#aztec codex

Opossum characters are found in several Mesoamerican codices; here is an amazing sequence from the Aztec Codex Fejérváry-Mayer of an opossum warrior-god performing a ritual decapitation.

“Calvin and Hobbes” is one of most well beloved newspaper comic strips by our generation.  Its funny and sometimes poignant.  I recently wrote a short post imagining that I was a book historian from the far future, looking back and trying to make sense of the comic strip format.  Would a person so far outside the context of our culture be able to understand even how to read it?  Artist and writers from antiquity used media conventions that we do not understand today.  The cave paintings that we discussed the first day in class appear to not express things in a linear fashion, and perhaps even represent motion through repeated images.  But we really don’t know what information it conveyed to its contemporaries.  This is also true in the Aztec Codices, much of the information in the codices of the pre-Columbian Americans would have been retained in the mind of the scribe.  There are many anthropomorphic beings in the Aztec and Mayan writings, whether men dressed in animal skins, or deities with animal shapes.  The illustrated manuscripts of the Medieval period in Europe are very much akin to our present comic drawings, where the image can tell as much of the story as the text.  Also a scribe might include comical drawings in the margins, or pictures of animals doing what only humans can do, like in many of our comic strips.