The seventy-ninth meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 18, 2014 at 7:00 PM at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. PLEASE NOTE: Events this semester will take place on Tuesday evenings.

Presentation: Patricia Mainardi on Picture Stories/Stories with Pictures.

At the same time that Rodolfe Topffer was creating his first comic books (1830s), book illustration was undergoing a parallel transformation. New printing techniques encouraged hundreds of illustrations instead of the few characteristic of earlier publications. Artists were now faced with new questions: What to draw? How to draw? How to integrate text and image? Patricia Mainardi will survey the parallel history of illustrated books and comic books, mirror images of each other in their first flower of development.

Patricia Mainardi is an art historian, professor emerita in the doctoral program in art history at the City University of New York . A specialist in nineteenth-century art, she has published numerous books and articles on topics from painting to comics and is currently completing  a book on nineteenth-century illustrated print culture, including comics, caricature, and illustrated books and periodicals.