In a 9-square-metre panel created for the Comics Museum, cartoonist Davide Toffolo traces an imaginary journey through the centuries. Guiding you on this journey is Yellow Kid — the world’s first comic book character — who wears a shirt bearing the question: “Were comics around before me?”. His answer is always the same: “Almost.”
The idea behind the work is simple: what we now call comics emerges only at the end of the nineteenth century on the pages of American newspapers, yet visual storytelling has existed since prehistory. Frescoes, mosaics, manuscripts, tapestries, murals and many other human creations seem to approach that language and at times come close to it.
The narrative follows the Western reading direction, from top right to bottom left. At a glance, you can connect images from distant times in a surprisingly clear sequence: from the Cave of Altamira to the Egyptian tomb of Nebamun, from the mosaics of the Basilica of Aquileia to the Bayeux Tapestry, from Trajan’s Column to medieval illuminated manuscripts, from the art of Botticelli and the Japanese prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi to the nineteenth-century works of Rodolphe Töpffer.
