The 388th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 26, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. 

Alex Beringer on Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth Century US Comic Strip.

Alex Beringer will discuss his new book Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth Century US Comic Strip, the first full-length study of US comic strips from the period prior to the rise of the Sunday newspaper comics. Where current histories assume that nineteenth-century US comics consisted solely of single-panel political cartoons or simple “proto-comics,” Lost Literacies introduces readers to an ambitious group of artists and editors who were intent on experimenting with the storytelling possibilities of the sequential strip.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, figures such as artist Frank Bellew and editor T. W. Strong introduced sequential comic strips into humor magazines and precursors to graphic novels known as “graphic albums.” These early works reached audiences in the tens of thousands. Their influences ranged from Walt Whitman’s poetry to Mark Twain’s travel writings to the bawdy stage comedies of the Bowery Theatre. Most importantly, they featured new approaches to graphic storytelling that went far beyond the speech bubbles and panel grids familiar to us today.

A gallery of selected images from Lost Literacies can be viewed at the site linked here.

Alex Beringer is Professor of English at the University of Montevallo. He has held fellowships with the University of Cambridge and the American Antiquarian Society. His research concerns nineteenth-century American visual culture, literature, and comics. Find him at www.alexjberinger.com.

David Claypool Johnston, “Trollopania,” in Scraps, Vol. 4. (Boston- D.C. Johnston, 1833)