A comic strip: monochrome, white borders. The first frame shows two men in conversation walking past the gothic towers of Glasgow University. One wears an Indiana Jones-style hat. The other is in jeans and Converse trainers, and carries a plastic bag.
Plastic bag man (grinning): “How about doing an exhibition about comics?”
Hat man (eyes wide in horror): “Comics in an art gallery? Our art gallery!”
I have rarely seen an introductory graphic panel as engaging – and, quite frankly, as cool – as the one that opens the Comic Invention exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery.
Across the seven frames of the comic strip introduction, the exhibition’s two curators discuss its key themes – what is a comic? Was the first one invented in Glasgow? – and encourage visitors to explore the universal and timeless appeal of telling stories in text and images.
So where to start? Well, that’s up to the visitor. The exhibition is in two L-shaped rooms, with the entrance between them. I see a couple asking for guidance and the room steward takes them down to see the oldest comic in the world, the Glasgow Looking-Glass, a broadsheet commenting on domestic and foreign news, illustrated by William Heath and first published in 1825. That’s the guide’s personal preference, but for me, the less interesting part of the exhibition.
The official line is that you are in the world of comics and should therefore let your eyes lead you, just as you would with a page of a comic. This is an exhibition that truly embraces browsing.
To one side is a long thin L-shaped gallery entitled The Invention of Comics, low-lit and black-walled, displaying two tiers of objects – historic images below, contemporary comics above. Facing you at the end of the gallery is an image of Superman, arm raised in Christ-like benediction. A bench offers a rest and a pile of comic books to read. Around the corner are the rival claimants to the title of the oldest comic in the world.
To the other side is a display named Comics and Culture. A first glance takes in two Warhols, a Lichtenstein, a Hockney, Egyptian hieroglyphs, a sculpture by Glaswegian Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce, a Paolozzi sculpture, a group of anti-heroes illustrating a story by Neil Gaiman, and a Rembrandt.
Whichever way you choose, it’s clear that Comic Invention is about the meeting of high and low art. There are direct comparisons between mainstream artistic expression and the aesthetics of comics throughout the exhibition.
My choice of narrative is to look at the comics first. (If this review was a comic strip, you could ignore my choice and make your own narrative but I’m confined to words in a row on a page… Museums Journal as a comic strip? If only...)
Frank discussion
This half of the exhibition presents images paired by theme (celebrity, lust, deities, shipwrecks) or artistic approach (caricature, compositional technique and so on). Each upper image is a page drawn by Frank Quitely (a pseudonym chosen by the Glaswegian artist Vincent Deighan because he thought his family would, quite frankly, find his early drawings disgusting). In recent years, Quitely has drawn Batman and Robin, the X-Men and Superman, among others. Below his work sit a historic manuscript, book and engraving, earlier stories told in pictures.
You are encouraged to study Quitely’s drawings and consider how he uses composition and visual devices to tell his stories. You also learn something of the process – Quitely’s images are mostly pencil or ink and the margins hold notes to the colourist who works on the drawings next.
You are also encouraged to draw parallels between comic strip conventions and narrative techniques new and old: there is no difference in the way they are treated – Quitely, Hogarth, Tenniel, Hans Holbein the Younger and Scotland’s oldest complete manuscript (an eighth-century medical manuscript) are all regarded as equals.
The labels stick to 50 words and the longer panels are short, discursive and provocative – not many exhibitions contextualise a Rembrandt by referring to the Bible, the local high street, Irn-Bru and Nike.
The voice of the text bridges two worlds – academia and comics. Since it is a university museum exhibition, cultural references abound, and perhaps some terms need more explanation; but in general, erudition sits alongside a sheer geeky love of comics.
In the Comics and Culture gallery there are more juxtapositions. The room is dominated by Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 pop art painting In the Car, shown next to the original 1950s Girls’ Romances comic from which it is taken. Turn 90 degrees and Hanna-Barbera cartoonist Iwao Takamoto’s drawing of his creations Scooby Doo and Shaggy sits next to a Picasso, opposite a Rembrandt that hangs by Donald Duck in Italian.
Framing the argument
Turn the other way and you see war, capital punishment and horror. It is a relatively small display but the quality and variety on show mean that it punches above its weight.
