Drawing in the style of pre-1450 Comics and Cartoons

For Master Henry’s Trailblazer Challenge, I have decided to draw in the style of pre-1450 European comics and cartoons.

There are many SCA cartoons (single drawings) and comics (sequential art), but none seem to take their style from pre-1600 examples. The large number of stories depicted through single or sequential images prior to the invention of the printing press leads me to believe that there is sufficient inspiration to use these depictions for drawing comics and cartoons that would be entertaining to an SCA audience.

My plan is to take humorous or entertaining stories, from SCA history or from pre-1600 texts, and depict them in various styles of pre-1450 comics and cartoons. Examples of pre-1450 comics and cartoons include the depictions of:

• Psalms in the Utrecht Psalter (ca. 820-240) and its copies
• Parables in the various Echternach Gospels (ca. 1030-1045)
• Biblical passages in the Bible Moralisee (1220-1230 for the French royal court in Paris)
• History of the kingdom of France in the Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (ca. 1375-1380)

My goals would be:

• To present the results of this project at Northern Lights in 2008
• To have the results of this project published in Tournaments Illuminated, the Pikestaff, or some other SCA journal
• To inspire other artists to use the style of pre-1450 Comics and Cartoons to depict other stories.

Starting Bibliography:

• Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip. Vol. 1, the early comic strip. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
• McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How imagination and technology are revolutionizing an art form. New York: Perennial, 2000 (and other books by Scott McCloud).
• Walther, Ingo F. and Norbert Wolf. Codices illustres: The World’s most Famous Illuminated Manuscripts, 400-1600. Koln, Taschen, 2001.
• The Utrecht Psalter and Derivation of Style: 800-1050 C.E. http://bibliomane.tripod.com/utrecht_psalter.htm Viewed 19 March 2007.
• The Utrecht Psalter: Digital facsimile of Ms. 32 of Utrecht University Library. http://psalter.library.uu.nl/ (IE only). Viewed 19 March 2007.