Wilhelm Busch: Die Bildergeschichten. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, I: Frühwerk; II: Reifezeit; III: Spätwerk (review)

For English readers Wilhelm Busch is probably best known, if he is known at all, for his 'fable in seven fyttes' Max und Moritz (1865) and for his role as a founding father of the modern strip cartoon. Indeed, Max und Moritz is said to have prompted Randolph Hearst to the commissioning for his New York Journal of 'The Katzenjammer Kids' strip, first drawn by Rudolph Dirks in 1897 and a significant development in popular cartooning. (Ries refines the history of this event but does not mention Busch's own dwelling on the comic possibilities of 'Katzenjammer' — the trials of hangover — in a strip in the Fliegende Blätter of 1867, Der Katzenjammer am Neujahrsmorgen, and in his extended portrayal of drunks in his book of 1878, Die Haarbeutel.)

The arrival of Max und Moritz in Germany served to confirm the emergence of a notable talent in the creation of narrative pictures. By 1865 Busch had already attracted attention through more than twenty contributions to Braun & Schneider's picture sheets, the Fliegende Blätter and Münchener Bilderbogen, and had had one gathering of four stories published as a book. This was the Bilderpossen of 1864 (which was to form the chief contents of his first work to be published in England, A Bushel of Merrythoughts, translated by Harry Rogers, 1868), and although its commercial failure deterred its small publisher, Heinrich Richter, from taking on and hence enjoying the success of Max und Moritz, it demonstrated how work done for the ephemeral sheets of local weekly or monthly papers might also be extended and given a more dramatic rendering in the leaves of a codex. From 1865 onwards Busch turned more and more to the design of picture stories in book form, through which he became perhaps the most popular and best-loved author in Germany for the second half of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth.

'Author' is a term here used advisedly, for in welcoming and seeking to justify this massive 'historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe' of Busch's picture stories, stress must be laid on the spirited versatility first of his choice of subjects, second of his skill as a versifier, and third of his graphic style. The last may seem paramount — and Ries notes of the early work that the progress of stories was often mapped out in drawings before a text was composed — but casual assessments that what he was turning out was a homogeneous succession of rather ferocious comic tales in doggerel is wide of the mark. Each of the (eventual) seventy-odd single-sheet picture stories and the twenty books is individually conceived in all its elements. Thus at one end of the scale one might find the seventeen romping, satirical chapters of Die Fromme Helene (1872) with their succession of energetic images commenting on and enhancing the text, while at the other there are the seven nursery tales of Stippstörchen (1880), with text and colour-printed illustrations carefully designed as a unity for each page of a children's book, with the narratives, which owe much to fable and folk-tale models, only a mite less drastic than those intended primarily for adult readers.

The survival of a vast array of manuscript drafts, drawings, correspondence, and related materials, and the accessibility of much of it at the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, have presented Hans Ries with an unparalleled opportunity to undertake the exhaustive study of the master's work in these three huge volumes, a project that has occupied him for eleven years or more. Each volume is constructed to the same plan. The first half reprints both text and pictures for what...