Will Eisner’s Evolutionary Discourse on the history of Comics

In an interview with Max Allan Collins on “Alley Oop” and sequential art at San Diego Comic Con 2001, Will Eisner recounts the evolutionary history of comics in primitivist language that rehearses the same kind of unfounded logic that underscored discussions of film as a new medium, even as he disavows the connection between the two forms.

The medium we call comics is really a literary slash art form. It’s capable of dealing with subject matter far deeper, far greater, far more meaningful than just a joke a day, or two mutants trashing each other. It has the capacity of combining the literary aspects of art, which is the use, the repetitive use, of image into a form of stereotypical language that is able to convey a real experience. The skill of the artist working in this medium has to be both literary and artistic or visual. […] The medium far exceeds what it has been given in its history.
It’s an old medium. It’s a very old form of communication. It began in the caves, it progressed up and through the hieroglyphics of the, uh, the Egyptian hieroglyphics. It really took on a form very similar to what it is today in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church began to disseminate morality stories to people–who [were] semi-literate, really–in the form of copper plates. And it began to evolve slowly into the daily strips that we saw at the beginning of the century. It is a highly educational form of language. And it is important today, it has reached today a point where it is filling a gap that has occured in the–that had began to develop or had occured in the 1920s, when motion pictures began to proliferate, and we fell into what I call the visual era: where communication became so important and the volume of information that was disseminated became so great that text was under siege. And in that gap that occurred between the inability of text to disseminate information as rapidly as film does (because the visual image disseminates information more rapidly than text actually) comics now forms that segment in that gap that has formed between pure visual imagery, like film or television[…] and pure text alone.
Comics is now providing a combination–a very sophisticated combination–of text and imagery to convey an idea, tell a story, and instruct.

Here’s the disavowal of the similarity between film and comics (couched in terms of active/passive viewership which is actually reminds me of Münsterberg and Bordwell’s rejection of the passivity thesis of film, and is a dichotomy that continues in the discussion about “lean-forward” vs “lean-back” media). Eisner claims that:

Film is a spectator medium; comics is a participator medium. In that your connection with the author of a comic strip is an intellectual one. He is asking you to participate in the telling of that story. It a film you’re just sitting there and an artificial experience is paraded in front of you at the rate of speed that the director wants it, within a frame that’s ordained and never changes. And you watch it. That’s all. You maybe feel it but that’s about it.

I transcribed the above from the full interview with Eisner, which is included in the special features of a documentary called Caveman: V. T. Hamlin & Alley Oop
In the edited version of documentary, Eisner’s evolutionary narrative is intercut, right after the bit about Egyptian hieroglyphics, with another expert’s history, George Hagenauer, “Comics Historian” locates the beginning of the medium with technological change:

Comic strips really started through a technological innovation. The earliest comic book that’s been found is a reprint […] from like, the 1840s. But where it really takes off is in the 1890s with the invention of the color press. Because they were able to do these first front pages that were full in color on Sunday. And the real turning point is the creation of “The Yellow Kid” by Richard Outcault.

Outcault, R. F., “The Yellow Kid and His New Phonograph”New York Journal. 25 Oct. 1896. R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995. Plate 42.