A Rake's Progress

Painted and then engraved by William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress follows Tom Rakewell through eight numbered scenes: he inherits a fortune, squanders it on fashion and vice, marries for money, gambles away everything, lands in debtors' prison, and ends his ruin in the madhouse at Bethlem. Hogarth called such series "modern moral subjects," and the phrase matters — these were stories, designed to be read in a fixed order, each plate advancing the plot while the viewer imagines the time elapsed between them. Every image is crowded with tell-tale detail rewarding the reader who lingers. Sold by subscription as prints, the series reached a wide public and made Hogarth both famous and, eventually, an advocate for the print copyright protections of his era. Strip away the frames and gilt, and the machinery is unmistakably that of the comic: a continuing character, a sequence of panels, a narrative built from the gaps between pictures as much as from the pictures themselves. A Rake's Progress is not a comic book, but it is one of the clearest proofs that its storytelling logic is nearly three centuries old.