Comparisons between Forms of Visual Narration

After tracing the means of generating openness in comics in the genres discussed in the previous chapters, the last chapter of analyses concentrates on related visual narratives such as illustrated novels and artists’ books. This chapter begins with two comics, or graphic novel versions, of literary texts, City of Glass and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These comics’ adaptations are compared with the transposition of Franz Kafka’s stories in Dave Mairowitz and Robert Crumb’s Introducing Kafka and Oliver Deprez’s version of The Castle. The chapter ends with a discussion of the variety of complex relationships (between words and images as well as images alone) and the role of materiality in artists’ books, comparing them with those discernible in more open comics in order to show how both incorporate indirect and multivalent word-image relationships to create greater interpretational scope, which is frequently complemented by aesthetic appeal.

The Rise of the Illustrated English Novel to 1832

This chapter describes the rise of the illustrated English novel. Eighteenth-century novels were cheap; illustrations expensive. Illustrated novels typically were not first editions, though some of the best known (Robinson Crusoe, Sir Launcelot Greaves) anomalously were. Looking at novels from roughly twenty years apart, one can see a number of changes from the increased presence of native engravers and designers to the burgeoning of illustrated volumes with the overthrow of perpetual copyright in 1774 (making possible the novel series of James Harrison and others), as well as shifting technologies leading from copperplates to the use of steel engravings in the nineteenth century. Important illustrators of novels included Pine and Clark, Hayman and Gravelot, Hogarth, Thomas Stothard, Thomas Rowlandson, Blake, and George Cruikshank.

PHIZ'S BLACK DOLL: INTEGRATING TEXT AND ETCHING INBLEAK HOUSE

Three black dolls appear in the etchingsby H. K. Browne (Phiz) that accompany Charles Dickens'sBleak House(1853). They hang, strange fruit, from strings on walls and in shop windows, and their purpose as commentary on the text remains unclear because it is also initially unclear what they might represent. The dolls are never mentioned in the text of the novel, nor do they receive any substantial criticism in readings ofBleak House's illustrations. This article plumbs the archive for evidence of the dolls, and uses the resulting range of associations, from the American cotton trade to Victorian advertising techniques, to argue for a greater integration of the analysis of text and illustrations in serialized, illustrated novels such asBleak House. Material culture readings of the novel to this date have overlooked elements of the illustrations (which are themselves material objects), or have focused on illustrations as print culture, and not conversations with the written text. Examining the dolls in this context not only enrichesBleak House, but also attests to the value of observing the interplay of text and illustration, as well as text and advertising, in readings of the novel's serialized form.