The Hunterian’s sketch for The Entombment by Rembrandt doesn’t get star billing, but is included because it represents one part of the narrative sequence of Jesus’s death and resurrection. We are encouraged to think of it as a frame in a text-and-image story. I am not 100% convinced – and would question the curators’ claim that “perhaps all art has an implied narrative” – but it’s unusual to see an old master interpreted like this, and it’s done with admirable confidence.
In its design, the exhibition makes plenty of references to comics, delivered with subtlety. There are comic strip frames, a font familiar from comics (not Comic Sans) and blocks of colour taken from the printer’s palette – cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The team rejected the idea of a comic strip floor treatment, suspecting it would undermine their message about the cultural value and skill of graphic art.
The exhibition poster is a tribute to the Lichtenstein painting, but in the poster by Sha Nazir it’s the woman who’s driving and the bloke is a hipster.
Space jammed
So, what’s not here? Speaking as a fan of graphic novels on contemporary political and social themes – not of superheroes, scantily clad futuristic warrior women and dystopian narratives – the exhibition does not present the full breadth of what the French call the “ninth art”. And it is odd that there is no mention of the great Scottish tradition of cartooning fostered by the Dundee-based newspaper publishers DC Thomson, home of the Beano, the Dandy and the much-loved Broons – and the fact that this environment has produced so many internationally famous comic artists, including Frank Quitely.
Space in the Hunterian is limited, though, and this exhibition has a plan and sticks to it. The show covers a large field that merits more attention – which hopefully it will get at the National Comics Academy that Laurence Grove (who co-curated this show with Peter Black) has proposed for Glasgow.
For now, Comic Invention succeeds in revealing this art form to a new audience, making a confident, clever, clearly articulated case for comics as a grown-up medium, which traces its direct lineage back to 19th-century Glasgow but whose roots lie in a much, much older human impulse to tell stories with words and pictures.
Lucy Harland is the director of Glasgow-based interpretation consultancy Lucidity Media
Main funders University of Glasgow; Friends of Glasgow University Library; The Watson Foundation
Exhibition design Stephen Perry (The Hunterian)
Main contractors Sha Nazir, BHP Comics; Richard West, Lightly West; Service Graphics; QD Plastics
Exhibition ends 17 July
Admission MA Members free, Adult £5, concession £3
Plastic bag man (grinning): “How about doing an exhibition about comics?”
Hat man (eyes wide in horror): “Comics in an art gallery? Our art gallery!”
I have rarely seen an introductory graphic panel as engaging – and, quite frankly, as cool – as the one that opens the Comic Invention exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery.
Across the seven frames of the comic strip introduction, the exhibition’s two curators discuss its key themes – what is a comic? Was the first one invented in Glasgow? – and encourage visitors to explore the universal and timeless appeal of telling stories in text and images.
So where to start? Well, that’s up to the visitor. The exhibition is in two L-shaped rooms, with the entrance between them. I see a couple asking for guidance and the room steward takes them down to see the oldest comic in the world, the Glasgow Looking-Glass, a broadsheet commenting on domestic and foreign news, illustrated by William Heath and first published in 1825. That’s the guide’s personal preference, but for me, the less interesting part of the exhibition.
The official line is that you are in the world of comics and should therefore let your eyes lead you, just as you would with a page of a comic. This is an exhibition that truly embraces browsing.
To one side is a long thin L-shaped gallery entitled The Invention of Comics, low-lit and black-walled, displaying two tiers of objects – historic images below, contemporary comics above. Facing you at the end of the gallery is an image of Superman, arm raised in Christ-like benediction. A bench offers a rest and a pile of comic books to read. Around the corner are the rival claimants to the title of the oldest comic in the world.
To the other side is a display named Comics and Culture. A first glance takes in two Warhols, a Lichtenstein, a Hockney, Egyptian hieroglyphs, a sculpture by Glaswegian Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce, a Paolozzi sculpture, a group of anti-heroes illustrating a story by Neil Gaiman, and a Rembrandt.
Whichever way you choose, it’s clear that Comic Invention is about the meeting of high and low art. There are direct comparisons between mainstream artistic expression and the aesthetics of comics throughout the exhibition.
My choice of narrative is to look at the comics first. (If this review was a comic strip, you could ignore my choice and make your own narrative but I’m confined to words in a row on a page… Museums Journal as a comic strip? If only...)
