Abstract
This chapters builds on the chapter, “Art History Turned Upside Down: David Kunzle and the Social History of Art”, by reassessing the significance of the social history of art to Comics Studies by tracking the development of concepts of style, class and ideology from the work of early Marxist art historians such as Arnold Hauser and Meyer Schapiro to that of New Left art historians like T. J. Clark and O. K. Werckmeister. It goes on to examine subsequent work by art historians and theorists taking a Marxist art-historical approach to print, graphics and popular culture such as Adrian Rifkin, Frances Stracey and Esther Leslie, before sketching what a social history of comics might look like through an analysis of the Writers and Readers’ … for Beginners series of “documentary comic books”, specifically Capitalism for Beginners by Robert Lekachman and Borin Van Loon.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of the impact of semiotics and structuralism in Art History and Comics Studies see the chapter, “Iconography for Comics Studies Reconsidered: Interpreting Visual Transformations in Jack Kirby’s The Mighty Thor”.
- 2.
This included dissecting the psychopathology of Soviet Communism at the threshold of its collapse (see Werckmesister 1999).
- 3.
This is to say nothing of work on post-digital art that has updated debates about art and autonomy in the context of the wider neoliberal restructuring of work (and the art market), with important bearings on any study of contemporary cultural production (see Stakemeier and Vishmidt 2016).
- 4.
Writers and Readers published several books by Berger including Permanent Red (1979), About Looking (1980) and the novel Pig Earth (1979), as well as work by other art critics like Peter Fuller.
- 5.
In this sense the ...for Beginners books come under the definition of applied comics—aiming to communicate information to a specific target audience in a way that shapes how the works are designed. Like many applied comics the majority of the ...for Beginners titles were collaborations between subject specialist writers and comics artists (see Wysocki 2022).
- 6.
This followed the first of the series, a translation of Rius’ Cuba for Beginners in 1975. A 1979 animated trailer was produced for Marx for Beginners by Bob Godfrey’s Movie Emporium and Cucumber Studios.
- 7.
The setting up of Writers and Readers was apparently directly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s 1934 essay “The Author as Producer”, which was a touchstone for these movements (see De Bolla 1987).
- 8.
Rifas was due to illustrate Middle East for Beginners written by Allan Solomonow, but the project never moved beyond the proposal stage, possibly due to the fallout from Writers and Readers disbanding as a cooperative (see Anderies 2017).
- 9.
These strips were published in collected form as Urban Paranoia by Suburban Books in 1977, Van Loon having met publisher Alan Courtney working at Lower Down.
- 10.
As Jelena Stojanović (2014) and A. J. Paylor (2021) observe, as well as détourning other visual imagery using comics devices the Situationists détourned comics themselves and drew their own comics from their founding in 1957 onwards, firstly with the inclusion of decontextualised single panels in Jorn and Debord’s experimental collage books Fin de Copenhague (1957) and Mémoires (1959), but also in their films and periodicals—Paylor describes their journal International Situationniste as “littered with comics” used to propagate their ideas (2021, p. 1015). But it was particularly from the mid-1960s onwards that they created comic strips, comprising a range of collaged imagery combined with phrases from their texts, including several to publicise their journal and books. This followed the publication of Rene Viénet’s 1967 text “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art” asserting how easily comics lend themselves to détournement and how easily “other mediums could be detourned through using the graphical conventions of comics” (Paylor 2021, p. 1023).
- 11.
The only photograph reproduced without any amendment is one of far right dictators Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla (Lekachman and Van Loon 1981, p. 161)
- 12.
The split apparently followed a dispute over rights to some titles in the ...for Beginners series being sold to Pantheon Books. Thompson moved back to New York and set up Writers and Readers Inc. and later formally incorporated the London-based Writers and Readers Limited in 1992. Appignanesi co-founded Icon Books that same year. Both reprinted several ...for Beginners comics while adding new titles to their respective series. From 1999 the Icon series was renamed Introducing…. (Today they are called ...A Graphic Guide and the series includes works in larger formats including Meg John Barker and Jules Scheele’s Queer; A Graphic History and Gender: A Graphic Guide). After Thompson’s death in 2001, For Beginners, LLC was established which also republished older titles and commissioned new ones. Appignanesi was also involved in establishing and writing SelfMadeHero’s Manga Shakespeare adaptations.
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Horton, I., Gray, M. (2022). A Social History of Comics Art: Looking at Writers and Readers’ Capitalism for Beginners. In: Art History for Comics. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07353-3_9
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