Rodolphe Töpffer, Visionary Graphomaniac and Father of Comics

In this episode of The Global Novel podcast, Dr. David Kunzle (UCLA) will uncover the unknown history of how a once frowned-upon visual story-telling genre, called "picture-stories," legendarily made its way into the hands of one of the greatest literary figures of world literature Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and since then, won the hearts of the entire world. By tracing comic strips’ unique lineage in Rodolphe Töpffer, father of comic strips, Dr. Kunzle will shed light on Töpffer’s visual story-telling rhetoric as well as its endless potential as a medium.

Recommended Readings:
David Kunzle, ed & trans. Rodolphe Töpffer The Complete Comic Strip
David Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer.
David Kunzle, Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, A Kleidoscope, 1847-1870.
Rodolphe Töpffer, "Essay on Physiognomy" (1845) in Enter: The Comics. ed & trans.  by E. Wiese. 

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Transcript

Transcript

David Kunzle  0:00  

If I am asked, casually in street by a passerby, a friend or not, "what are you studying? What are you doing?" And I'd say, "I am investigating Töpffer". They might answer: "who? Töpffer?who is that? "And I would, in a few words, answer, only "the inventor of the modern comic strip."

Claire Hennessy  0:41  

Thanks for tuning in to The Global Novel. I’m Claire Hennessy. In the winter of 1831, when Goethe was feeling a little blue, one of his loyal attendants Frédéric Soret placed some illustrated manuscripts by a taciturn Genevan scholar into Goethe’s hands, attempting at a therapeutic distraction. Thankfully, the gamble paid off: Goethe found the book “very amusing,” as it gave him “extraordinary pleasure,” though he chose to take this pleasure in small doses, so as not to suffer “an indigestion of ideas.” Soret also noted that Goethe thought the Genevan sparkled “with talent and wit,” and “if he . . . did not have such an insignificant scenario before him, he would invent things which would surpass all our expectations.” The Genevan in question was Rodolphe Töpffer—the inventor of the comic strip.

 And with us today is David Kunzle,  professor of Art History at UCLA, from 1976 until his 2009 retirement. Professor Kunzle is a prolific author and one of the founding fathers of contemporary comics scholarship. Among his writings on popular, political, and public art, he is best known for his compilation and translation of Töpffer’s comics strips named Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips, along with his monograph called FATHER OF THE COMIC STRIP: RODOLPHE TOPFFER. Hello David, welcome to the show.

David Kunzle  2:06  

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite topics which lay a little my distant past speaking from now, but which abide with me.

Claire Hennessy  2:19  

When Goethe attempted to describe what he found so revolutionary in Töpffer’s work, he primarily observed that the sequential pictures suggest movement, which “freezes and unfreezes . . . in the spirit of imitation.” In this awkward but prescient observation, Goethe nails the strange mechanism Töpffer had stumbled on and finds metaphoric resonance with one of his own utterances: “Architecture is frozen music.” How would you summarize Töpffer's overall mechanism ?

David Kunzle  2:52  

first of all, Töpffer discovered that his way of sketching very sketchny and showing it to people made them laugh, he had a way of turning this all to comic effect. And he began scribbling the beginning of a story which became the middle of a story and the end, became a whole story and allowed or encouraged even the students in his class, he was a schoolmaster by profession, to take a peek at what he had drawn, and they laughed loud. And soon they were followed by Töpffer's friends, the intimate circle in Geneva, which was a very educated circle, and admired already this man for his writing abilities. They admired Töpffer already for little prose pieces he had written, and they discovered that he could also draw in this novel fashion, brilliant, flighty sketches which were constantly in movement. And nobody had been able to do that, in sequences of drawings, inspired perhaps by Hogarth, who of course did not do sketchy series of drawings, but very finished ones. Töpffer, by contrast, left them in sketchy form. This was quite revolutionary.

