History of Comics

Abstract

This paper is based on exploring the in a holistic context. The history of comics is a bit convoluted. The word comes from the Greek, komikos, which means “pertaining to comedy,” and the earliest comic strips were humorous, but the term has little in common with today's, often grim and gritty, comic books. “Sequential art” is the term most often applied to modern-day comics, and the history of sequential art stretches back to the cavemen! However, the history of today's comic books begins a lot closer to present-time. Modern-day historians have retroactively termed some 19th-Century books “graphic novels,” but the first real comic was The Yellow Kid, which debuted in The World, a New York-based newspaper, in 1895. Originally referred to as “the funnies,” the term, “comics,” caught-on in the early 1900s. This paper identifies that by the 1940s and '50s, every literary genre was represented. The most popular were Romance, Western, Detective, and Horror comic books - the latter of which were largely published by EC Comics. These comics were so effective that they came under fire for “corrupting youth” and the comic book industry created the Comics Code in response. Some cite this self-imposed sanitation as the catalyst for the rising popularity of superheroes, as they had been around since the 1930s, but were not big-sellers before then.

History of Comics

Today the earliest known comic book is called The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck. Originally published in several languages in Europe in 1837, among them an English version designed for Britain in 1941. A year later it was that version reprinted in New York on Sept. 14, 1842 for Americans, making it the first comic book printed in America. Odadiah Oldbuck is 40 pages long and measured 8 ½" x 11". The book was side stitched, and inside there were 6 to 12 panels per page. No word balloons, but there is text under the panels to describe the story. A copy of it was discovered in Oakland, California in 1998[1].

The comic was done by Switzerland's Rudolphe Töpffer, who has been considered in Europe (and starting to become here in America) as the creator of the picture story. He created the comic strip in 1827 and the comic book/graphic novel. Rudolphe Töpffer created several (7 is known) graphic novels that were extremely successful and reprinted in many different languages, several of them had English versions in America in 1846. The books remained in print in America until 1877. There are an unknown amount of Victorian Age Comic Books, this era of comic book history is still being discovered, researched and recorded. When more information is available I'll be writing about this as well[2].

An influential illustrated book to come out in this period was called The Brownies: Their Book. The Brownies feature wasn't really a comic book per say. They were created by Palmer Cox and originally part of a children's magazine called St. Nicholas. The Brownies first appeared in the magazine in 1883 in a story called The Brownies' Ride. The Brownies were heavily merchandised and one of the ...