Frank discussion
This half of the exhibition presents images paired by theme (celebrity, lust, deities, shipwrecks) or artistic approach (caricature, compositional technique and so on). Each upper image is a page drawn by Frank Quitely (a pseudonym chosen by the Glaswegian artist Vincent Deighan because he thought his family would, quite frankly, find his early drawings disgusting). In recent years, Quitely has drawn Batman and Robin, the X-Men and Superman, among others. Below his work sit a historic manuscript, book and engraving, earlier stories told in pictures.
You are encouraged to study Quitely’s drawings and consider how he uses composition and visual devices to tell his stories. You also learn something of the process – Quitely’s images are mostly pencil or ink and the margins hold notes to the colourist who works on the drawings next.
You are also encouraged to draw parallels between comic strip conventions and narrative techniques new and old: there is no difference in the way they are treated – Quitely, Hogarth, Tenniel, Hans Holbein the Younger and Scotland’s oldest complete manuscript (an eighth-century medical manuscript) are all regarded as equals.
The labels stick to 50 words and the longer panels are short, discursive and provocative – not many exhibitions contextualise a Rembrandt by referring to the Bible, the local high street, Irn-Bru and Nike.
The voice of the text bridges two worlds – academia and comics. Since it is a university museum exhibition, cultural references abound, and perhaps some terms need more explanation; but in general, erudition sits alongside a sheer geeky love of comics.
In the Comics and Culture gallery there are more juxtapositions. The room is dominated by Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 pop art painting In the Car, shown next to the original 1950s Girls’ Romances comic from which it is taken. Turn 90 degrees and Hanna-Barbera cartoonist Iwao Takamoto’s drawing of his creations Scooby Doo and Shaggy sits next to a Picasso, opposite a Rembrandt that hangs by Donald Duck in Italian.
Framing the argument
Turn the other way and you see war, capital punishment and horror. It is a relatively small display but the quality and variety on show mean that it punches above its weight.
The Hunterian’s sketch for The Entombment by Rembrandt doesn’t get star billing, but is included because it represents one part of the narrative sequence of Jesus’s death and resurrection. We are encouraged to think of it as a frame in a text-and-image story. I am not 100% convinced – and would question the curators’ claim that “perhaps all art has an implied narrative” – but it’s unusual to see an old master interpreted like this, and it’s done with admirable confidence.
In its design, the exhibition makes plenty of references to comics, delivered with subtlety. There are comic strip frames, a font familiar from comics (not Comic Sans) and blocks of colour taken from the printer’s palette – cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The team rejected the idea of a comic strip floor treatment, suspecting it would undermine their message about the cultural value and skill of graphic art.
The exhibition poster is a tribute to the Lichtenstein painting, but in the poster by Sha Nazir it’s the woman who’s driving and the bloke is a hipster.
Space jammed
So, what’s not here? Speaking as a fan of graphic novels on contemporary political and social themes – not of superheroes, scantily clad futuristic warrior women and dystopian narratives – the exhibition does not present the full breadth of what the French call the “ninth art”. And it is odd that there is no mention of the great Scottish tradition of cartooning fostered by the Dundee-based newspaper publishers DC Thomson, home of the Beano, the Dandy and the much-loved Broons – and the fact that this environment has produced so many internationally famous comic artists, including Frank Quitely.
Space in the Hunterian is limited, though, and this exhibition has a plan and sticks to it. The show covers a large field that merits more attention – which hopefully it will get at the National Comics Academy that Laurence Grove (who co-curated this show with Peter Black) has proposed for Glasgow.
For now, Comic Invention succeeds in revealing this art form to a new audience, making a confident, clever, clearly articulated case for comics as a grown-up medium, which traces its direct lineage back to 19th-century Glasgow but whose roots lie in a much, much older human impulse to tell stories with words and pictures.
Lucy Harland is the director of Glasgow-based interpretation consultancy Lucidity Media
Project data
Cost £34,000Main funders University of Glasgow; Friends of Glasgow University Library; The Watson Foundation
Exhibition design Stephen Perry (The Hunterian)
Main contractors Sha Nazir, BHP Comics; Richard West, Lightly West; Service Graphics; QD Plastics
Exhibition ends 17 July
Admission MA Members free, Adult £5, concession £3
