A Reader's Progress.

Sketch of the Snooter, whom you may remember from such books as After the Snooter, doing what he does best. Being an annoying bastard.



This is just pulled from my sketch folio.The Snooter's hand appearing to extend Campbell's nose is entirely accidental and means nothing. I think. First to ask for it in comments can have the drawing in the mail.
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Excellent gallery of the works of William Hogarth



I was talking about William Hogarth the other day and it carried over into the comments to the extent that I felt I owed a few more words on the subject. I was critical of the notion that "Hogarth’s sequential narratives... consolidated the graphic experiments of earlier prints and established a complex language of graphic devices that artists have borrowed from ever since". This has become accepted as fact among too many comics scholars.

My argument essentially is that it can't be so as I have never met a comics person who would know how to read Hogarth properly (myself included) let alone be influenced by his work. In support of my statement I quote this article by Martin Heusser reviewing
Reading Iconotexts:From Swift to the French Revolution. Peter Wagner. London: Reaktion Books, 1995.
"Reading Iconotexts is a study of 18th-century prints and their inscriptions, which Wagner prefers to call iconotexts in order to emphasize the high degree of mutual interdependence and interpenetration between word and image which they exhibit. In fact, Wagner claims that they form a specific genre, because in them, neither text nor image is free from the other."
"Reading Hogarth "right" is difficult for two reasons, one intrinsic and one extrinsic. On the one hand, these illustrations are in and of themselves heterogeneous; they represent both a critique and an enactment of 18th-century commercialization of culture and taste. On the other, modern interpretation suffers from a severely distorted view, because, over the generations, the immensely broad range of 18th-century cultural phenomena has been pared down to a very narrow body of samples.
Taking Hogarth's well-known first plate of A Harlot's Progress as an example (shown above), Wagner convincingly shows what he means. To "understand" this picture - that is, to get the maximum information out of it and to grasp it - we have to be capable of decoding a wealth of sign systems running criss-cross through its visual appearance. On a pictorial level, we find both the re-enactment and the subversion of traditional subjects as diverse as the Penitent Harlot, the Choice of Hercules and the Visitation. Similarly complex but more difficult to trace and recognize are those references to what must have been first-rate contemporary tabloid material offered by the three central human figures: the rapist Colonel Charteris, the notorious prostitute Kate Hackabout, or the debauched Mother Needham. Then, there are the numerous emblems and puns present in the guise of seemingly accidental elements such as the dead goose and the bell, which may both well refer to the fate of the silly goose who may soon be a dead belle. By the same token, the horse whose excessive appetite causes it to knock over a pile of utensils demonstrates ad oculos how the consequences of gluttony affect the careless without delay.
The quasi infinite number of allusions generated by the quite finite space of Hogarth's engraving proves Kristeva's point that references do indeed evoke a "universe" of significances... "

Here's an extended argument over the details of the same image by two experts: READING HOGARTH By Ronald Paulson, Reply by Richard Dorment. They're making as much progress as you and I.