The tradition of storytelling in pictures dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when Valencia and Barcelona began to sell pictures for the people, most often on religious subjects. These are retellings of the lives of the saints in a series of small prints printed on sheets of colored paper (“hallelujahs”). The drawings on secular subjects were called “(hep. aucas)” (from the Spanish jeu de l’oie).
“Hallelujahs” in the 16th and 17th centuries were widespread in Flanders, France, and Germany.
Forerunners of comics include the political European caricatures of the eighteenth century. The engravings of the English artist and illustrator William Hogarth (1697-1764) were extremely popular and were a series of drawings telling a particular story. In 1730-1731 he produced a series of engravings of six paintings entitled “The Career of a Prostitute,” followed by the next, “The Career of a Moth,” which was published in 1735. In 1745, the famous satirical series “Fashionable Marriage” was created. A number of other series appeared, and in the mid-1850s almost any English bookstore or small shop could buy engravings by William Hogarth.
In the 19th century, a factory production of stories in pictures was established in Epinal. Thus, Pelleren’s factory produced 600 stories consisting of 16 square pictures with captions (the classic Spanish “hallelujah” had 48 pictures).
In 1830-1846, the Swiss Rodolphe Teupfer publishes in Geneva a series of albums about the adventures of Mr. Jabot and Mr. Crépin.
One of the founders of the comic book genre was the German satirist poet and painter Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908). His witty satirical poems in pictures are popular all over the world.
After 1870, illustrated weeklies in Europe began to use a form of lubonic “Epinal pictures.” Louis Lumiere borrowed the plot of “The Watered Waterman” from such picture books.