Rodolphe Toepffer: The Complete Comic Strips
David Kunzle (Editor), David KunzleBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Among the many accomplishments in art and literature by Genevan Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846), his virtual invention of the comic strip, or graphic novel, stands out as the most surprising, curious, and to us, after a century inundated by comic strips, by far the most significant.
This volume is the first English-language version of the Töpffer comics oeuvre and includes (unlike previous French and German editions) all of his eight full-length stories, plus previously unpublished fragments of stories started and abandoned and manuscript segments omitted in the printed versions. Comics scholar Kunzle translates the captions from the French, gives essential biography and chronology, and appends socio-political contexts for all the stories with explanation of references obscure today. He deals with questions of dating and the differences among manuscript, printed version, and the various editions. He also lists the plagiaries, translations, and adaptations in other media.
Töpffer's complete comic strip output, combined with Kunzle's annotative material and analyses, makes this volume one of the most significant works of comics history to be published and reestablishes Töpffer's seminal place in the comics canon.
David Kunzle is author of From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art, 1550-1670 and Decade of Protest: Political Posters from the United States, Vietnam, and Cuba, 1965-1975.
Synopsis
The first English-language edition of the premier comic artist's work
The Washington Post - Douglas Wolk
The Complete Comic Strips is the first full English-language edition of Topffer's eight "histoires en estampes" ("engraved novels"), originally published between 1835 and 1845…The Swiss artist drew in a fluid scribble, along the lines of Edward Sorel's New Yorker cartoons, with a sly, whimsical caption beneath each image. His stories amble from one incident to the next, daffily satirizing the social trends of his day.
Editorials
Douglas Wolk
The Complete Comic Strips is the first full English-language edition of Topffer's eight "histoires en estampes" ("engraved novels"), originally published between 1835 and 1845…The Swiss artist drew in a fluid scribble, along the lines of Edward Sorel's New Yorker cartoons, with a sly, whimsical caption beneath each image. His stories amble from one incident to the next, daffily satirizing the social trends of his day.—The Washington Post
Library Journal
The histories en estampes(picture stories) published from 1833 to 1845 by Swiss writer and educator Topffer are important precursors to the modern graphic novel; a pirated edition of one of them, published in New York in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, is often regarded as the first American comic book. This volume is the first complete collection of Topffer's comics works, ably translated and annotated by Kunzle (History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century). Originally intended to amuse himself and his students and told in lively illustrations and narrative captions without dialog (and hence without word balloons), Topffer's stories are primarily freewheeling farces spiced with fantasy elements, formal invention, and social and political satire. They involve caricatured heroes such as social climber Monsieur Jabot and lepidopterist Monsieur Cryptogame in ever-escalating series of absurd adventures and complications. Kunzle provides historical and biographical context for the works in his simultaneously published companion volume, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Topffer(Univ. Pr. of Mississippi). While definitely more accessible, even riotous, than their remove from the present might suggest, Topffer's comics are unlikely to draw a large audience of modern comics fans. But this volume and its companion are essential for comics scholars.
—S.R.