Originally published at: When did comics shift to focusing on visual storytelling? | Boing Boing
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his importance to the medium of comics can’t be understated.
Uh, maybe the opposite?
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Krigstein was a painting teacher at the HS of Art & Design while i was a student there. He was among one of the many brilliant artists that taught there, something many of did not appreciate until later (dumb kids). I wish i had been smart enough to ask more questions of those teachers while i was there.
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I don’t think the You Tuber ever heard of Will Eisner. He was doing this kind of thing years before Krigstein.
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Personally, I have always found it weird that modern comics have largely stopped using thought bubbles, something I consider an essential part of the language of comics.
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Do you have some images in mind? I have not seen a lot of the Spirit, I remember a lot of it as being verbose. It was definitely work that stood out from its time, but I remember it as more cartoony, not having this much drama.
Comic Tropes also covered that one some time ago.
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I watched the video to the end, and although Krigstein was on the cutting edge at 1955, I feel the European artists like Hergé, Goscinny, and later Jean Gireaud (AKA Moebius) also helped. Were it not for Metal Hurlant and then Heavy Metal, I suspect American comic publishers would have remained deaf to Krigstein’s acolytes.
In the end, I suspect the obscurity of “Master Race” may have been the true secret to fueling the later revolution: “secret” knowledge is cherished, appreciated more.
And we all are richer for it. Merci beaucoup, M. Krigstein, wherever you are.
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“… can’t be overstated,” surely 
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These people never heard of Windsor McCay?
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You right, you right.
Good catch, friend.
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Alas, the original is gone, but the Wayback Machine still has a copy:
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I read that comics/web page and It screamed Invincible and Garth Ennis out loud…
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Oh, one more thing I ought to mention: the fact that Bernard Krigstein did this in 1955 is also important because it shows how European, American and Japanese comics weren’t as different as many suppose. It’s an aspect that Scott McCloud missed when he penned Understanding Comics, where he attributed pacing and panels without words to the Japanese, saying they evolved it first.
So it is interesting after all, not only for how Krigstein introduced “cinematic” sequential art, but also how the timeline shows how these evolutions interweaved.
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But at least that text is full of pictures. 
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I felt similarly about Eisner’s work before actively seeking out his stuff to read, but that cartoony rendering style is a bit deceptive. Especially after he came back to actively working on Spirit after WWII - the 1946-1951 work is light years more advanced than what he was doing in say, 1940 or earlier… but he retained the cartoony look (although much more polished) for the rest of his career. But the layouts, rendering, lighting, pacing… it’s all just so tasty.
It took me a while to get used to the more cartoony/older figure drawing style after decades of reading 1970s or newer Marvel and DC books with more proportioned (or attempts at) figure drawing, but I find myself examining/enjoying the style of Eisner and his contemporaries much more these days.
The same could be said for Harvey Kurtzman’s drawing style - and his is even MORE cartoony-looking, but he was one of the best layout/storytelling artists (or at least, one of the most influential, encoding the house layout style for MAD and other seminal humor art mags) ever.
Eisner’s works could get wordy, but like Dave Sim as well - his hand-lettering style was so unique that I consider it more a part of the artwork than just a text overlay (looking at you, Al Feldstein/EC!). And he definitely knew his way around dialogue-less space when he wanted to:
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