Remembering David Kunzle

UCLA faculty photo.

David Kunzle opened the doors of academic art history to comics history, and vice versa. During my dissertation years, in the mid to late 1990s, David’s work somehow intimidated and reassured me at the same time. Just knowing that the two volumes of his History of the Comic Strip (1973 and 1990) existed, and that they had been published by the University of California Press, seemed to pry open new possibilities. Knowing that the history of comic art in Europe could be traced back so far, that comics historiography was just a step beyond the generative work of Ernst Gombrich, that comics could be approached as part of a long history of contentious political art - knowing these things seemed to rewrite the rules of what we now call Comics Studies.

We really wouldn’t have a Comics Studies worth the name without David Kunzle.

I did not know what to make of David’s work at first, and I continue to be daunted by its variety and inexhaustibility. He was an expert in Netherlandish art, Renaissance art, political graphics, more broadly art as protest, and the history of fashion and fetishism (ultimately his most controversial area, he told me). Of course, I knew him as a comics scholar. Part of his legacy is the implicit argument that comics studies is not, and cannot be, separated from these other things. Thank goodness.

In the mid '90s, the out-of-print first volume of the History circulated among my comics scholar cronies as a massive sheaf of photocopies. I remember trading listserv messages about how to get it. That’s how badly we wanted it. Needed it.

Besides the monumental History, David wrote a great deal else about comics, and translated and edited several collections of 19th century cartooning. After his “retirement” from UCLA in 2009, he created, by my count, at least four new books (as well as revised editions of earlier works). The Indian summer of his career seemed to bring him back to comics and cartooning with a vengeance, as he elaborated upon and substantiated earlier findings with detailed studies, including his two essential volumes on Töpffer and his final book, Rebirth of the English Comic Strip. (He knew ahead of time that it would be his last book - he told me so while the book was still in progress.)

As someone who came to Comics Studies as a U.S. “comic book fan,” and from an English studies perspective to boot, I first responded to David’s work as simply a signal of possibility. Later, I learned gratitude for it all over again. His run of work since 2007 reignited the radical sense of possibility that I first felt in the mid '90s when I learned of the History. There is no richer run of historiographical work in Western comics scholarship.

I only met David in person a few times; our face-to-face conversations were limited to maybe three or four. The last time was about a year and a half ago, when he contacted me about taking some books from his research collection, which he was donating out. With the help of his wife Marjoyrie, I visited David for a day in the late summer of 2022, skimmed through part of what remained of his collection with him, picked out two boxes of books I thought I should donate to my university library, and shared tea and lunch with him. I was awed to be with him and meekly grateful for his graciousness and the way he shared out from his experience. It was startling to be in his home and presence, to glimpse mementos and moments from his life. I didn’t know what was ailing him (amyloidosis) but understood that he was in fragile health. About that, I did not know what to say. I asked David a bit about his experiences teaching at UCLA, about his political commitments as they shaped his scholarship, about his resistance to art history’s business as usual. I wish I could remember all he told me.

I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that I would be seeing him again. Indeed, I was invited to call him and see him again, months later, but couldn’t get out from under the avalanche of my work schedule to do that good thing. Thinking about that now, I feel ashamed.

The pioneers of comics scholarship have been quirky, self-motivated excavators—diggers, obsessives, brave cussed souls—who did not respect the boundaries usually drawn around the subject. That was undeniably David. He could do, and did, so much: a veritable Renaissance person. Ha, I learned only days ago that he performed at the southern California Renaissance Faire for years - that’s where my wife and I met! Damn.

David Kunzle’s work still stands as a reminder that Comics Studies can, and must, be less parochial, bolder and less boundaried. He taught and continues to teach us that, among the many, many other things he did and offered. R.I.P. to a man who made my field possible and worthwhile.

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