming out of my seven-year-old; I am the best/worst dad ever).
posted by rodeoclown at 4:11 PM on June 28, 2013

This is exactly what it's like in our street at 3am in the morning when the clubs chuck out, but minus the charming period costume. You'd only have to add a few wheelie bins for the drunks to attack (as is their wont) and it would be spot on. I call it 'The Hour of the Numpty'.
posted by Flitcraft at 6:10 PM on June 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

I am going to sit here and hold my breath until loud stripped pants and colored vests come into fashion again.

Yeah, don’t wait, make it happen.

I cannot wait to see what the Scots have for us next.
posted by bongo_x at 7:48 PM on June 28, 2013

empath: "A comic isn't just words with pictures. It's a sequential series of them that tells a story. I couldn't find any evidence of that."

Gary Larson's outside. He says he'd like to have some words with you.
posted by barnacles at 10:53 PM on June 28, 2013

Disappointed that the first link wasn't this.

(Terrible quality, but still worth it.)
posted by Decani at 12:42 AM on June 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Even in the late 1500s and the 1600s, printed pamphlets and single-sheet broadsides and cheap books were available for people besides the rich. Some touted key ideas of the Renaissance world view. We see that in what are called "emblem books": illustrated lessons of key ideas of the time."
posted by iviken at 2:43 AM on June 29, 2013

Gary Larson's outside. He says he'd like to have some words with you.

That's more of a cartoon (see Understanding Comics).
posted by empath at 7:47 AM on June 29, 2013

"This broadsheet is, in our terms, a strip cartoon showing a sequence of events within the ‘elector’s dream’, with each element in it a scene depicting a different stage in Luther’s progress."
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:43 AM on June 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

I am going to sit here and hold my breath until loud stripped pants and colored vests come into fashion again.
posted by The Whelk at 2:42 PM on June 28

Stripped pants...sounds like an indecency charge waiting to happen.
posted by Michele in California at 11:16 AM on June 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

The first ever comic book?
posted by homunculus at 4:28 PM on June 30, 2013