Re-Thinking Comics’ Periodization: Stone, Parchment, Fabric, and Glass Age?

Bronze Age, Silver Age, Golden Age ... for modern (western) comics fans and scholars, these terms have a particular meaning for making sense of developments in twentieth-century comics, especially within the superhero genre. Modern comics’ use of this terminology, however, perplexes scholars of the ancient Mediterranean; not only because those terms hearken back to eighth-century BCE poet Hesiod’s characterization of the “Ages of Man” (Works and Days, 109-201) lifting their name but not their meaning, but also because these “Ages of Comics” discount the long history of pre-modern sequential art. Sequential art has long been painted in fresco, carved in stone, etched on papyrus, parchment, and bark, stitched onto fabric, and framed into stained-glass windows. Pre-modern sequential art, like the modern medium, comprises multiple genres, including graphic history, science, and memoir. Splash pages featuring heroes and heroines in epic battles of good versus evil figure in these millennia-old “comics”; but so do startling examples of wealth inequality and state control. Even the modern concept of the comic “multiverse” has nothing on the multiple re-imaginings of stories and heroes over time and place in antiquity. This paper explores how the long history of pre-1900 sequential art challenges existing comics periodization, with respect to materials/form, thematic topics, circulation/audience, and more. Such an examination of pre-modern examples of sequential art is an essential step in reframing and rethinking comics periodization.