Comics Were the First Written Language

In which we discover the history of comics is the history of human civilization.

Note that Bill has been giving a version of this posting as a speech for many years now, such as his Guest of Honor Speech at the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention Reno, and is delighted that other comic artists and writers are beginning to make reference to it, if only rarely and never (so far) with attribution.

The 40 thousand year old Lascaux Cave Paintings were discovered in 1940 by a dog named Robot, who fell into a hole. Robot was followed by his owner, 18 year old Marcel Ravidat, who’s most often credited with the discovery, but that’s just blatant speciesism.

Since then primitive cave paintings have been discovered all over the world, some dating back perhaps as many as 70 thousand years. And since then scholars have argued over what they mean. What were they for? Why were they only done in these remote and almost inaccessible places?

Yeah, I know. Leave it to academics to fail to see the obvious. They weren’t only painted in remote and inaccessible places. They were painted everywhere, but these were the ones that survived the millennia of human contact, weather, and such that wore the other markings away.

What were they for? They were for many things, because we don’t just confine our expressions and innovations to one or two narrowly-defined purposes. They were historical depictions of great deeds, and terrible disasters. They were calendars, marking, “this is the time of the rising rivers,” followed by, “this is when the herds return,” and so on. They were invocations to the gods and civil records of who lived here over time.

What did they mean? Everything. All that was of interest.

And here’s the one bit no scholar ever considered: Since these were graphic images placed in sequence in order to tell a story, the cave paintings were comic books.

No, they weren’t stories printed on paper, and mass produced for distribution, but that’s just a difference in delivery platforms. Graphic images placed in a sequence to tell a story is the irreducable bedrock definition of comic books.

Our first written language was comics, and all of human civilization is based on them. All of written language began as images. They changed over time, adapting, slowly becoming formalized into Sumerian Cuneiform, and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and ancient Chinese, and dozens of other languages, all of which began as pictures. And some modern languages still use pictographic symbols.

Thank comics.

Without comics as our first written language, even the most basic records could not be kept, which means civilization never would have gotten underway.

Why harp on this? Because I’ve been in this business more than 40 years, during which time comics have often been treated as the idiot stepchild of literature. Librarians used to swear no comic books would ever assail the sacred bastions of their stacks. Playwrights, filmmakers, and even the worst hack prose writers would poo poo comics as a gutter medium, suited only for children and imbeciles.

That’s changed some lately. Comics are now the coin of the realm in libraries, where circulation figures are the standard by which all worth is measured. Movie moguls and prose writers try to break into comics, and build multi-billion dollar franchises from the stories first told by these cartoonists who could barely scrape out a living from their creations.

But the hard core “real” writers still look down their noses at us, even though the written languages they traffic in are barely a few thousand years old. The first pure alphabets (properly called abjads, or so I’m told) mapping single symbols to single phonemes, only emerged around 1800 BC, which is brand new compared to the vast ages of comics.

So then, here’s my message to you Johnny-come-latelies plying your newfangled prose works: “You’re very welcome to join in. It’s a big pool. There’s plenty of room, and the storytelling trade can accommodate any new mechanism and medium in order to get stories told. We won’t ever look down on you the way you did to us.

“Will your new prose and film mediums stand the test of time? Who knows? Stick around long enough and I guess we’ll see. Will they ever accomplish as much for the human race as comics has done? No, because civilizations have risen via comics. Mankind has been transformed into a literate animal from comics, and it all happened long before you came along. Still, keep plugging away. You’re doing good work so far. We’re rooting for you, kiddo.”

And who knows? Civilizations may fall once again. The smart money says, given enough time and human folly, it’s almost certain we’ll someday tumble back into base savagery. But here’s the thing. When and if that happens, it still won’t be prose writing that drags us back into civilized enlightenment again. Prose alphabets are entirely symbolic constructs and have no relationship to reality. Pictures however, even simple ones, depicting things we see and know in nature, will always do the trick.

We’re hardwired with the ability to convert graphic images in a sequence into story information. That’s why you have to work so hard to acquire a new written language, but a comic in any language can be more or less understood at a glance — provided the pictures carry most of the weight of telling a good story.

That’s why we still put important stuff in pictures.

Don’t worry. When civilization does fall, we’ll save the day again, for which, you’re welcome.