AOB 1

During the 1950's the CCA created guidelines for what was allowed to be published inside and on the covers of comics/graphic novels, the cover i have made in photoshop above would not have been accepted for publication as it contains the word terror. Anything that had the word terror or horror inducted into it would not have been allowed for viewing.

Brief Sequential Art History

The first notable sequential art is that of cave paintings, they were painted with purposeful scenes all in one picture that was read in a flowing motion.

The next sequential art of not was in the tombs in Egypt, it was known as Tapestry and was sewn. They were not snapshots but were read as a story. An example of this is the Scribe Of Menna.

Next in the 1740's a man called William Hogarth began to create narratives which told a story, a notable piece was Marage Alamode he made a piece that consisted of 6 paintings that created a story cycle and were designed to be shown side by side.

In the 1800's a guy called Rodolph Toppfer started to create frames in his work, the images were smaller and went along with writing, these were the first mass produced pieces of sequential art but the use of speech bubbles had still yet to be found.

After this the Guttenburg Press was introduced giving the ability to mass produce lots of things, this enabled people to send work such as newspapers around instead of people having to come to them. It was mainly used to ship the bible around. Also the first copyright laws were introduced.

Now that mass production was possible, a cartoon called Hogans Alley in a newspaper with a character called Yellow Kid became a big success, the strips were able to be ripped out from weekly issues and put together to create one big strip.

The difference between a cartoon and a comic could now be seen. A cartoon was one single image with a caption explaining what was happening. A comic was a series of sequential pictures that would fit with text to form a story or narrative.

In the late 30' early 40's of the 19th century, a guy called Max Gaines had the idea of re-printing images and strips into an anthology which then became comics. This then lead to a company called DC Comics being set up and in 1938 was the 1st time that Superman was ever seen.

In the 1950's Bill Gaines who was in relation to Max, created EC comics, in the company he let his artists use their imaginations freely . This lead to the outcome of some brutal stories hitting stores and after a man called Fredrick Wertham came up with a comic called 'seduction of the innocent' this called for the introduction of a way to control what people read. This caused the sales of comics to drop, so EC comics changed a comic the had called 'MAD' into a magazine, this turned out to be a big seller.

Graphic Novels I Have Read