Lost Literacies

Lost Literacies is the first full-length study of American comic strips from the years before Sunday newspaper comics took off. Existing histories tend to assume that nineteenth-century US comics were limited to single-panel political cartoons or simple "proto-comics." Alex Beringer instead introduces an ambitious group of artists and editors who were determined to experiment with what the sequential strip could do for storytelling. Their playful comics undermine the accepted account of how comic strips evolved. Throughout the nineteenth century, figures such as the artist Frank Bellew and the editor T. W. Strong brought sequential strips into humor magazines. They also produced "graphic albums," forerunners of the graphic novel. These early works reached audiences in the tens of thousands. Their influences ranged from Walt Whitman's poetry and Mark Twain's travel writings to the bawdy stage comedies of the Bowery Theatre. Most importantly, they developed new approaches to graphic storytelling that went well beyond the speech bubbles and panel grids we know today. Readers of the book will find that these little-known early strips rival even the most inventive modern comics in diversity and ambition.