This one-day symposium explores the ways in which early comics artists pioneered new visual techniques to engage, educate, and challenge audiences. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, artists like Frank Beard, J. H. Howard, and Winsor McCay approached the page as a complex interface that could educate and entertain audiences at the same time. Indeed, an important goal of this period was to train the audience’s media literacy through playful means, often combining the written word with visual realism and an oral commentary in the case of live performances.

This one-day symposium explores the ways in which early comics artists pioneered new visual techniques to engage, educate, and challenge audiences. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, artists like Frank Beard, J. H. Howard, and Winsor McCay approached the page as a complex interface that could educate and entertain audiences at the same time. Indeed, an important goal of this period was to train the audience’s media literacy through playful means, often combining the written word with visual realism and an oral commentary in the case of live performances.

Programme

12:00 - Benoît Crucifix (KU Leuven)

Childish Vision? Playful Interactions between Comics and Children's Drawing

This talk will inquire into the interactions between cartooning and children's drawing in the framework of a “ludification of vision” in the late 19th and early 20th century. Going from Töpffer's thoughts on the proximities between children's doodles and cartooning to playful interactions with readers in children’s magazines, it will connect this play with simple lines to intermedial exchanges affecting the relationship between reading, looking at, viewing, and drawing.

Chair: Dr. Erin LaCour (VU Amsterdam)

13:15 – Kin Wai Chu (U Gent)

Ludic Ways of Seeing: Cultural hybridisation of vision in early Chinese cartoon periodicals

Emerging at the turn of the 20th century, early Chinese cartoon magazines blended traditional Chinese drawing styles and pictorial storytelling with the transnational practices of western cartoons, comics journalism and printing technology. This talk examines two key periodicals, Dianshizhai Pictorial (1884–1898) and Shi Shi Hua Bao (1905–1912),  to trace the evolution of Chinese cartooning in shaping readers to engage with modernity, humour and new ways of visual storytelling.

Chair: Dr. Laura Vermeeren (UvA)

14:45 – Mathieu Li-Goyette

Chalk Talking: Between Sunday School and Stage Stunts

This workshop will present different examples taken from chalk talking instruction manuals from the 1880s up to the 1920s in order to conceptualize a typology of different public drawing practices as well as their relationship to early American comic strips.

16:30 – End

Research Master’s students can obtain 1 EC for participating in the entire programme through NICA. To obtain a credit, please sign up through this form: https://forms.office.com/e/v1iC5RivXf