Black History
by T. Hodler
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Here’s another urgent cultural-history question for you: Does anyone out there know who was the first cartoonist to depict a scene taking place in darkness via a completely black panel?
I ask because without quite outright stating it, Michael Farr, in Tintin: The Complete Companion, strongly implies that Hergé originated the technique in his first Tintin adventure, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. (Interestingly, Farr theorizes that Hergé may have intended the panel as an homage to Malevich‘s famous Black Square, seen below.)
Does anyone know if Farr’s right? Is it possible that no one had employed the technique earlier than Hergé did in 1929/1930? The Looney Tunes film series didn’t get started until 1930, so Daffy Duck didn’t get there first…
I don’t know the answer, but whoever did it first was a genius.
Labels: comics vs. art, darkness, Hergé, M. Farr, Malevich, trivia
The third guy to do it was a complete hack, though.
Krazy Kat? I think I remember seing one there.
Krazy Kat, April 3rd, 1927, for instance. In an otherwise completely black panel, you can only see the voice of Ignatz: Hey, "bug"!! "Lightning bug"!!! – come back here!!!
Thanks, K and KP! I knew Hergé couldn't have been the first. That volume of Krazy Kat is at home, waiting to be consulted. In any case, Herriman was a genius, so I am still right, at least until someone digs up an earlier example.
@Stwalley: So true.
Never mind Herriman, Hergé, nor Malevich! The winner is Gustave Doré: The first panel on the first page of his "Histoire pittoresque de la Sainte-Russie", published 1854, is completely black. Even better: page 7 of the very same book shows nothing but five completely blank panels!
(probably the first two completely black panels, or pages, or pictures in a non-comic book, are to be found in "Tristram Shandy", by Laurence Sterne, 1759).
I may be mistaken, but I thought I once saw a 'Dreams of The Rarebit Fiend' strip with this effect – or maybe it was white-out, or maybe I just have false memory syndrome…
@KP: Wow! Okay. I should have remembered the Sterne example, though I don't think it counts, because he was trying to do something else with it.
But great detective work! I don't think anyone's going to top Doré. (But is he a genius? Oh, why not.) Do you know if that image is available anywhere, in a book or online?
Hmm. I just found an online essay that includes most of the Doré images, and I'm not sure know whether or not they should count. They definitely do something similar, but aren't meant to represent total darkness. But that's a pretty arbitrary distinction, so maybe I'm being crazy. Either way, very interesting.
@TH: yeah, I didn't count the Sterne example as relevant to comics, either, but it was a stroke of humorist genius! Doré: He was a bit TOO good for my taste, but the "Sainte-Russie" book is graphically remarcably restrained, very humoristic, cartoony, and on many of its about 180 pages clearly using the means of the comic strip. I have it in book form, the German edition. I'll scan the relevant pages, quick google search doesn't show them …
@TH: ah, you found the page! well, it is more a figurative darkness of "history", that's true, but still!
Yes, I think I was being crazy. You're right. Unless and until we discover earlier candidates, I agree that we have Doré as the first to use the all-black comics panel, and Herriman as the winner in the subsidiary category of first artist to use the all-black comics panel as a way to represent total darkness.
I am going to sleep well tonight!
I saw this posting earlier today and Herriman also came to mind. I was going to do a search but now I see the mystery is already solved.
The McCay example that anonymous was thinking about was probably the famous Rarebid Fiend page with a corpse's eye view of a burial.
Tangentially relevant: Today's dose of Evan Dorkin's Fun uses the trick too.
http://tinyurl.com/llzjue
RE: Malevich. The best part about that painting is that it is now completely cracked – the surface looks like a broken black eggshell.
This kind of post makes the day.The black panel question seems to be solved but ¿what about his twin brother, the white panel? A famous one is from Breccia's "La vida del Che"(1968), although he said it was a mistake. Maybe Kurtzman or someone else did one first.
I've just found through Derik Badman a Nancy strip with both panels: black and White (and even a third one, the grey scale):
http://madinkbeard.com/images/nancy-imageless.gif
@Frank – the reproductions of Malevich's work in books make it all seem so slick, but when you see the actual paintings they're totally rough textured, not quite plumb – the execution is extremely human. The concepts are so factory ready, but then he had to make the damn things. The show at the Guggenheim a couple of years back was fantastic.
Word.
Don't forget it's meant to be hung in the corner – about eight feet off the ground. And in the corner means not flat against the wall but straddling the two walls at the meeting point.
Earlier than Herriman: Rube Goldberg in Boob McNutt, 7/27/1924. Totally black panel with just one word balloon: "They put the lights out on us!" Reproduced in "100 Years of Comics Strips" (reprint of "the Comic Strip Century," but I don't know if the pagination is exactly the same), p. 151.
Also early: Billy deBeck, in "Parlor Bedroom & Sink" ("Barney Google" topper), 8/25/1929. Reproduced in "The Smithsonian Collection…," p. 106.
It took me about three minutes (literally) to find these ones, so I'm sure there were many others, some even earlier.
The Sterne doesn't count because the black there is not darkness in a diegetic space, but symbolic of mourning.
Earlier than all these, but later than Dore, Alphonse Allais exhibited at the Incoherents exhibition of 1884 a series of monochrome painting, with titles such as "Tomato harvest on the shores of the Red Sea by apoplectic cardinals" (for the all red one) and "Procession of chlorotic young girls in snowy weather" (for the all white one). Among them was an all-black one, titled "Blacks fighting in a tunnel."
Even earlier, in "Either/Or" (1848), Kierkegaard imagined a monochrome red painting:
"The result of my life is simply nothing, a mood, a single color. My result is like the painting of the artist who was to paint a picture of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. To this end, he painted the whole wall red, explaining that the Israelites had already crossed over, and that the Egyptians were drowned."
This sounds to me like he's referring to something even earlier.
Sorry for this total display of nerd fu.
Admittedly, though, Farr's singling out of Herge as innovator still applies inasmuch as Herge, on p. 106 of "Soviets," has a *completely* black panel–no word balloons, no captions, nothing. I'd guess no one had done anything like that before–all examples given here still have a balloon or something in them.
Oh, and FWIW Farr's association of Herge with Malevich strikes me as totally bogus.
Oops–even earlier (by two years) than Allais–Paul Bilhaud exhibited at the Incoherents in 1882 "Blacks fighting in a cellar, at night," an all-black painting.
Since among the Incoherents were also cartoonists, such as Caran d'Ache, I would be very surprised if one of them hadn't already done this trick in a cartoon or comic strip in the 1880's.
Thanks, AM! Rube Goldberg's another genius, so we're on a roll.
Monochrome paintings are something a little different, though it's interesting context.
I was considering pointing out the Hergé distinction you draw — that his panel contained no dialogue or word balloons (unlike the Goldberg and Herriman) — but I was starting to feel pedantic, and decided just to leave it alone. (That's one of the benefits of having knowledgeable commenters: You can leave the pedantry up to them! Emoticon.) Of course, depending on how you looked at it, even under those stricter rules, Doré might still win.
I know nothing about the Incoherents' comics work, but that theory certainly sounds possible.
Seriously, thanks for the comments.