20th Century Evolution Of Comic Books
A comic book or comicbook, also called comic magazine or simply comic, is a publication, first popularized in the United States, of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are often accompanied by brief descriptive prose and written narrative, usually dialog contained in word balloons emblematic of the comics art form. The first comic book appeared in the United States in 1933 and was a reprinting of earlier newspaper comic strips which had established many of the story-telling devices used in comics. The term comic book arose because the first comic book reprinted humor comic strips. Despite their name, comic books are not necessarily humorous in tone—modern comic books tell stories in many genres. Since the introduction of the comic book format in 1933 with the publication of Famous Funnies, the United States has produced the most titles, along with British comics and Japanese manga, in terms of quantity of titles. Cultural historians divide the career of the comic book in the U.S. into several ages or historical eras. Comic book historians continue to debate the exact boundaries of these eras, but they have come to an agreement, the terms for which originated in the fan press. Comics as a print medium have existed in America since the printing of The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck in 1842 in hardcover—making it the first known American prototype comic book. The introduction of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman in 1938 turned comic books into a major industry, and is the start of the Golden Age of comics. Historians have proposed several names for the Age before Superman, most commonly dubbing it the Platinum Age. While the Platinum Age saw the first use of the term "comic book" (The Yellow Kid in McFadden's Flats (1897)), the first known full-color comic (The Blackberries (1901)), and the first monthly comic book (Comics Monthly (1922)), it was not until the Golden Age that the archetype of the superhero would originate.
- Comics In Past Times -
The history of comics has followed divergent paths in different cultures. American comics emerged as a mass medium in the early 20th century with the advent of newspaper comic strips; magazine-style comic books followed in the 1930s. By the mid-20th century, comics became popular in periodical and book form, especially in the US, western Europe (particularly France and Belgium), and Japan. Since the late 20th century, bound volumes such as graphic novels, comics albums, and tankōbon have become increasingly common. Comics has had a lowbrow reputation for much of its history, but towards the end of the 20th century began to find greater acceptance with the public and within academia. It is common in English to refer to the comics of different cultures by the terms used in their original languages, such as manga for Japanese comics, or bandes dessinées for French-language comics. There is no consensus among theorists and historians on a definition of comics, with some emphasizing the combination of images and text, some sequentiality, and others historical aspects such as mass reproduction or the existence of recurring characters.
- The Evolution -
Comics can have almost no mass and yet be the most mass of mass arts: Garfield has had up to 263 million readers a day. Comics constitute a new art, just over a century old, and usually an unusually accessible one. So what can evolution add to our understanding of comics?
Evolution lets us see comics, like almost anything human or even alive, in a panoramic context but also in extreme close-up, as close as a comics artist trying to grab readers’ attention in this frame or with that angle. And it can zoom smoothly between these two poles. Evolution offers a unified and naturalistic causal system from the general to the very particular. Far from reducing all to biology and then to chemistry and physics, it easily and eagerly plugs in more local factors—in a case like comics, historical, technological, social, artistic and individual factors, for instance—the closer we get to particulars. Evolution accepts multilevel explanations, from cells to societies, and allows full room for nature and culture, society and individuals. During the years 1907–20 most of the major categories of American comics were established, including the first aviation, ethnic character, and career girl strips. The most important gag strip was George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (begun 1913/16), also the first American strip to achieve international fame. Outstanding among the family saga or domestic problem strips that burgeoned during the 1920s was Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, which started in 1918. It strove for realism rather than farcical effects and had a strict continuity (as opposed to the daily gag), during which, moreover, characters actually grew older. The first career girl strip was Martin Branner’s Winnie Winkle (1920–96), followed by the fashion-conscious Tillie the Toiler (1921–59) by Russ Westover. Another major group of the 1920s was fantastic, satirical, and parodistic. Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye (first appearance in Thimble Theatre, begun 1929) still depended upon slapstick, but George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1911–44) placed the slapstick in a tender world of poetry, at once surreal and humorous. Drawn with the greatest of graphic economy, it presented the absurd interrelationships of a tiny cast of characters (basically three), using the thinnest imaginable plot line. Krazy Kat was the first newspaper strip anywhere to be aimed at relatively intellectual adults and to claim philosophical significance.
