Young Historians Corner: A Brief History of the Comic Strip

 

Welcome back to the Young Historians Corner, where we get to hear from rising historians. In this series, every story is dreamed up and written by students with a passion for the past.

This month, Lucy is diving into the history of the comic strip. From 18th-century British caricatures to Calvin and Hobbes, comics have had a longer history than you think. In fact, its roots go all the way back to the 3rd millennium BCE—that’s over 5,000 years ago! Keep reading to uncover the fascinating history of this humorous art form.

Introducing…

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COMIC STRIP

By Lucy N.
Grade 9

In today’s day and age, it seems unlikely that I would have any personal experiences with comic strips since so much entertainment is tied to screens. That is not the case. As a child, before I even knew how to read, I would look at the funny pages in my grandmother’s newspapers. During COVID, when I was in third grade, my interest grew when I found a stack of old book collections of Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side that belonged to my parents, who grew up in the 1970s-1980s. I was a little kid at this point, and these comic strips were funny, just for the sake of it. Children’s media tries so very hard to teach lesson upon lesson, but the comic strips let me enjoy them at my own leisure, without any expectations. Around the time I was twelve, I began reading Peanuts, Bloom County, and Dilbert, all of which I still enjoy today.

While my personal history with comic books is only 10-12 years old, the true history of comic strips is far older. Comic strips are based on sequential pictures. This means that the pictures are meant to show one thing happening after another.

The first known sequential pictures are almost as old as civilization itself. An earthenware bowl from Iran that’s nearly 5,200 years old depicts a goat jumping towards a tree.

This ancient pottery vessel found in Iran includes five pictures:
a goat stepping toward a tree, climbing up, eating leaves, and coming down.
Image by Emesik via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

In the mid-fourteenth century, similar sequential images appear on European tapestries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, printed examples of sequential images came along, this time with the intent of telling a story and being funny. William Hogarth made humorous sequential and single-panel stories poking fun at English high society. British caricature was also an early form of comic characters, featuring simply drawn figures with exaggerated facial expressions and captions, sometimes drawn in sequential stories, as in the cases of famous caricaturists like James Gilray and Thomas Rowlandson. So in effect, the comic strip, which is defined as a sequential, humorous image-and-text-based story, existed in different forms way before the type of comic strips we know today.

 

College Pranks by Thomas Rowlandson, 1811. Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now we just need to dive into how they got to America and how they became popular. By the 1890s, printing was finally cheap, and the amount of newspapers circulating in the US was starting to increase. In the past, publishing funny written stories had been popular, but as more and more immigrants came to the US who couldn’t read English, some publishers started to call for a pictographic or image-based version of these stories. 

The first REAL American comic strip (in other words, the type that appears in a newspaper, is popular, and reaches a wide audience) was the comic strip called The Yellow Kid, which began syndication in 1895.

The main character was a small boy in a yellow nightgown who played mischievous pranks in a run-down alley full of urchins that was known as Hogan's Alley. This serialized strip was so popular that the original artist, Richard F. Outcault, quit in 1898 on account of being sick and tired of drawing the Yellow Kid (also known as Mickey Dugan).

From there, comic strips boomed and often reflected the attitudes and situations of a particular time period. For instance, in the 1920s, there were comics that were the first to heavily feature women, especially flappers, such as Nell Brinkley's The Adventures of Prudence Prim and Ethel Hays's Flapper Fanny Says (Flapper is a term for women who, in the 1920s, had a certain look with a bob haircut and shorter skirt and often engaged in rebellious actions). In the 1930s, there were many adventure comics to help readers escape the Great Depression, such as Popeye the Sailor, Tarzan, and Buck Rogers.

By 1947, the artist Charles Schulz debuted a comic strip called Li’l Folks in which the now-famous Charlie Brown character first appeared. 

 

Charles Schulz with a drawing of Charlie Brown, 1956.
Image from the Library of Congress.

 

Lastly, my favorite comic strip, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, first appeared in 1985. The comic strip has a fun, whimsical tone that centers on a six-year-old boy (Calvin) and his stuffed tiger (Hobbes). The two of them get absorbed in imaginative adventures. Calvin and Hobbes ended its run in newspapers by 1995. It has been called the “last great newspaper comic” as people turned more to the web for entertainment. If you haven’t yet read any Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, check them out!

 

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