Claire Hennessy 4:25  

Töpffer’s essay on physiognomy, written in the year 1845 attempts at theorizing the basic principles to visual storytelling and line drawing, as he wrote,  "the faces you doodle are after all alive, they talk the laugh and cry before you know it you have on the paper, a whole society within whom you can converse. Almost invariably, one discovers too, that if some of these partners are thrown together, a diverting scene can ensue. So you bring them together at others find a scene that went just before device the next and there you are on the road of making a picture story. " Elsewhere he wrote, "The drawings without the text would only produce an obscure meaning. The text without the drawings would mean nothing. It is their combination that forms a kind of novel." Could you enlighten us on how the concept of line drawing came about? What does it mean exactly what elements lay at the core of Töpffer storytelling rhetorics?

David Kunzle  5:31  

We know quite exactly how and why took for developed this sketchy line drawing effect, which undergirds all of his picture stories while he was at the same time doing different kinds of drawings, landscape and characters and all sorts of subjects. But the picture stories are in this characteristic line drawing and "dessin au trait" in French. By his late teens, Töpffer expected to go perhaps to an art school to refine his natural talent for drawing, discovered he had weak eyesight, which could not endure continuous work, exacting work on the page. As he tells us himself very movingly, I found that it was only when I allowed my pencil to take off of its own the core to fly off in any direction it wanted. It was only when I let the pencil loose on the page that I could create the characters. And the adventures for those characters that would become a graphic novel, at its best graphic novels can be very, very long, perfect tip for they were short up to 70,80 pages. But certainly that was more than anyone could manage in the 19th century. And the line drawing was much admired for the effects it could produce of immediacy and spontaneity and pre-visibility and foreseeability of the Adventures of these characters. And the way they get each other, they get themselves mixed up his wonderful way in which Töpffer mixes his characters literally, by changing their clothes, or changing their actions. constantly shifting is one of the extraordinary things about Töpffer is when the way the geography melts in front of our eyes, you don't look where people are quiet. You know what they're feeling and thinking and doing, but you don't know where they are. That is magic.

David Kunzle  7:50  

The other element is as the very term of the treatise he wrote to explain this essay on physiognomy. It's actually in French physiognome, English, just as a physiognomy that starts really with faces, what are these faces, what are these heads, what are these expressions, portent took forward draw a single funny face and he realized that this is the kind of funny face which is given to crazy things. Again, this, for instance, is a man who is going to be hen-packed by his wife. When it comes to the education of his children, I can see that in the very face that I have scribbled without even thinking what it is doing. This is a face, which had character peculiar, and often ridiculous, and adventurous, which I could throw about in my imagination and generate laughter.

David Kunzle  8:54  

Comic Strip is always about adventure, the comic strip to engage in the variety and fun and unforeseeabilities of the adventures that the hero got engaged in, and how the other characters enter into those adventures as well. This is a matter of letting your imagination run free, just loosen the bridle and you'll maybe reply the Spurs if need be, in order to make your imagination run faster, but you have to let it go of its own accord as it were. So, the idea of the term "the unconscious," which stood for is very sparing in the use of, but the idea of the unconscious taking over, which is very much part of our psychology today. And very much part of the modern novel, which is so often psychological in the deepest sense, are a series of psychologies of different characters. This is really embedded in Hogarth's narrative method. And the glory of it is is that you never know where he's going, Töpffer, as one example. They take off their clothes, or swim in a river. And somebody's going to pick up those clothes and pretend to be them. Or pretend to be somebody else if anyone than they were before they found these clothes, by chance, and left their clothes behind, which are then picked up and put on by the swimmer really gets out of the water and finds himself mistaken for that character. Actually it is a hilarious, mise en tant.

