Page - 22 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

22 | Christian Wessely www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 17–44 with a strict seriality and the use of speech bubbles. Until the 1930s the “offi- cial” comic genre was still dominated by the humorous content that had been responsible for its name. in the mid 1920s, however, demand for pornographic comics thrived, in the U.s. market in particular, where cheaply produced book- lets with eight to ten pages were sold under the collective name Tijuana Bibles.14 in 1929 Belgian George remi, writing under the pen name hergé, designed the series entitled The Adventures of Tintin,15 a pioneering achievement in blend- ing adventure story and comic elements. the same year saw the publication of hal foster’s Tarzan, an adventure story full of suspense but with realistic depictions,16 which launched a paradigm shift, with the move away from the comic genre towards the adventure and hero genre, a trend that continued with the detective comic Dick Tracy (1931) and reached a zenith with the eponymous superhero characters of Superman (1938) and Batman (1939), both published by DC Comics. the comical receded or was eliminated as the “comic” forsook its origins. the comic’s format also changed, as the comic strips that had been the rule until the 1930s were supplemented by comic albums that might have sixteen or more pages.17 the time was ripe for such innovation, for, as Drechsel/ Funhoff/Hoffmann have noted, such superheroes not only provided a means of 14 http://www.tijuanabible.org/. 15 By the time of his death in 1983, Hergé had created 24 volumes in the Tintin series; volume 25 lay unfin- ished on his desk. 16 hal foster’s renown stemmed not only from tarzan but also from Prince Valiant. Both series lack the speech bubble, an essential part of the comic. foster’s characters do talk, but the text is written as a side note to each panel and is sufficiently elaborate for the story to be gleaned from the text alone, without the aid of the pictures. thus, Price Valiant and tarzan are more illustrated stories than comics. 17 Due to the production process, the size of an album of issues corresponds to the size of the print- sheets. A printsheet is usually cut into sixteen pages, and as the number of pages in a volume is usually calculated by half printsheets, such volumes usually contain eight pages. Fig. 3: Dance of Death, Bleibach, about 1720. © Jörgens.mi / CC-BY-SA-3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons). The banner says “Mein Trompetenschall bringt Freud oder Truebsal in Ewigkeit“ (The sound of my trumpets brings joy or sadness for eternity).