The first century of narrative strips (1450-1550): the origins of graphic narrative

Abstract

Due to the growing academic interest in comics and graphic novels, some authors such as Roger Sabin or Santiago García have emphasized the kinship these modern genres of graphic narrative share with the Broadsheets where popular stories (lives of saints, popular scenes, mystic allegories or biblical passages) were represented in sequences of panels during the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In his landmark work The History of Comic Strip, David Kunzle put together the first and only corpus (up to the present date) of this type of sequential engravings, giving them the name of Narrative Strips. Kunzle, however, held back the task of analyzing the formal features of these Narrative Strips. The purpose of this article is to provide a starting point for that task, establishing a bridge of dialogue between graphic narration and history of art.