History of Comics from Lascaux to Last Week — Kelly Sue DeConnick & Matt Fraction, JoCo Cruise 2020
Channel: Angela Brett
Date: 2020-04-17

From https://jococruise2020.sched.com/event/ZlUl/the-history-of-comics-from-lascaux-to-last-week-in-29-minutes

We’ll set a timer and then give a fast-paced talk on, uh, the History of Comics from Lascaux to Last Week. It’ll last, um, 29 minutes. After which we can take questions.

Kelly Sue DeConnick talks about Wakandan etiquette, a playwright, and then begins telling the history of comics in 29 minutes. She and Matt Fraction continue in a tag team fashion. Here are some random keywords I wrote down, because the information came faster than my brain's clock speed at the time of watching, and I’m probably not going to have space to write all that in a mere 5000 characters anyway:

Storytelling with sequential images
Mass-production and distribution
cheap, fast, disposable pop culture

White people suck, and they wrote most of this history, so there is a lot of erasure.

A dog named Robot fell in a hole and found over 600 17000-year-old comics!

Lots of different printing presses were invented!

Everything’s political!

Töpffer!

Suspension bridges allow people to drive across rivers, and this is somehow related to making newspapers for poor people! Ben-Day dots! The yellow kid! 

The mob! Gambling and pornography! Superheroes! Eisner and Eiger! Intrigue! Heartbreak! Crime! Women reading comics! A wife-beating child-hater being chopped up by a motorboat engine! Crashing on Dexedrine in front of congress! Pulp magazines! LSD! Raina!

Comics are a medium, not a genre! The price of comics relative to minimum wage has gone up 519%!

They take some questions from the audience:

What were your comments about Mouse, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns?
Why did you jump past the Egyptians?
What about Belgian comics, like Tintin?
What’s with creators urging us to buy single issues to make sure the trade paperbacks will be made?
Have you talked to Ramona Fradon?
Webcomics have a totally different business model!
What should we be reading that you’re reading and is wonderful?
Do you have an opinion on Sentinels of the Multiverse? (Created by someone who’s been on all the JoCo Cruises)