The Historians of the Art Form

This overview compares and contrasts the development of critical discourses, in French and English, concerning the origins of the formal aspects of comic books in earlier artistic practices. The key texts examined here show how art-historical approaches towards the study of comic books developed in the 1960s in France and in the 1970s in the English-speaking world. Central to any evaluation of art-historical approaches to the study of comic books are the two volumes of David Kunzle’s The History of the Comic Strip, published in 1973 and 1990 respectively, which still stand out as the most substantial body of scholarship on the emergence of the form in any language. The concluding sections of this overview consider the continuing impact of this early scholarship and how the ideas presented have been critically revised in academic texts from the 1990s to the present-day as Comics Studies has emerged as a discipline internationally.