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art theory
Jun. 12th, 2011 12:59 pmOkay, so photography crops up in the late 1800s, and suddenly you have things like Edward Muybridge's photographs of motion, or the post-impressionists actually having figures move in and out of the frame, influenced by photographs.
At the same time everyone in Europe and the USA is trying to figure out national identity and there's a health/naturalism craze which gets into big muscular figures. About the same time there's an interest in big healthy muscular figures, it becomes both okay and feasible to capture those big healthy muscular figures in motion. More literate urban societies, cameras and then cheaper cameras, and widespread print media, all probably fit this together with a batch of people trying to figure out who the hell they were.
I would posit that superhero comics are this combination of partly-technically-driven changes to art, mixing it up with subconscious attempts to figure out national identity. I'd compare that to the connection of photography to national identity (things like Ansel Adams photographs, all the WPA art projects, and I guess nationalism in film). All stuff coming together around 1900-1940.
I'd suggest that the USA's late arrival to world-spanning nationalism, and relative American prosperity after WWII meant we were still reflecting serious nation building in superhero format through the 1960s. We had no India or Kenya to turn our comic industry into the sometimes savage introspection of a 2000 AD. What we did have was a Comics Code Authority that made superhero and romance comics pretty much the only real route for comic books. And WWI/WWII never hit our print media the way it did Europe's.
Certainly artists like Simone Bianchi indicate that there's nothing so innately American about superheros that an Italian can't totally groove on the idea - so why is it that most Italian/Spanish/French/Belgian comics, even "for kids," tend to feature slower development, more careful illustrative styles, and better production values? I'd bet that's rooted in post WWII resource management which forced those countries to think of comic books more as books than we ever did.
At the same time everyone in Europe and the USA is trying to figure out national identity and there's a health/naturalism craze which gets into big muscular figures. About the same time there's an interest in big healthy muscular figures, it becomes both okay and feasible to capture those big healthy muscular figures in motion. More literate urban societies, cameras and then cheaper cameras, and widespread print media, all probably fit this together with a batch of people trying to figure out who the hell they were.
I would posit that superhero comics are this combination of partly-technically-driven changes to art, mixing it up with subconscious attempts to figure out national identity. I'd compare that to the connection of photography to national identity (things like Ansel Adams photographs, all the WPA art projects, and I guess nationalism in film). All stuff coming together around 1900-1940.
I'd suggest that the USA's late arrival to world-spanning nationalism, and relative American prosperity after WWII meant we were still reflecting serious nation building in superhero format through the 1960s. We had no India or Kenya to turn our comic industry into the sometimes savage introspection of a 2000 AD. What we did have was a Comics Code Authority that made superhero and romance comics pretty much the only real route for comic books. And WWI/WWII never hit our print media the way it did Europe's.
Certainly artists like Simone Bianchi indicate that there's nothing so innately American about superheros that an Italian can't totally groove on the idea - so why is it that most Italian/Spanish/French/Belgian comics, even "for kids," tend to feature slower development, more careful illustrative styles, and better production values? I'd bet that's rooted in post WWII resource management which forced those countries to think of comic books more as books than we ever did.