Comic strip

A comic strip, sometimes called a strip cartoon, is a series of cartoon panels placed together to tell a short joke or a story, often continuing from one day to the next. Words usually appear in speech balloons or captions.

For most of the 1900s and into the 2000s, these strips appeared in newspapers and magazines. Daily papers ran black-and-white horizontal strips, while Sunday editions offered longer, color sequences. The internet later gave rise to online versions known as webcomics.

Most strips are both written and drawn by a single cartoonist. While the name "comic" suggests humor, strips can also be dramatic or educational. Gag-a-day examples include Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Marmaduke, and Pearls Before Swine. In the late 1920s, adventure stories joined the fun, with strips like Popeye, Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and Terry and the Pirates.

By the 1940s, soap-opera-style continuity strips such as Judge Parker and Mary Worth became popular. Because not all comic strips are funny, cartoonist Will Eisner suggested calling the form "sequential art" instead. In the United States, strips appeared inside magazines like Liberty and Boys' Life, and on the covers of supplements such as The American Weekly with its Flossy Frills series. In the United Kingdom and Europe, strips are also serialized in comic book magazines, sometimes spanning three pages.

History

Telling stories with a sequence of pictures is ancient. An Iranian earthenware bowl shows a goat jumping toward a tree, then arriving and eating leaves. Similar sequential images appear in medieval Islamic Persia. The Bayeux Tapestry is a medieval European textile example.

Printed sequential narratives emerged in 19th-century Germany and mid-18th-century England, where early satirical drawings appeared. William Hogarth’s 18th-century English caricatures include narrative sequences like A Rake’s Progress as well as single panels. The Biblia pauperum, a late medieval picture Bible tradition, sometimes showed biblical figures with words on scrolls coming from their mouths, making them ancestors of modern comic strips. In China, experiments with lianhuanhua date back to 1884.

The modern English-language comic strip began with the flourishing of caricature in late-18th-century London. Artists like Richard Newton and George Woodward created sophisticated styles using strips of expressive comic figures with captions read left to right for cumulative effect, and they developed business models for selling cheap comic illustrations by subscription. Other leading British caricaturists also made strips.

James Gillray produced Democracy;-or-a Sketch of the Life of Buonaparte. Thomas Rowlandson used strips as early as 1784, for example in The Loves of the Fox and the Badger. Rowlandson may have invented the first internationally recognized comic strip character: Doctor Syntax, whose picaresque travels through England were told in comic etchings with verse.

First published in parts between 1809 and 1811 in Rudolf Ackermann’s Poetical Magazine, the book The Tour of Doctor Syntax in search of the picturesque went through nine editions from 1812 to 1819, spawned two sequels, a prequel, many pirate copies, and translations into French, German, and Danish. His image appeared on pottery, textiles, wallpaper, and other merchandise. The Caricature Magazine or Hudibrastic Mirror, an influential English comic series published in London from 1807 to 1819 by Thomas Tegg, included satirical stories in comic strip format, such as The Adventures of Johnny Newcome.

Newspapers

The first newspaper comic strips appeared in North America in the late 1800s. The Yellow Kid is often credited as one of the first, though the art form combining words and pictures developed gradually. The Glasgow Looking Glass was the first mass-produced publication to tell stories with illustrations and is considered the world’s first comic strip.

It satirized Scottish political and social life in the 1820s and was conceived and illustrated by William Heath. Swiss author and caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) is considered the father of modern comic strips. His illustrated stories, such as Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois (1827, first published in the US in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck) and Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (1831), inspired later German and American comic artists. In 1865, German painter and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created Max and Moritz, a strip about two mischievous boys.

It consisted of seven moralistic tales in the tradition of German children’s stories like Struwwelpeter. In the final act, the boys are thrown into a sack of grain, ground through a mill, and eaten by geese, with no one mourning them. Max and Moritz inspired German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897, a strip featuring two boys.