Claire Hennessy  10:47  

Who has thought about a once low status art form, so looked down upon that it has to circulate underground, can one day win the heart of the million, in your monograph on Töpffer you mentioned that even though tougher had to sell his picture stories underground, they did gain him traction during his lifetime, enabling him to make a few bucks out of these little books. However fearful Töpffer was of retribution for indulging in such tomfoolery as caricature, and however worried he was about how it would weigh on the career of a freshly minted university professor. He nevertheless grew cautiously bolder after Goethe's encouragement, passing out his hand drawn books to select aristocrats until it was generally known that the Genevan R T was the author of those amusing picture books everyone especially Goethe was talking about. One of the original manuscripts even includes a handwritten exhortation to the following words "please avoid crumbling, dirtying or pulling the pages about, being careful to turn only by the edge". How did Europe and particularly Goethe become instantly smitten with Töpffer? Especially concerning that Goethe is one of the greatest literary figures at the time, who represented and endorsed the serious undertone of European academia? Is it by chance? Did Töpffer get famous because of Goethe? How did the Töpffer's "silly caricatures" even managed to make it all the way to Weimar?

David Kunzle  12:24  

Well Goethe represented much more than the serious face of the academy. It was a man of the greatest versatility. And even one of his best known best translated productions like Faust is full of humor. It's not embedded in humor, like Töpffer would stories would be like there is a humor slant to quite a bit of writing in Goethe. And he certainly enjoyed a joke. He certainly was looking out, this is an important point, looking at perhaps for somebody who would take humor serious more seriously than he appreciated it but did not deploy it in a way in a consistent and deliberate way that Töpffer did. He was looking for somebody to take literature in a different direction. At the time, he saw himself as a sort of sponsor of new talents, as detecting the marshals that are in the maps of the general figure of no account as he certainly was to the world at large, like Töpffer a little schoolmaster in Geneva could make a new army of thoughts of thinking out of these small beginnings and by skillful manipulation of them, and also by skillful dissemination of them because Töpffer did not publish in the normal way. He had his drawings put into lithographic form, and then published by himself at his expense, but at an expense, which was actually very profitable to him, because he figured that the cost of one elbow to him was one Franc, perhaps that cost paper  much more. And he was able to sell these little books. They are quite small booklets, or his eight, seven or eight comic strips are quite small, the bulk of 80 pages at the most, and the could be sold for 10 francs, which was the price of a well made album by a major artist at the time.

Claire Hennessy  14:44  

And you of course, have held at these original volumes, many of them in your hands, just like you might have spent a couple of francs in buying one. And I heard that all those books another archival of Töpffer papers have all gone recently to the Getty as bequest from you, is that right?

David Kunzle  15:03  

The first editions of tip for have become highly desirable articles on the market, very seldom preparing on the market. And when they do fetching extraordinarily high prices, it's five, occasionally even six figures. But the subsequent re-publications of what you can find in general way, which have been republished in collections, and which are still original Töpffer's, they're not degraded. And one of the advantages of line drawing is reproduces well, compared with other kinds of more academic drawing, where the lines get blurred. And the Getty, yes, very happily. I hope it made them as happy as it did me to release to such an institution of these huge collection of Töpffer editions and related materials, because he did all kinds of other work novels, he wrote himself, for instance, that took for his entire is now well represented in getting rich before I gave these books  really didn't know who Töpffer was, and now they do.

Claire Hennessy  16:24  

"Go little book, and choose your world for a crazy things. Those who do not laugh, yawn, and those who do not yield, resist, and those who reason, are mistaken. And those who would keep a straight face, can please themselves." How should we understand this preamble that begins with each of Töpffer story?

