#2 The History of Holy Russia (1854)

This book could also have been called, "A Petty French Douche Talks About How Much Russia Sucks."

Gustave Dore had done previous comic-style books, but this one was his longest and most ambitious. A lot of care went into this book, with hundreds of illustrations and groundbreaking use of empty space and art flowing into text, all in the service of showing how shitty Russians were as a people and a nation. It becomes obvious as you go through the book that Dore was extremely butthurt about Napoleon's failure in 1812, and proceeds to talk shit about the Russian's pride in 1812. In this book, Russians are portrayed as barely human, murdering people to the point where, in one image, you can see people actually swimming in a river of blood. Heads are chopped off repeatedly, and sections are devoted into debates on which torture devices are preferable. Russian leaders are shown as dumbasses who randomly die if kidney problems, and Catherine's orgies are described as "so vile" that Dore couldn't even draw a depiction of them, and instead opted to draw a Roman orgy, which he says was more delicate and tame compared to a Russian orgy.

As a comic book, we still don't have dialog bubbles, and the format is still pictures above descriptive text. Borderline stick figures are sometimes used for tiny drawings of humans, a pictures vary from being detailed line drawings to what look like mere sketches. The art is really clever as well. On one page there's just a series of blank panels, and on another moving music scales. Sometimes there'll be a huge picture that takes up an entire page with a minimum of text, and at other times there'll be a shitload of text with a small image accompanying it. It has a narrative as a "history" text, and so there is a feeling of progression that occurs as the book goes on. Unfortunately, the momentum really starts to peter out near the end, and some of the final pages are uninteresting and annoying to get through.

This book also has that irritatingly pretentious habit that old writers have of throwing untranslated Latin into their writing. I don't know what the climate was at the time, but a comic like this was clearly meant for a "lower" audience, and therefore they probably didn't retain their Latin that they learned in school. I could be wrong though. As a modern reader, seeing untranslated Latin just seems like the writer's a snooty douchebag who needs a hard kick in the balls.


As an evolution of the form, this is clearly superior to Obadiah Oldbuck, and a hell of a lot more ambitious. Even the random shit ties into the overall theme of Russia being crap. There was some funny stuff in the book, and I really liked a lot of the drawings, but it's hard to get past the blatant propaganda of it all. Reading a history of this book, apparently it was a commercial failure, as all propaganda deserves to be. The price was too high, and the French weren't that thrilled about going to war again. So, ha ha, in your face, Dore.

For a much, much better and more in-depth look at this book, go here: http://www.indyworld.com/indy/summer_2004/kartalopoulos_dore/index.html

Unfortunately, because the editor of the 1001 series doesn't give a rat's ass about availability, this book is currently out of print and hard to find. I got mine via an inter-library loan, so if you live in the US you can probably ask your local library to request it. Because of the book's historical value most copies seem to be in university libraries, so if you're a college student you may find it there.

Next up: Max and Moritz, which, thankfully, can be found online.

#1: The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck (1837)

To start the book off, we have Swiss artist Rodolphe Topffer's The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, published in parts in the 1820s and eventually being published in book form. It is considered by many to be the first ever comic book.

Because of it being the "first," there are a lot of things that are different about it. There aren't any dialog bubbles, and my understanding is that it might take a few more entries before we get to those. The drawings themselves are fairly grotesque caricatures, but not like what we'll be seeing later with The Yellow Kid and Krazy Kat. As for the story itself, it's decent. This follows in the Candide tradition of following a character who travels around and just has a bunch of horrible shit happen to him. The drawings have that weird old-timey grossness that you see in older cartoons, where the people look scary and off. Wrinkles and fat jokes abound in this book, and for some reason the Monks that keep popping up are total assholes who keep trying to kill Oldbuck. Maybe I missed it, but what the hell was going on in Switzerland where the monks were so evil?

There's some good stuff in this though, especially near the end when a narrative finally pops up. Early in the book there's a lot of non sequitur jokes, with Oldbuck's foiled suicide attempts being mined for laughs. Seriously, take a look at these panels:

There are a ton of set ups like this, and in one instance he's covered with rats who think he's dead.


Around the halfway point we get a story where Oldbuck's trying to get something going with his overweight lover. She gets kidnapped by another suitor, then rescued, then kidnapped again, then saved, etc., etc. As repetitive as this section is, it's a bit clever, and some of the repeated jokes get better as it goes on. At one point a rival suitor gets trapped in a water wheel, and the story creates a really good rhythm of cutting between Oldbuck escaping with his beloved and the rival trying to break free from the wheel. Considering just how early this came out, and its distinction as the "first" comic book, that's more sophisticated than I expected, and a good display of narrative pace for something that was supposed to be nothing more than a bunch of brief non-sequiturs.

I'd say that I liked it alright, but I don't know how often I'd go back to it. If anything, it's always great to see the first steps of any new art. Also, unlike some of the other early entries in this book, this one's pretty easy to get ahold of. If you want it, go to the following link:

Available at: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/books/ocn259708589/?mswitch-redir=classic

Next up: a book that I had to do a fucking interlibrary loan to get a copy of: Gustave Dore's The History of Holy Russia.

Introduction

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved comics. When I was a kid, I devoured collections of Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes. My trips to the library would have me coming home with The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, Peter Bagge's the Bradleys, and The Complete Crumb Comics (I was a weird kid). One Halloween (1998 to be exact) while trick or treating some kind soul dropped a copy of The Uncanny X-Men issue 239 into my bag, and I instantly became a huge superhero comic fan, particularly for Wolverine, Spider-Man, and the X-Men. This continued through the 90s, until I became more of a music and film fan. Then I'd read comics on and off, but never with the voracity that I did as a kid.

I'm current back on a comic kick. This will probably die off in a few months, but right now I'm reading a ton of stuff. I found out that the 1001 *Insert Random Bullshit* Before You Die series has a book out about comics. I've previously written about this series and how frustrating it is for someone to try to actually finish these lists. What typically happens is that the people who put these books together throw a bunch of titles in and don't even both to consider availability. Therefore, in their Films book there are a bunch of films that you either can't get in English or just can't get at all in any format. Their Novels book really pissed me off because they included a series that's only available in Korean, and partially available in a hard to find French translation. Honestly, I don't even think the asshole who included that one even read the fucking thing. As far as I can tell, only the the Albums one can actually be finished.

This hard to find aspect, unfortunately, also applies to the Comics edition. Starting with the second entry, I had to do an interlibrary loan to try to get it, and lord knows if I'll be able to find some of the foreign works included in this book. In fact, when I started doing a little research, I found that the fifth entry, Balthazar's Feast, is impossible to find anywhere, and in the synopsis he doesn't even talk the fucking book itself, just the author. In those cases, I may just find other works by the same author, typically going for whatever gets the most attention in the book's write-ups. I'm also going to leave a blank spot for those and move on to what is obtainable until I can find something to fill those slots, and try to work my way through this collection for as long as my interest allows. I will also on occasion provide information on how to find these books, either online (for pd versions) or through bookstores.

On last bit: Some of the entries are infuriatingly vague. One will just say "Batman" and not include issue numbers, so you don't know which issues you're supposed to read. On these occasions I will make a judgement on what I think is enough and go from there. For Batman, using just the first issue would be perfect, since it introduces some main characters and is probably one of the best first issues I've seen. The second issue, however, kind of sucks ass. So yeah, it'll just be whatever I deem fit to include.