Comic Books History - Part I
Because comic books have such a long history I'm breaking up
this series into several parts.
Comic books. Arguably one of the largest industries in the
world. To be able to store every comic ever written you would
need a city the size of New York and even then I think you would
run out of room. No question, comic books are here to stay. So
when did this multi billion dollar a year industry actually
start.
Actually the origin of comic books is not really known for
certain. Up until recently there was one theory of what the
first comic book was. Then new evidence suggested that this was
incorrect. We may never really know when comic books started but
as of this writing the first known comic book was "The
Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck" which was written in 1837
somewhere in Europe in several languages. In 1842 an English
version of this comic was printed for the United States, more
specifically New York City. The comic was 40 pages long and
didn't really resemble the comics that we are used to seeing
today. There were no word balloons with dialogue. Instead there
was text typed at the bottom of each panel to describe the
story. A copy of this comic was recently discovered in Oakland
CA. The comic itself was done by Rudolphe Topffer who in Europe,
was considered to be the creator of the picture story. He
created the comic strip in 1827 as a graphic novel. After that
he created 7 more graphic novels in many different languages
including copies for the United States. These books stayed in
print until about 1877. This was considered to be the Victorian
Age of comic books which is still incomplete and still being
researched even until today.
Even though many comics were printed after that, they have
fallen into obscurity and the next known comic book was
published in 1894 called "The Yellow Kid." The Yellow Kid was
actually a character derived from the comic "Hogan's Alley" but
the kid was so popular that the comic book became known by his
name rather than by the official title of the comic book.
Hogan's Alley was created by a gentleman by the name of Richard
Outcault who actually got his start writing for "Truth
Magazine". In an issue of "Truth" he did a character cartoon
featuring "The Yellow Kid" and it's from that initial publishing
that the actual comic came into being a short time later. It is
believed that Outcault got his inspiration for "Hogan's Alley"
from several cartoonists including Michael Angelo Wolf and
Charles Saalburg, both of whom used street kids in their
cartoons. It is believed that the title "Hogan's Alley" came
from the song "O'Reilly and the Four Hundred" which starts off
"Down in Hogan's Alley."
In the next of this series I will be covering what is referred
to as "The Platinum Age Of Comics" which spans the years 1897 to
1938 which features the extremely popular "Mutt And Jeff" and
"Little Orphan Annie" comics. You don't want to miss this.