Understanding Comics through Ancient Art

I found Scott McCloud's discussion of the history of comics extremely interesting, especially because I'm taking a class on Ancient Art. Since I'm learning about the visual iconography of ancient cultures every week, it's great to see McCloud compare these same concepts to a more contemporary art form. In some ways, it might even be possible to extend his analysis back to some of the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic era, which (debatably) show animals and people in sequence. From this perspective, "comics" as McCloud defines them ("juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer") are much more than 3,000 years old (which he claims on page 107).

Also, McCloud credits Topffer with dividing comics into panels during the 1800s, but this strategy had been employed in art long before, around 3,000-2,000 BC. Artists often divided images by theme into registers, as with the vase to the goddess Inanna and a music resonance box found in a king's tomb (from Uruk, I think... or possibly Ur). Both can be read from bottom to top, rather than from right to left as in modern comics. Their content falls into McCloud's categories of Subject-to-Subject or Aspect-to-Aspect comics, since they show different parts of society in a hierarchy.

I love it when classes come together like this... I have to say, this was a pretty unexpected connection.