David Kunzle 16:47  

This is his way of warning you that odd things, impossible things, and outrageous things are going to happen in this story. And you can't apply the normal criteria you want to any piece of fiction. This is something new, which demands new criteria as a new attitude to them, and a readiness to laugh at anything. A readiness also to take on board impossible things that are happening all the time in this story, including scientific parts, which I'm thinking that good, particularly, as a himself, an amateur scientist would have appreciated in particular, he uses as a kind of signature on books, which he did not sign with his own name. Occasionally, he put RT below his drawings, and it wasn't know generally who the author was. But he didn't claim authorship himself. It says it's the characters that have invented themselves, quite a good description of their behavior. The behavior of people are constantly reinventing themselves as they go along. And also he was perhaps anticipating opposite reactions to stories, somebody's going to say, Oh, this is just too silly. For words, this is not the sort of thing that my children should be reading. If the albums came into the hands of children, as they did they were acquired one way or another by friends who would pass them down the line among their children among their their clans, shall we say? 100 around the parties and given to people who perhaps go wherever party and couldn't find anything else to do that leaf through Töpffer album, which happened to be lying on the table.

Claire Hennessy  18:47  

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What is your favorite character among all of Töpffer's picture-stories, and why?

David Kunzle  19:17  

That's difficult to answer because they're also good. The characters are also different. It's frequently the name of the story given to the story like this, Monsieur Pencil. Pencil starts with a figure who has made a drawing, which is swept away by the wind into the atmosphere. And this becomes a way into complete strange nebulous cloudy realms into different levers. And this drawing is going to send us into strange parts of experience. The best known character principles ugly, Mr. Cryptogame, which is the one album which the verses were redone completely in Dutch for the Dutch market. And to this day it is the only Töpffer story that everyone's heard of. Ask any Dutchman What did you think about Mr. Cryptogame? When you had it as a child to say, Oh, yes, of course I had a child. Everyone had a child. It was marvelous. So Cryptogame, really was the most popular in the true sense of the word if reached the most people, even if the very children succeeded with children. But if you look inside the story of Mr. Cryptogram, which was run over 13 episodes, in a popular magazine called (French) you you'll find that it has elements of magic strangeness, to it like being finding yourself gobbled up by a whale or flinging yourself into the ocean to avoid your fiancé, where your sister in the case of the children's version, it is possible to get married and find yourself at the very end, the father of eight children clamoring all over you. And that, together with incidences of this year, Mr. Cryptogame freezing and then unfreezing, leaping aboard strange vessels being captured by pirates. And above all, this, I think is interesting for mass, internationalist and perhaps racist concerns. Today, he finds himself captured by pirates, who deposit him or send him to the day of Algiers, who employs him as the tutor or as a gardener, as his friend was unhappy. As tutor to the days children as a joke, attach a beam to his leg to the Abbys, the teacher at this moment in Algiers, that the teacher Algerian teachers are suddenly tied to a beam which are being hastened out of the country when lions threaten sets the whole country on fire and crazy things crazy things happening all the time.

Claire Hennessy  22:33  

As you wrote in Father of the comic strip off Töpffer, "we enter here the realm of pure comedy says Vischer, the autonomous absolute world of humor, where the laws of physics are suspended, chance and accident rule in epic fashion." So is it fair to say that most contemporary comics originate from tap first comic strips, if so, how different they have evolved from those of Töpffer's?

David Kunzle  23:01  

After Töpffer was inspired, he became unafraid to let his children of his weight escape from him and entertain people. They did this massively on the local scene in Geneva in Switzerland and out of Paris, where his work was plagiarized. They caught on with educated people, and they caught on with children, or I should say, adolescents, not young children. This is not a sort of Lewis Calevon la lettre, let me these are intended for intelligent and politically aware up to a point people who understood young people who understood what was happening in Paris, in terms of the revolutions to which Töpffer refers in his stories. Töpffer had imitators were who are better described as disciples. One of them became France's best known comic artist with Doumier the equal with Doumier, you might say, or even a rival to Doumier in the 19th century, diverse name, which is unknown to many people have know about top foot but they haven't heard of this disciple of Töpffer, who I hesitate to call an imitator because he's so much more he adds his own form of wit, his own form of absurdity, and ventures and all over the place in crazy travels that his characters undertake out of Töpffer's pocket, so to speak, his name was come on Cham, C H. A M, who was a great admirer of Töpffer and started off with what I would not call imitations, but inspirations from Töpffer, which Töpffer himself saw and admired and use or realized, would be useful to him when it came to engraving on wood, which he could never do. Töpffer could never do that kind of work. That the engraving on word could be done from drawings specially created by Töpffer for publication to the wider world of Paris under the engraver, or under the drawings, which was then engraved of the very young Frenchman who was 21 years old about called Sham his real name was actually Count. Henri de Noway. He was an aristocrat, who were descended to the low form of caricature, because he just had the genius for it.

