… in the new entertainment industry of creative businesses…

ART as a language before the alphabet cannot be disputed. Much of what we know of the prehistoric world through the study of social Anthropology and Archaeology is told to us on interpretation and the science of carbon dating through the works of ancient artists.

Knowledge that the Sahara was once fertile can be credited to estimated 8,000-year-old artworks on caves of tropical scenes with animals unknown to the Sahara. Other strange artworks are alluded to represent what is suggested as alien visitors or unidentified-mythical kind creatures on earth. Art on the walls of caves and against the body of mountains and hills and etched on selective choice rocks span some 300,000 years of human history, with the oldest found so far, in Africa.

The drama of art heralding the comic book, the editorial cartoon and the graphic novel also began in Africa, in ancient Khemet [Egypt] from celebrating the propaganda art for the Pharaohs. It was only natural that the calibre of talent that produced the fresco and public art and design would shift to satirical commentary as revealed in the strip accompanying this article.

The ancient world was much unlike what 19th-century European pro colonist academia would concoct. The ancient world traded in ideas, techniques and improved on new exchanges, to facilitate homegrown talent. Because story telling is a natural human propensity, so it was easy for graphic storytelling to manifest across cultures and continents, limitations on expression were based on the open-mindedness and tolerance, or the opposing intolerance and fear of ruling hierarchies, be it from the throne or the temple.

This was no different in the modern world and the propaganda of Roman adopted Christianity and the era of colonisation needed its graphic storytellers. There is no other artist whose storytelling graphic paintings have had such impact over centuries as a compelling force of mesmerising propaganda as that of Michelangelo’s incredible work of the divine, in the Sistine Chapel 1475-1564.

No, it was not intended to be used as a tool of continuous indoctrination by the artist, it was a contract and he wasn’t on friendly terms with his contractors most of the time. But it was the tool utilised by the printmaking and book industry of the 19th and 20th centuries to define God and the divine along ethnic lines. And despite our analysis, we have to celebrate the man’s talent as well as the vision of the State and Church sponsors that made it happen, coupled with Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, half the work in respect to our history, of creating the colonial, was visually done.

Cartoons and caricature art were integral as tools in every conflict since the advent of Newspapers and magazines. In both world wars and in the politics of British Guiana, I can remember those comic books given out by the United Force during the 1960s about the evils of communism. Imagine no record with all the sources I have explored have an archive of those.

In 1978 in America the late Will Eisner’s ‘A Contract with God’ launched the graphic novel evolution of the comic book. This cartoonist had professed “Our era requires imagery: a visual, literary language to occupy the space between books and film.” Another celebration of the art form was the Maus comics by Art Spiegelman that described his parents’ experience in Auschwitz concentration camp. He won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for that work.

On the local Guyana and Caribbean scene, the talents exist to develop an active graphic storytelling realm of its own, but unlike music, in the wider Caribbean that always had an active tourist audience to showcase with visiting exchange acts, it was easier for active local acts to perform across waters.

Guyana and British Guiana were no different in relation to visiting acts and our own quality groups, but the musical story is for another time. Where illustrated storytelling was concerned, Guyana was ahead, whether with local editorial cartoons or comic book and strip productions they existed but never got the opportunity to expand the potential and become progressive businesses. Such talents as Rudy Seymour, Tyrone Doris, Gregory Shanks, Hubert Edwards stepped out into the field, other talents saw gloom with unreceptive authorities and drifted off.

The essential failure back then was the fixations of the local ‘Colonial’ who were the businessmen, politicians and educators. Their prejudices were constructed by the not so comical effective positioning of Comic Book and Comic Strip usage during the just concluded second World War. And before that, locally with the maintaining of the ethnic bigotry in defining the local social strata and what stereotypical imagery what group must conform to, the further political uses of the comic book as a propaganda tool in the cold war confirmed those biases to envelop the comic book as a ‘serious’ must be well content censored creative medium. But regardless, the Graphic artists from my perspective have proven our point on the prolific potential of illustrated storytelling.

So far, even though Graphic novels, comic books, their educational and business potential pose a not typical but rather a new and complex business arena to Guyana, that is entangled in the limbo of an era not too grown up from its recent colony status. Two comic book publications were taken to the theatrical stage, ‘Shadow of the Jaguar’ and ‘Legend of the Silk Cotton tree’. No doubt other talents on realising that an accepting awareness exists toward embracing new lucrative creative career choices, will add to the emancipated vibrancy of a yet to be organised and conscientiously supported Cultural Industries.

Acknowledgement must be affixed to the post-Independence temperament of Forbes Burnham for the impetus behind existing graphic art talents, that argued for the replacement of imported heroic storytelling with local concepts and imagery. This of course was met with resistance and still is, but we live in a different technological world and for the few who have endured the test of time, the timidness of that early post-Independence challenge has worn off, and our talents have so far fulfilled our mandate.