Is Comics an Art: Presenting to the readers of Diaskop a transcript of the first article by Georgi Chepilev from 30 November 1987

History of Bulgarian Comics

►

Is Comics an Art?

Georgi Chepilev

Newspaper Komsomolska Iskra, Plovdiv, 30.11.1987

This text precedes by many years the systematic academic studies of comic art in Europe and the United States. Long before the term “Ninth Art” was established in scholarly discourse, before the works of Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen and other leading theorists, here – in Bulgaria – the fundamental question was already being formulated: comics as an autonomous art form, with its own language, its own temporality, and its own visual grammar.

The article does not approach comics as illustration, as a pedagogical tool, or as a subordinate genre. It considers comics as a temporal art, in which the image does not decorate the text, but thinks through sequence, through pause, through transition.

This is an approach that today we would call interdisciplinary, but at the time it was an act of intellectual courage. The fact that this text remained undigitized for more than three decades is part of the broader fate of Bulgarian Ninth Art – interrupted, marginalized, often deprived of archive and continuity. Its publication today is an act of restoration, not merely a commemorative gesture.

On the eve of the New Year, and at a moment when the profession “Comics Artist / Graphic Novel Author” receives official institutional recognition in Bulgaria, returning to the article “Is Comics an Art?” is both natural and necessary.

 

Comics have been created in Bulgaria for a long time, but in order for Bulgarian comics to stand firmly on their own feet, they must be approached with empathy. Let us begin from the beginning.

As for the history of comics, it begins with what the history of the problem of time in visual art presents to us: Egyptian wall paintings and reliefs, Assyrian and Sumerian statues; in Greek art – archaic relief and vase painting; later – fresco cycles, hagiographic icons, multi-meter scrolls in China and Japan, the laws of movement formulated by Tintoretto and Daumier…

If we must name a concrete founder of comics, this would be Richard F. Outcault at the end of the 19th century – a name that has been accepted and established. But I would point to the illustrated narrative of Guamán Poma de Ayala about the Inca Empire and its culture, from the beginning of the 17th century, as the most ancient comic. Ancient and medieval painting, tormented by its silence, strove to speak through the introduction of written text. Yet these works did not achieve full literary expressiveness through sequential frames and quickly readable words. The fact that Guamán Poma’s work is a chronicle, and that he uses drawing as more eloquent than many words, provides grounds to think of a major turning point in pictorial narration.

Of course, the final turning point occurs at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, when cinema begins to influence the reproductive possibilities of printing. This helps form a specific type of dynamic visual narrative, which is already comics in its modern form.

What distinguishes comics from other arts is the possibility for different events to be placed on a single page – that is, within a single space. At the very moment of seeing the page, we can perceive and experience the present, the future, and the past simultaneously. This is a principle analogous to human memory: all events that have entered so-called “long-term memory” are released for simultaneous playback. The individual page is an internally organized unity of its differentiated panels and, depending on the analytical approach, reveals itself through various interval-rhythmic combinations.

“No. Absurd? Of course! Talentless? Shameless stupidity. Throw them out, tear them to pieces, burn them in the stove.” Or: “Behind this lies the awareness that where it becomes necessary ‘to read comics,’ this is progress for a people who no longer wish to think much.” — Umberto Eco.

This is generally how people speak about comics. But does the vice lie in the art form itself? Are we not witnesses to how arts recognized as “classical” are corrupted not by anything else, but simply by lack of talent?

In 1938, as a result of the collaboration between two Americans – writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster – the character Superman appears for the first time: the reporter Clark Kent. Superman has colleagues and competitors: Captain Marvel, Batman, Jimmy Olsen – all of them waging tireless battles against violators of law and order. Since the regiment of superheroes always triumphed, it became necessary to create worthy opponents – anti-superheroes. Thus, comic pages were flooded with Gorilla-Man, Iceman, X-Man, and others. And the need for superheroes to have super-companions gave rise to Wonder Woman and her adversaries.

When dozens of such heroes are produced monthly, there is no way the reader will not be pushed into a monotonous and narrow path leading to a fabricated and purely entertaining world. Thus, in the 1960s, the inventiveness of these authors began to decline catastrophically fast. At that time, the American publisher and artist Stanley Lieber created strange creatures with fairy-tale ferocity – Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and others. As for the affirmation of violence as a manifestation of vital force and masculinity, the glorification of mass killing and spectacular death, I would like to quote the Italian publicist Gianni Toti:

“The living fantasy and immediacy of the first comics turned into a crude way of producing intoxicating food for a crowd hungry for fairy tales… Having entered the stream of monopolistic cultural production, comics became an inseparable part of the gigantic machine that works not only to achieve profits, but also for ideology.”

I believe it has become clear that the struggle should not be directed against comics as an art form, nor against its genres and expressive means, but against the ideological content that could give the reader a distorted emotional attitude. In this sense, it would be fair to give space for the full realization of Bulgarian comics and its varieties – comic short stories, novellas, novels – which may appear in separate publications.

Only then will we have grounds to speak of a genuinely Bulgarian comic, a bearer of national characteristics, a comic with a new functionality, different from the Western one, continuing the tradition laid down in the 1940s…

-----------------

Some assessments and formulations in the text reflect the inevitable compromises with the language and ideology of their time – the time of the Berlin Wall. They should be regarded not as a weakness, but as testimony to the cultural environment in which the very publication of such an article was possible. Thinking of comics as a temporal art rather than illustration is key and fully contemporary. Understanding the page as a simultaneous space of past, present, and future anticipates McCloud’s theory of “closure” and visual time.
The connection with memory is a subtle philosophical observation, rarely articulated so clearly even today.

Editorial note from the newspaper Komsomolska Iskra (printed above the title of the original article): Georgi Chepilev is 26 years old and works as an artist at the magazine Daga.

►

Georgi Chepilev: "The Art of Comics"

History of Bulgarian comics - Plovdiv 2019

Online lessons "The Wonderful World of Comics"

Diaskop business card

Letter of gratitude

© Diaskop Comic

      Bulgarian culture, comics, artists, art

The editorial team of "Diaskop" expresses gratitude to its collaborators, who regularly send information to us first! The editorial team responsibly forms the materials and publishes them. We recommend to all colleagues who wish to popularize the information and borrow messages, to place a link to the original source.