Just reported via The Daily Cartoonist: comics historian Maurice Horn passed away on December 30, 2022. He was 91.
Maurice Horn is a French-American comics historian, author, and editor, considered to be one of the first serious academics to study comics. He is the editor of The World Encyclopedia of Comics, The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, and 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics.
He was born in France. Horn was a writer in the 1950s, then emigrated to the United States, looking for more lucrative work.
Returning frequently to France, he was a member of the 1960s groups Club Bande Dessinée and SOCERLID ("Société civile d’études et de recherché des littératures dessinées"), which championed the idea of comics as "the ninth art" and worthy of academic study.[2] Horn was instrumental in organizing three important exhibitions of comics art in the late 1960s and early 1970s:[2]
- Bande dessinée et figuration narrative. 7 April–12 June 1967, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
- AAARGH!: a Celebration of Comics. 31 December 1970 – 7 February 1971, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
- 75 Years of the Comics. 8 September–7 November 1971, New York Cultural Center, New York[4]
Horn's two-volume The World Encyclopedia of Comics, first published in 1976, focused on American and European comics (although not exclusively), with extensive biographical notes and publication histories.[5] It was one of the first and most comprehensive resources of its kind,[6] and spawned seven volumes. A complete edition was published in 1997 (and updated again in 1999), and included the work of fifteen contributors.[7]
It was Maurice Horn’s massive World Encyclopedia of Comics in 1976 that put his name front and center.
Though not without some controversy since he, as editor, changed some accounts to suit his debatable interpretations of characters without advising or informing the contributors who wrote the original entries.
And, as the first of its kind, there were the inevitable errors.
But even so it was a monumental leap forward in the publishing of comics history.
From Kim A. Munson’s How the French Kickstarted the Acceptance of Comics as an Art Form in the US: the Books and Exhibitions of Maurice Horn:
After the NYCC exhibition, Horn shifted his focus to writing, editing and publishing. In 1974, he began production on The World Encyclopedia of Comics, which became a bestseller and the book he is most known for. The July 1976 hardcover first edition is 790 pages with 850 illustrations, and contains over 1,200 entries, contributed by historians from the Philippines, US, Italy, Germany, Spain, UK, Canada, France, Japan, Yugoslavia, and Australia. According to WorldCat, Chelsea House (New York) published 69 editions of the encyclopedia between 1976 and 1999. Horn told me that this number represents over 200,000 copies sold worldwide. The World Encyclopedia was substantially updated in 1997.
Horn told me that the encyclopedia made so much money from its royalties that he bought an apartment at One Fifth Avenue, an Art Deco landmark, built in 1927 by Harvey Wiley Corbett, which he eventually sold. On publication, The World Encyclopedia got good reviews as a literary work in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and The Chicago Daily News. As for its practical use, the reviews were mixed; the book became both an indispensable reference and a source of frustration as knowledgeable fans and historians identified inaccuracies in many of the entries. Some people expecting a reference work to have a more neutral voice objected to the strong criticism put forth by a few of the contributors. However we look at it now, The World Encyclopedia was a major undertaking and the first work of its kind.
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