REBIRTH OF ENGLISH COMIC STRIP KALEIDOSCOPE 1847-1870

Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870 enters deep into an era of comic history that has been entirely neglected. This buried cache of mid-Victorian graphic humor is marvelously rich in pictorial narratives of all kinds. Author David Kunzle calls this period a "rebirth" because of the preceding long hiatus in use of the new genre, since the Great Age of Caricature (c. 1780-c. 1820) when the comic strip was practiced as a sideline. Numerous comic strips and picture stories appeared in periodicals other than Punch by artists who were likewise largely ignored. Like the Punch luminaries, they adopt in semirealistic style sociopolitical subject matter easily accessible to their (lower-)middle-class readership.