Comic strips

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with daily horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in newspapers, while Sunday papers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the advent of the internet, online comic strips began to appear as webcomics.

Strips are written and drawn by a comics artist, known as a cartoonist. As the word "comic" implies, strips are frequently humorous. Examples of these gag-a-day strips are '' Blondie'', ''Bringing Up Father'', ''Marmaduke'', and ''Pearls Before Swine''. In the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in ''Popeye'', ''Buck Rogers'', ''Tarzan'', and ''Terry and the Pirates''. In the 1940s, soap-opera-continuity strips such as ''Judge Parker'' and ''Mary Worth'' gained popularity. Because "comic" strips are not always funny, cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that sequential art would be a better genre-neutral name.

Every day in American newspapers, for most of the 20th century, there were at least 200 different comic strips and cartoon panels, which makes 73,000 per year. Comic strips have appeared inside American magazines such as ''Liberty'' and ''Boys' Life'', but also on the front covers, such as the ''Flossy Frills'' series on ''The American Weekly'' Sunday newspaper supplement. In the UK and the rest of Europe, comic strips are also serialized in ''comic book magazines'', with a strip's story sometimes continuing over three pages.

History

Storytelling using a sequence of pictures has existed through history. One medieval European example in textile form is the Bayeux Tapestry. Printed examples emerged in 19th-century Germany and in 18th-century England, where some of the first satirical or humorous sequential narrative drawings were produced. William Hogarth's 18th century English cartoons include both narrative sequences, such as ''A Rake's Progress'', and single panels.

The ''Biblia pauperum'' ("Paupers' Bible"), a tradition of picture Bibles beginning in the later Middle Ages, sometimes depicted Biblical events with words spoken by the figures in the miniatures written on scrolls coming out of their mouths—which makes them to some extent ancestors of the modern cartoon strips.

In China, with its traditions of block printing and of the incorporation of text with image, experiments with what became ''lianhuanhua'' date back to 1884.

Newspapers

The first newspaper comic strips appeared in North America in the late 19th century. ''The Yellow Kid'' is usually credited as one of the first newspaper strips. However, the art form combining words and pictures developed gradually and there are many examples which led up to the comic strip.

The Glasgow Looking Glass was the first mass-produced publication to tell stories using illustrations and is regarded as the worlds first comic strip. It satirised the political and social life of Scotland in the 1820s. It was conceived and illustrated by William Heath.

Swiss author and caricature artist Rodolphe Töpffer (Geneva, 1799–1846) is considered the father of the modern comic strips. His illustrated stories such as ''Histoire de M. Vieux Bois'' (1827), first published in the US in 1842 as ''The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck'' or ''Histoire de Monsieur Jabot'' (1831), inspired subsequent generations of German and American comic artists. In 1865, German painter, author, and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created the strip ''Max and Moritz'', about two trouble-making boys, which had a direct influence on the American comic strip. ''Max and Moritz'' was a series of seven severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children's stories such as ''Struwwelpeter'' ("Shockheaded Peter"). In the story's final act, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill, and consumed by a flock of geese (without anybody mourning their demise). ''Max and Moritz'' provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the ''Katzenjammer Kids