Strip Search: Egyptology, McCloud, and Comics
Jennifer M. Babcock reviews and recommends comic strips available in print and on the web.
I am in the land of Egypt, the land of pyramids. Of course, I wrote this LAST Thursday when I wasn’t in Egypt but let’s pretend I already know what it’s like to be there.
Man, it is HOT here!
Anyway, as many of you already know, in addition to being a cartoonist, I am also studying Ancient Egyptian art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. There are a lot of people at my school that don’t see any connection between my interest in Egyptian art and cartooning – I think many people see me as quite the oddity. More perceptive people or people who have read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics completely understand why I’m interested in both. If you’ve read it, you’ll recall that McCloud lists Egyptian tomb paintings/reliefs as some of the first examples of “sequential art” or “comics.” He also uses Trajan’s column, prehistoric cave paintings, and the Bayeux Tapestry as “early comics” though, so I don’t know if Egyptian art’s narrative qualities necessarily drew me to that field. But if that’s the way people are best able to cope with me having two different interests, that’s fine.
Anyway let’s talk about what McCloud has to say about Egyptian art as comics and then deconstruct it a bit. I’m not going to get very lofty with my ideas here – that’s for my dissertation proposal, which I don’t want to discuss until I know it’s been passed by my department’s faculty. I just want to provide a short critique from an art historical perspective – a perspective that McCloud, who is coming from a cartoonist’s standpoint, lacks.
I first want to say that McCloud’s book, Understanding Comics, may be respected for all that it has to offer about how to look and study comics and sequential art. Despite any flaws that it might have, the book brings up a lot of interesting ideas and is still useful for someone who wants to learn about the more theoretical issues behind comics.
That said, I do take some issue with McCloud saying that any narrative art is somehow a precursor to comics. First of all, and this is a critique that many have had, McCloud’s definition of comics is incredibly broad: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence.” (McCloud, 9) While it is deceivingly specific, it also ignores context.
McCloud talks about all sorts of pre-19th- and 20th-century narrative art as examples, but as I’m in Egypt and am an Egyptologist, let’s see what he has to say about that culture.
The 18th Dynasty tomb of Menna (TT 69), belonging to an Ancient Egyptian scribe, is placed in timeline of the history of comics. It is located in the Theban necropolis and is painted with beautiful daily life scenes on its walls. The particular narrative that McCloud reprints in his book is of a harvesting scene and McCloud shows how “the Egyptian read their comics zig-zag.” (McCloud, 14).
What makes this a comic? According to McCloud, it is a comic because the sequence of images is constructed into a clear narrative- in this case, you see a step by step process of how the Egyptians harvested their wheat. This is not the only tomb that depicts such a scene- there are hundreds of other tombs from this dynasty and many others that use narrative constructions in their tombs. Not only that, but many of the images are accompanied by “speech” or textual “labels,” not completely unlike what we see in a modern comic.
Despite this medium’s similarity to comics, however, I am hesitant to place Egyptian tomb paintings and reliefs in the history of comics. Yes, they may look like comics to us, but we are looking at them with modern eyes. The Egyptians obviously didn’t have a concept of what comics are as the word itself is relatively new. Is it really fair to retroactively place them into this category of representation?
Now you may be saying that McCloud didn’t explicitly say they were comics- rather, he said they were the precursors to comics. However, does that not also imply that art history is evolutionary? Were the Egyptians really working toward building a vocabulary to help us cartoonists create the art that we make today? McCloud’s argument for Egyptian art is based on a priori knowledge, something that is quite dangerous when we are a good number of millennia away from the ancient Egyptian culture.
I think more people need to be more careful about what they label as “comics”- just because something is narrative, it doesn’t mean that thing is a “comic” or a “precursor to a comic.” What is needed is a more specific definition of what comics are. I think a good start would be to keep comics in their historical context- comics are a modern phenomena and although ancient art, like those of the Egyptians, may seem to follow their formula, they are a completely different beast that need to be considered separately.
Nonetheless, I think McCloud’s discussion is useful because it has obviously gotten a lot of scholars and comic artists thinking about what comics are and what constitutes a comic. I would like to make one correction, however…
On page 12 of Understanding Comics, McCloud talks about hieroglyphs and how they only represent sounds- that is not true. There are actually three types of hieroglyphs:
1) phonetic (the kind that McCloud was showing us)
2) ideographic (the pictorial kind- the signs that represent an object or an idea) and
3) determinatives (symbols that are often seen behind a noun or verb to help the reader identify the meaning of that word.)
Anyway, this is Jen Babcock signing off from Egypt. If my dissertation proposal is passed this September, I’ll let you all know more about my “secret ideas” about Egyptian narratives.
Jennifer M. Babcock holds her MA in art history and is currently pursuing her doctorate in Egyptology from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she is also known as a comics scholar. A creator herself, she is the artist and writer behind C’est La Vie, which is syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate and available at http://www.gocomics.com/cestlavie.
Indeed, it was quite hot in Egypt.