David Kunzle 25:58  

What has happened to comics after Töpffer have transformed the genre into popular father of the intelligent classes who wanted a bit of humor in their life was very various and cumulated. Over the years, I mentioned Sham, along with Sham there were other French artists who made I would use the word imitations fade inspirations out of Töpffer, which are also very good. And then the comic strip really becomes popularized, and cheapened, which is to say, appeared in magazines, which costs very little like a penny, or twopence, which was a novelty because magazines, in those days, by which I mean, from the 1840s 50s, to the end of the century, tended to content themselves with cartoons, single, funny drawings with funny captions, with jokes, really illustrated jokes, they were. And they were the standard fare of caricature, in journals, in England, in France, and in Germany, until a wave of Töpffer artists penetrated. And they realized that these single cartoons could be expanded to embrace small novels. So we say novelettes, the Germans have a good word "novella" for short stories that tip for represented so perfectly, and it could be rivaled by new inventions by different artists in various ways, right into the 20th century, right into the 1900s. When, for the first time and this is very important, the Comic Strip, found a name for itself was given a name, which is comic strip, or picture story, or graphic novel. Before that, there was no short description of this new hybrid form of art, which where we are calling the comic strip or graphic novel, and which certainly goes back to Töpffer who himself called his stories graphic novels. But nobody's had thought of using that term, perhaps too ambitious to call these novels when they work is often very much shorter, and comic unserious confections made out of the imagination of various artists who were in many cases known for different kinds of caricature. I'm thinking of Tenniel, who was the best Punch cartoonist for half a century, from 1850 to 1900.

Claire Hennessy  29:07  

And you've just completed a book in 2021 called Rebirth of the Comic Strips, is that correct? And that was all from the whole collection from the Punch magazine, right?

David Kunzle 29:19  

Yes, that is partially true. A third of the comic strips that I found the 100 also, which I reproduce in my Rebirth of the Comic Strip, do come from Punch which sporadically spread through its pages. Without any systematization there was no regular appearance of comic strip heroes. In general, there was sort of one offs but they were made with the intent of representing a new form of fiction, often with a contemporary bent to it, notably when big things have happened in Europe, like the French politics which went through extraordinary somersaults in the course of the century. And they were treated with ridicule, and actually with fear, one can say fear manifesting itself as a kind of ridicule by English artists responding to the English take on the French Revolutions of well, particularly after Louie Philippe and Napoleon the Third, and then finally even the Franco-Prussian war. I call it the rebirth of the English comic strip, out of the surprise that I underwent when I realized that the comic strip, which had flourished under Töpffer had been attempted not very successfully by the only took for ish artists in England at the time was George Hook-shank, who was also as inspired by tougher without adopting Töpffer's this particular method of drawing which he didn't attempt to imitate. But that became popular by which I don't mean that the out of some sort of Töpfferian  nexus there emerged the comic strip fully formed, but rather tentative experiments in the comic strip form. Generally short ones, between two wins the most four or five pages, they deserve the name of comic strip, as I call it, without ever having claimed it, so to speak. Hybrid literature art, which had no name is very peculiar until the 20th century, when it came to be called comic strip and since then, it's borne that name in English comic strip and in French as drawn strip without actually saying comic but they're the "bande dessinées" in French the drawing strip is understood to be initially comic, but not always, because many comic strips is a very important point. Many comic strips in the 19th century onwards entered the 20th century, even the 21st century are very serious, some very long, some very beautifully drawn and colored, some quite expensively produced...