Comics Art Legacy-What it means to be us

I’ve been thinking about the future of comics lately. I think the challenges facing independent creators, from trying to get in anthologies, get “for hire” gigs or maybe the Holy Grail, get some kind of bigger publisher interested in our work in this economy often means you second-guess your creations, style and even “career” choice. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, and what helps me is to remember that the art form we call comics now is part of a continum that has it’s roots tens of thousands of years ago. In the past we see the future, and vice versa. What the Hell am I talking about? Let me explain:

The fact that humans are the only living thing on the planet that not only has symbolic thought, but makes recordings of these symbols: art. About 30-50,000 years ago symbolic representations of animals start to show up on cave walls and in carved forms like figurines and stylized tools and jewelry in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, as Modern Humans spread out from our ancestral homeland, Africa. Modern humans date back to perhaps 150,000 years, but the RECORD of symbolic thought is only a fraction of that time. What this means is we had the brains, hands and bodies we have now, but symbolic thought took a long time to refine, past down to the next generation and find the richness of meaning that finally led to the first art.

How does this relate to comics? Well, when people started living in towns, growing crops and domesticating animals, people started to need to trade for goods, since not everyone grew food or hunted. People started to have specialized “careers” and craft-people appeared along with the concept of the city state. Merchants needed to keep track of sales, so the first writing appeared around 7,000 years ago. Almost immediately the artisians took hold of the writing, and at the request of the leaders started to combine them. The birth of the written word is inextricably linked with the combining of pictures and more abstract, symbolic words. These are, for all practical purposes, comics.

In ancient Sumer, in the Kingdom of Ur, we see the clearest example of this, even more than in Egypt in my opinion. For one thing, the practice of anthropomorphizing animals started here, with the “Bull Cult”. We see an amazingly modern approach to the “bull woman” here, holding an offering of wine to the gods.

That what we call comics has such ancient roots in not just art history, but the way written language itself was born, should never be forgotten by those of us that practice this art form. We continue the legacy of telling stories, effecting our fellow humans that might be too busy to write their own. We continue civilizations true prize: the heightened level of communication that art represents.