First Modern Comic Strip example essay topic

The comic strip developed in America towards the end of the nineteenth century, originally created as a tool to draw customers to the Sunday edition of the local newspaper and becoming an icon of American culture. Though many contributed to it's format and existence, there are five people directly connected to it's birth. These five men, Richard Outcault, William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, James Swinnerton and Rudolph Dirks are responsible for popularizing what is now a major part of American culture. Richard Felton Outcault was a staff illustrator at Joseph Pulitzer's "The World" in 1895 when he created a one panel cartoon called "Down Hogan's Alley". Within the panel of the first Hogan's Alley is a homely, bald little boy dressed only in a frock. Shortly after he first appeared, the World's engravers were experimenting with color inks and in a test yellow was added to his frock (the strip was at first only black & white) and the gap toothed urchin was named the "Yellow Kid" and would go down in history as the first comic strip.

Not very long before the Yellow Kid made his first appearance, William Randolph Hearst's "Journal American" featured a large panel called the "Little Bears", drawn by the 25 year old James Swinnerton. Later on kids were added to the strip and later still tigers. Eventually Swinnerton would transpose his little tigers into the enormously popular "Mr. Jack" featuring a philandering tiger bachelor. Though both features were the direct progenitors of the American comic strip it would be another cartoonist who would create what is recognized as the first modern comic strip.

It was Rudolph Dirk's "Katzenjammer Kids", which appeared on December 12, 1897 in the Journal American. Previously, cartoon panels had no in-panel dialogue, but in the Katzenjammer Kids dialogue was directly applied within a "word balloon" indicating the speaker. Also, until then no strip had ever consisted of more than the one panel format of the editorial or political cartoon. The Katzenjammer combined both the aspect of internal dialogue and panel ized continuity, and in the process designed and solidified the form of the modern visual narrative strip. With these three innovative strips and the progress of the printed paper now able to print four color the seeds were sown, and newspapers across the country clamored to artists requesting creation of every kind of humor strip imaginable. Hearst & Pulitzer began the famous "Yellow Wars" hiring each others artists and editorial crew en-masse to gain circulation.

Some artists had so many ideas they created numerous strips, some of which appeared in the same papers simultaneously to whet the voracious appetites of readers. George McManus, George Harriman, Frederick Burr Op per, James Swinnerton and Winsor Mckay were some of them. Nor was there any shortage of artists and creators. By the early 1900's there were over 150 strips in syndication, in addition to many strips that never saw publication in more than a local paper.

Throughout the childhood of the comics, the main ingredient was humor. Each daily or Sunday installment was a singular episode and no reference was ever made to yesterday's strip. The medium would remain relatively unchanged for almost thirty years. In 1933, publishers at Eastern Color Press were trying to think of how to better use their printing equipment which frequently idle between jobs. Maxwell Gaines (father of William F. Gaines, EC & Mad publisher) came up with the idea of printing an 8 page comic section that could be folded down from the large broadsheet to a smaller 9 inch by 12 inch format. The result was the first modern comic book.

Containing reprints of newspaper comic strips, this experimental "comic book called "Funnies on Parade" was given away for free and proved that there was a market for repackaged strips. The following year Eastern published "Famous Funnies" (series 1, the fifth comic book) and took the bold action of selling the comic for a whopping ten cents through chain stores. So successful was the book that Eastern began producing numerous reprints on a monthly basis and other publishers, eager to capture profits jumped on the bandwagon. One of these publishers, National Periodicals chimed in with their first effort in February 1935. This title, New Fun Comics was just as it's name intimated - and entirely new content book, devoid of reprints and with original characters that appeared from one issue to the next. It was the first example of the modern day comic book.

Often crudely drawn and badly written, the novelty of comic books did not tail off and more books were printed each month by a growing list of publishers. As a new medium, there had really been no pre-set boundaries for the style or story lines so there was constant experimentation, new genres were played with, and finally ideas began to gel for the comics. In 1938 Harry Donenfeld, the publisher of National Periodicals was looking for a new headline feature for his soon to be published Action Comics. Again Max Gaines was to be involved in another trend setting innovation. From 1938 on the superheroes enjoyed great popularity. So successful were some of them that they quite frequently outsold news stand magazines like Time and Newsweek.

Captain Marvel reportedly sold over 2 million copies per month at it's peak and other titles commonly sold close to a half million or more copies making them extraordinarily ubiquitous in American society. When World War II began, all the comics chipped in to the war effort. All the comic characters fought the Nazi's and the Pacific fleets. One such hero even preceded our entrance into the war by several months. This super hero, was fighting the Nazis in February 1941 when Captain America blasted onto the scene, created by comic giants Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. The cover featured Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw!

