Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in ...

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Chapter I: The History of Comics and its Connection to Politics: Assessing the
importance images have had in informing public ideals and ethical standards
“And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification,
relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader,
and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw
and describe.” (Leonardo Da Vinci, reproduced Inge pg. 132)
Graphic narratives, or stories which rely on images to convey information and
advance plot, have been used for centuries to record political developments or illustrate
significant changes in power relations. In order to have the resources to create and
exhibit a work commemorating a particular event, though, one must have the capital to
perform such a task and anticipate an audience to receive it after its completion. Thus
historiography reveals that subjectivity, or individual perception, is strongly related to
political subjection.
The mass produced comic strips which appeared weekly in newspaper
publications during the late nineteenth century exemplify the rapid growth of
industrialization as commodities while simultaneously representing attitudes about the
values of the period through their content. The predecessors of this honed sequential art
form reveal a great deal about the time periods in which they were made. Graphic
narratives existed even before the printing press was invented in the middle of the
fifteenth century. A commissioned embroidery known as the Bayeux Tapestry illustrates
William the Conqueror's acquisition of power as the first Norman king of England.
Depicting the events of 1066 through pictorial representations and accompanying
descriptions stitched in Latin, the work preserves a historical record from a distinct
perspective (McCloud Understanding 12). This artifact conveys information about
monarchism, the power relations between individuals living in that system, and their
relationship to religious ideology. Comics historian Scott McCloud identifies several