#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.