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

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:
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