Before there were comic books there were comic strips. The latter are basically a series of sequential art used to tell a joke or story. Humor has long been associated with these images and eventually helped to name them. A comical set of four sequential panels, or a comic strip.
Such art goes back to cave paintings and hieroglyphs. But modern strips began to take form in 15th century when Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, born Jeroen Anthonissen van Aken (c. 1450 - August 9, 1516), painted various scenes with sequential narratives. Many of his works depict sin and human moral failings. Bosch used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man — images not unfamiliar in comic books today.
After that different people contributed to the form in different ways without knowing that was what they were doing. For example, from 1672-3, Francis Barlow, an English painter, etcher, and illustrator, drew The Cheese of Dutch Rebellion, a political cartoon which featured a text beneath the image, as well as speech balloons. Such early use of speech balloons was an important development.
William Hogarth, another English painter, published engravings of eight paintings in 1735, Rake’s Progress, combining text and art in a sequential fashion. He called his images, cartoons.
19th Century Advances
In the 19th century the comic strip form began to take shape more rapidly. William Heath, a British artist, helped found early caricature magazines. His The Glasgow Looking Glass was the first mass-produced publication to tell stories using illustrations and is regarded as the world’s first comic strip. It satirized the political and social life of Scotland in the 1820s.
In 1849, American artists James A. and Donald F. Read illustrated Journey To The Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags, which is the first picture story (or comic book) published in the United States. It tells the story of Jeremiah Saddlebags, an urban Northern dandy and “man of fashion,” who, looking for
a way to invest an inheritance, sets out towards California “by way of the Horn” (as in, by ship past Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America). The story relates his trials getting to San Francisco, and then his misadventures as he becomes involved in the California gold rush. He ends up one of the masses who did not get any “gold other than that of experience,” as art historian William Murrell put it in 1933 (A History of American Graphic Humor, 174).
In 1865, German painter, author, and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created the strip Max and Moritz, about two trouble- making boys, which had a direct influence on the American comic strip. Max and Moritz was a series of seven severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children’s stories such as Struwwelpeter (“Shockheaded Peter”). In the story’s final act, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill, and consumed by a flock of geese (without anybody mourning their demise). Max and Moritz provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids in 1897 – a strip starring two German-American boys visually modeled on Max and Moritz. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, sawing logs for snoring, speech balloons, and thought balloons originated in Dirks’ strip.
Ten years later, in 1875, Livingston Hopkins, an American- born cartoonist published Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm in The Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper known for daily illustrations. Professor Tigwissel was a one shot strip of 17 panels that filled the page and is one of the earliest newspaper comic strips and by the end of 1882, the American newspaper Grit began printing comic strips.
But strips at this time were one shots and solely for humor or political satire. Another ten years elapsed before they became recurring. The first to do so was Little Bears created by Jimmy Swinnerton, a cartoonist. The strip was one of the first American comic strips featuring talking animals and one of the first with recurring characters – the titular bears. The feature emerged from a series of spot illustrations of a bear cub that began appearing in The San Francisco Examiner starting October 14, 1893. The strip was launched as a regular feature on the children’s page starting June 2, 1895, and ran through June 7, 1897.
About the same time, 1893, Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World published the first color cartoon, The Possibilities of the Broadway Cable Car, in an American newspaper. The images, attributed to Walt McDougall, appeared on the cover of the World’s first color Sunday comic supplement, thus started the tradition of color comics on Sunday.
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