Journal of Research & Scholarly Output 2006 - Grimsby Institute of ...

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‘Comics are for Kids’ - Exploring the Origins of Bias Against Sequential Art in the United Kingdom Chris Dows - Course co-ordinator and tutor on the BA (Hons) Professional Writing programme at The Grimsby Institute of Further and Higher Education’s East Coast Media centre. The majority of Britons do not regard comic books as a serious form of story telling, and despite the fact that sequential art is increasingly recognised as an important narrative medium, equal to prose and scriptwriting in its sophistication and influence on popular culture, an inaccurate and demeaning opinion of sequential art FOCUS Page Page 73
continues to persist within this country. The question this paper wishes to address is a simple one - where did the bias against comic books in the United Kingdom originate? Across the world, comic books offer a rich and varied environment for a writer and excitingly diverse subject matter for the reader – a fact acknowledged by a substantial number of regular consumers across mainland Europe, Japan and the United States. In this country however, sequential art in all of its forms (comic books, collected trade paperbacks and graphic novels) continue to be regarded with disdain and rejected as worthless, yet the characters and narratives from their pages continually prove to be hugely popular in differing media. As a perfect example of this irony, consider UK Box-office receipts for comic bookbased films in the United Kingdom. Regardless of whether the original text is recognised as belonging to the superhero/fantasy genre or less obvious adaptations of graphic novels (witness the popularity of ‘Road to Perdition’ (1), ‘From Hell’ (2) and ‘A History of Violence (3) – most people had no idea they started life as panels and speech balloons), many blockbusters of the last thirty years have been based on comic book characters, yet the majority of the British public would never dream of reading the source material. In England, ‘comic books are for kids’ and while some explanation can clearly be attached to the post-war output from the British comic book publishers who exclusively targeted pre-teen and young teen audiences, it is the intention of this essay to propose that attitudes to the medium were formed several centuries ago through a series of highly influential historical and cultural events. In order to contextualise the factors that shaped modern-day attitudes to sequential art, one has to travel back to a time when England shared the same image-based mass communication as the rest of Europe. One of the major reasons the United Kingdom’s attitudes towards comic books differs to that of mainland Europe (particularly France and Belgium) is directly connected to its relationship with religious iconography and, in particular, the events of the Reformation. Christian imagery had been growing in popularity as early as the eighth and ninth centuries, but the explosion of Catholicism across Europe and its subsequent reliance on image-based texts brought a limited version of sequential art to the masses (in the form of church paintings, stained glass windows, frescoes and alterbased Tryptych that did not include a textual narrative as contemporary Japanese medieval paintings did). Theologians and art critics may argue the function of art was (and is) to represent the glory of God, but there is dramatic evidence to refute this point. Serenus of Marseilles, an Iconoclast bishop who had actively destroyed all of the imagery within his diocese some time towards the end of the sixth century, was sent the following communication from Pope St. Gregory the Great (between 590- 604 AD), the man widely regarded to have been responsible for the doctrine, organisation and discipline of the Catholic Church up until the Middle Ages: Page 74 FOCUS
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Journal of research & scholarly out
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Editor’s Comments by the Director
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Contents The Collegiate and Transfe
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y a minority, their location in a d
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A number of colleges were also cent
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The reasons for this are historical
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contribution made, first, to the sh
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Page 19 and 20: of the conclusions of an independen
Page 21 and 22: About the author Professor Gareth P
Page 23 and 24: values, educational background, sys
Page 25 and 26: whether our metaphors, stories and
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Page 29 and 30: and used material from literature a
Page 31 and 32: their understanding of issues with
Page 33 and 34: Tutors need to be prepared and be a
Page 35 and 36: Reference Papers Dimmock, C. (2004)
Page 37 and 38: WISHful Thinking? By Rob Cooling -
Page 39 and 40: the growing trends of contractorisa
Page 41 and 42: These mechanisms can range from the
Page 43 and 44: References: HSE (2005) Obstacles pr
Page 45 and 46: Critical Circuits and Textual Const
Page 47 and 48: ‘The thing’ exists as a negativ
Page 49 and 50: offered for interpretation, the ‘
Page 51 and 52: Notes 1. All subsequent unattribute
Page 53 and 54: Vocational Excellence in Seafood Pr
Page 55 and 56: contrast to national projections, h
Page 57 and 58: ensuring that the approaches used b
Page 59 and 60: Software Tools Produce Plus is a Un
Page 61 and 62: Although some factories were happy
Page 63 and 64: Conclusions So far a target group o
Page 65: About the author Dr Mike Dillon has
Page 69 and 70: From the beginnings of Christianity
Page 71 and 72: While Hogarth resisted the increasi
Page 73 and 74: tragedy, he nevertheless single-han
Page 75 and 76: References Collins, Max Allen, Road
Page 77 and 78: Error Analysis and Interlanguage By
Page 79 and 80: way the learner has of testing his
Page 81 and 82: sentence has to be analyzed in erro
Page 83 and 84: tongue of the learner. The implicat
Page 85 and 86: of different mother tongues learnin
Page 87 and 88: Information for Contributors The pr
Page 89: Nuns Corner, Grimsby, North East Li
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