COMING SOON on A Book - A Place: Geneva...

Comic books, or graphic novels, have been around for, what? A century? Perhaps more? 

Where did they spring from? The America of the superheroes? The Belgium of Tintin, perhaps? What about Japan, that gave us manga and animé? 

Long before any of those, almost two centuries ago, a Genevan teacher and writer with failing eyesight and frustrated ambitions as a painter, created and published most historians of the genre now consider the first ever comic strip. Loved by perhaps the greatest writer of the day, Goethe, and read and pirated all over Europe, Rodolphe Toepffer's work is now far less well known than it should be. 

On this episode of A Book - A Place: Geneva we go in search of the real inventor of comic books.

Part history podcast, part bookclub, part travel guide, A Book - A Place: Geneva looks at the stories behind the stories 

Available on your podcast app and at abookaplace.com