Evolution lets us see comics, like almost anything human or even alive, in a panoramic context but also in extreme close-up, as close as a comics artist trying to grab readers’ attention in this frame or with that angle. And it can zoom smoothly between these two poles. Evolution offers a unified and naturalistic causal system from the general to the very particular. Far from reducing all to biology and then to chemistry and physics, it easily and eagerly plugs in more local factors—in a case like comics, historical, technological, social, artistic and individual factors, for instance—the closer we get to particulars. Evolution accepts multilevel explanations, from cells to societies, and allows full room for nature and culture, society and individuals. During the years 1907–20 most of the major categories of American comics were established, including the first aviation, ethnic character, and career girl strips. The most important gag strip was George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (begun 1913/16), also the first American strip to achieve international fame. Outstanding among the family saga or domestic problem strips that burgeoned during the 1920s was Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, which started in 1918. It strove for realism rather than farcical effects and had a strict continuity (as opposed to the daily gag), during which, moreover, characters actually grew older. The first career girl strip was Martin Branner’s Winnie Winkle (1920–96), followed by the fashion-conscious Tillie the Toiler (1921–59) by Russ Westover. Another major group of the 1920s was fantastic, satirical, and parodistic. Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye (first appearance in Thimble Theatre, begun 1929) still depended upon slapstick, but George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1911–44) placed the slapstick in a tender world of poetry, at once surreal and humorous. Drawn with the greatest of graphic economy, it presented the absurd interrelationships of a tiny cast of characters (basically three), using the thinnest imaginable plot line. Krazy Kat was the first newspaper strip anywhere to be aimed at relatively intellectual adults and to claim philosophical significance.
- 20th Century Comics -
The modern newspaper strip was born in the heat of rivalry between giants of the American press. In January 1894 a comic strip filled for the first time a full-colour page of Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World; in October 1896 the publisher William Randolph Hearst announced in his rival paper, the Morning Journal, the first regular weekly full-colour comic supplement. This supplement ran to eight pages and included the Yellow Kid of Richard Outcault, whom Hearst had enticed away from the New York World. The Yellow Kid, set in a large single scene, not a narrative strip, was the first continuous comic character in the United States. During the 1930s the comics page expanded both in quantity of strips and in range of subject matter. Several of the strips created then survive today. One of them, Chic Young’s domestic comedy strip Blondie (begun 1930), has achieved unparalleled international renown, syndicated by the turn of the 21st century to 2,300 newspapers and read by some 250 million people in 55 countries and in more than 33 languages. Twenty-four Blondie films were made between 1930 and 1950.
The demand for adventure stories spawned a new and highly lucrative vehicle for the comic strip: the cheap staple-bound comic book. The first true comic books were marketed in 1933 as giveaway advertising premiums. These had a 7.5- by 10.25-inch (19- by 26-cm) page size, a format that has continued. By 1935 such titles as Famous Funnies, Tip Top Comics, King Comics—at first chiefly reprints of newspaper strips and then with original stories—were selling in large quantities. Specialization soon set in with Detective Comics (begun 1937) and Action Comics (begun 1938). Superman, which appeared first in Action Comics, was the creation of Jerry Siegel (scenario or text) and Joe Shuster (art); it was soon syndicated and transposed to other media. The Superman formula of the hero who transcends all physical and social laws to punish the wicked was widely imitated. The animated cartoon animals of Walt Disney also took root in the comic book.
World War II hastened the development of strips and comic books dealing with war and crime, the latter finding a new and avid readership among American soldiers stationed abroad. Being outside the control of newspaper editors, the comic book became increasingly violent and gruesome. The sadism of the American comic became proverbial; the “comic” became equated by Europeans with the “horror comic,” and voices of educators were raised against it on both sides of the Atlantic. The psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) blamed rising juvenile deliquency on the pernicious influence of the comic book, and U.S. congressional investigations confirmed this opinion. The industry responded by instituting systems of self-censorship, administered by several organizations; the more vicious-looking material was restrained, but in Europe some American adventure strips continued to be criticized for their pursuit of violence and for their racist, militarist, and fascist tendencies. Wertham’s book had reverberations in many other countries.