The true inventor of the superhero comic? William Blake

Among the documents in the West Sussex Record Office is an indictment for sedition of a certain William Blake. During an altercation in a Felpham garden in August 1803, he is accused by one John Scofield, a soldier in the British army then at war with France, of having shouted: ‘Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves.’

Fortunately for the accused, when the case came to trial in Chichester the following January the ‘invented character’ of Scofield’s evidence was judged to be ‘so obvious that an acquittal resulted’. It looks as if Blake got off lightly. Had the judge been better versed in the work of our great artist-poet, he might have noticed that Schofield’s accusation had the ring of truth: this was exactly the sort of curse that Blake – obsessed with enslavement, mental and physical – would have uttered. His prophetic books are full of contrasts between images of liberation and figures in chains – including a naked, manacled ‘Skofield’ dragging his leg irons towards the gate of Hell in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1794–1820).

Like many of his countrymen, Blake had supported the French revolutionaries before the Terror. Along with other radical nonconformists he saw the turmoil unleashed by revolutions in America, France and Haiti as a fulfilment of the prophecies of Revelation, destined to sweep away the old corrupt order and ‘drain the swamp’. Instead of an isolated crackpot crying in the wilderness, the Fitzwilliam’s exhibition seeks to reposition him as a member of a millenarian generation of artists searching for spiritual renewal through art. The trouble is that the works of George Romney, John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli, Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich mustered in support of this view succeed only in making Blake seem more unique.