But as the war ended, so did it seem the golden age of super heroes began to wane. But there were other formats for comic books. Funny animals were very popular as was evidenced by the tremendously successful Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, which reportedly had very high sales. Science fiction had it's own niche in Fiction House's "Planet Comics" which started in January 1940. Even the teen idol "Archie" also had high sales figures. But the comic companies that had slowing sales figures needed something new, different and exciting to revitalize their net profits.

So here it was, late 1946 and some publishers began to take note of small publisher Lev Gleason. Gleason had a almost unnoticeable section on the news racks because he only sold a handful of titles. One was Daredevil Comics which sold very well, and another was titled "Crime Does Not Pay", which first came out in 1942. It was a highly successful title, depicting according to the blurb on the cover "ALL TRUE crime stories".

The covers were real gruesome events. On one a maniac is forcing a woman's head onto a burning stove top, on the next three guys are blasting away with machine guns at a bloodied bank teller, the next cover had a bloodied man thrown from a speeding car and yet another had a guy about to hack a woman with a cleaver while there were five dead men "hanging" from a tree limb nearby. It is not difficult to understand why this title was so popular, but it is difficult to understand why comic publishers took so long, five years, to cash in on the crime title's success. So here it was, 1946/47 and suddenly a whole assortment of crime comics were coming out. True Crime, True Western Crime, Women Outlaws, War Against Crime and Crimes By Women. EC publisher Bill Gaines was converting titles like International Comics into Crime Patrol, and crime comics were all over the place, and they were a smash, and the companies profits soared again.

Another genre that began to flourish was horror comics. In 1948, ACG had come out with Adventures into the Unknown, and the previous year Avon Publishing, a paperback publisher looking for new revenues, would jump in with the short lived Eerie Comics. But something that all comics enjoined was an artistic instead of literate contribution to comic books. It would later be called good girl art, and some of the main features of this art were the way the women were depicted. Large breasts called headlights were adopted.

Women were dressed as scantily as the editors would allow showing as much cleavage as possible, and the rear view of a woman bent over was a very common sight. WOW I say! Unfortunately, though this could not have come at a better time for the comic companies, it also could not have come at a worse time. Sometime around this same time, as the story is related to me by noted comic author an historian Greg Theakston, comic publisher and publisher of the popular Betty Pages magazine; at a family outing a mother who was looking for her son found him hiding and reading a comic book. The irritated mother looked at the comic and saw... tits, ass and who knows what else and went to her husband with the offending publication. It was a fretful moment, the woman's husband was reportedly a United States Senator.

The comic book was reportedly Lil Abner. I guess she had never seen Daisy May before. After the party, the senator spoke with his fellow senators and before long a panel had been convened to study the effects of comic books on American society, in particular the effects they had on children. Still, comics were selling faster than ever and in 1950 new changes were coming to the field. The emblem of that change was EC. But the early fifties however the war on comics was about to go all out in an attempt to eradicate comic books if possible.

By this time the public outcry was almost a roar. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency had released a report very critical of comics, and it was widely circulated. But nobody was prepared for what came next. P Readers Digest had published a scathing article by a paranoid psychologist who all but claimed outright that comic books and other media were responsible for the degradation of the American youth. It was comics that made teenage boys rob and rape. It made adolescent's grades drop.

It made them use drugs. Comic books made every child a thief, a bully - a killer! These were the claims of this paranoid. His name was Frederic Wertham.

American mothers could not believe what they were reading. Then it got worse, Wertham published a book that contained purported examples of sex and violence in comics. The book, entitled "Seduction of the Innocent" fanned anti-comic sentiment all over America. It was a death knell for the field.

The resulting hysteria caused many schools and PTA groups to hold (shades of Nazi Germany) public comic book burnings. Comics were banned in many cities and even store owners would refuse to put out for display anything else but Bugs Bunny, Archie and Walt Disney's Comics. Even Superman's super strength couldn't get shelf space in some places. The backlash sent comics into a tailspin from which most would never recover. By 1955, all comic publishers had sharply curtailed their output. Many had totally phased out comic publishing, if they remained in business at all.

Bill Gaines had left comic publishing for Mad magazine. DC had only a couple dozen titles and Atlas (which later became Marvel) was almost out of business. It was comic's darkest hour.