Summary
The US-American comic strip emerges around 1900 on the pages of daily newspapers as a narrative form that interlaces text and image. The early comics, however, neither come out of nor exist within a vacuum. They go back to caricatures and cartoon strips which – aside from important individual works such as Rodolphe Töpffer’s cartoon strips – were published in European illustrated magazines from the second third of the 19th century onwards. In Germany, the revolution of 1848 in particular gives rise to a multitude of journals, including Kladderadatsch (Berlin), the Fliegende Blätter (Munich) and the Münchener Punsch. They attach themselves – sometimes aggressively – to paragons from France (Le Charivari, Paris) and England (Punch, The London Charivari) and are not themselves without successors, e.g. Kikeriki (Vienna), Die Wespen (Hamburg, Berlin) and Simplicissimus (Munich). Very similar periodicals are established in the USA by European immigrants in the final decades of the 19th century, for example, Truth, Judge and Puck. A variety of authors in Europe draw caricatures and cartoon strips for the new magazines; first and foremost, the influential Wilhelm Busch. When he begins working for the publisher Braun & Schneider in the 1860s, however, he is already part of a tradition of illustrators and cartoon strip narrators, drawing on them and bringing their ideas together in an unprecedented way. If Thomas Nast from the Rhineland-Palatinate was the “father of the American caricature”, then Busch became the father of the American cartoon strip; in it, he went on to develop and popularise narrative strategies and techniques that were taken up by many others. His American successors – comic strip narrators such as Frank M. Howarth and Frederick B. Opper – were among those who later became comic strip artists.
The publication conditions of magazines and daily newspapers determine the form comic strip narratives take: page format and page layout, production processes and paratexts have an influence on the formation of comic strips as a medium. In this respect, many aspects of the humorous comic strip are a direct result of the media environment: one strip generally consists of three to five images, for there is barely enough allocated space on the page to print more than this in a legible size; serial narrative strategies (e.g. overarching plot strands and individual punchlines) arise out of the necessity to produce a newspaper that appears every day; the same is true of “regular characters”. Early comic strips already reflect these production conditions and their effects, flaunting them humorously – from playing with the frame drawn around the individual picture to presenting the frame of production and the sign system in an explicitly self-reflexive way.
The sub-project “Framing Experiments. Cartoon Strips around 1900 in German Humorous-Satirical Publications and as US Newspaper Comic Strips” examines the transatlantic developments between cartoon strips in magazines and comic strips in newspapers from a comparative media perspective, in particular by means of their self-referential, playful forms, and with regard to their framings. Several issues each play a central role in this. The sub-project interrogates, for example, the role played by the visual frames and framing structures of individual images, image sequences and narrative structures characterised by framing. This issue borders on paratextual and peritextual framings, i.e. on questions around the cartoon strip’s mise en page in the media context of the magazine and the pictorial broadsheet, or the position of the comic strip within the newspaper. What are the effects of the respective media embedding on the reception? Connected with this is the question of the representation and narrative modelling of time and the passage of time. From this perspective, the focus is on the construction of cartoon and comic strips as representations of the passage of time in the individual story and across the sequence of serial stories: repeated and varied plot patterns, regular characters, etc. The debate also focuses on the way the cartoon and comic strips alternate between media, e.g. from the magazine to the illustrated broadsheet and the newspaper, or from the newspaper to the book, for the paper objects of the newspaper, the issue and the book, all designed in different ways, are not merely marketing vehicles; they frame the cartoon and comic strips they contain in a media-specific way.
The analyses are carried out, on the one hand, using representative cartoon and comic strips – for example, by Lyonel Feininger, Winsor McCay and George Herriman –, and, on the other hand, using more extensive digitalised corpora.