A little history on the Comic Strip.

A little history on the Comic Strip.

Elements of the comic strip form can be found in antiquity, where Vergil in the Aeneid describes a tapestry that retraces the events of the Trojan War. The Bayeux tapestry, from the Middle Ages, retraces the hostilities leading to the Battle of Hastings. Narrative strips, usually in the form of woodcuts, became a popular medium for the expression of religious and political ideas during the Reformation. Although these were not representative of today's comic strip, they did tell a story in a simple form.

The immediate ancestor of the newspaper comic strip was the cartoon, especially popular in the late 19th cent. In the 18th and early 19th cent., the cartoons of William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson regularly included balloons; continuity was utilized by Rowlandson in his Tours of Dr. Syntax (1812