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“Ye Baron’s Daughter…” The Illustrated London News (1890)

Illustrator: J.B. Clark
Writer: Milton Jackson

Appearing in the 1890 Christmas issue of The Illustrated London News, this comic is a word-specific narrative that has been illustrated. The story is told in verse, a rarity for comics, and starts a full six stanzas before the first image. Furthering the separation of the words and the images, there are five stanzas for every four pictures. In addition, the sequence of the panels goes down the column, like text, rather than across the page. It comes as no surprise that the poem and the images were created by different people: the poem by Milton Jackson, the illustrations by J.B. Clark.

Jackson’s poem can be read and comprehended without the images, and in that since it is a word-driven narrative. However, it could also be considered a picture-specific narrative. If the reader ignores the words, he can piece together the story by looking at the pictures. A young man stands on his horse to kiss a girl in a second-story window; the horse is frightened by a donkey and runs away, leaving the young man clinging to the window-sill; an older man, presumably the girl’s father, walks out the front door, sees the young man, and becomes enraged; the young man pulls himself into the window, the father runs back inside; the young man drops back outside, onto the back of the donkey, and rides away.

The strip is simultaneously word-specific and picture-specific. It is not duo-specific, because the words and pictures don’t convey exactly the same information, but both the visual and textual sequences can stand on their own. Therefore, this could be seen as a sort of beginner’s comic, from an image-text perspective. It offers both pictures and words, and places them so that they could be complementary to each other, but does not demand that the reader both readand look. Just one or the other will suffice.