A Selected History of Comics

One of my great art teachers said that all artists start out cartoonists. They just evolve to 'higher' forms of art. Okay, so he wasn't all that great. The point I think he was trying to make is that cartoons are basic reflections on daily life, little pieces of humanity preserved on a cave wall, a tapestry or a newspaper clipping. So although I can't agree with my professor's view of cartooning on the evolutional scale of art, I do agree cartooning is a necessary part of the developing artist, and human. Every kid does it once or twice, drawing a picture of the cat and begging to have it put on the refrigerator for public display. Things don't change much from the childhood artist to the adult, do they? I'd write you a plain dry history but I looked on Google.com and that's already been done. And let's face it, just throwing around a bunch of names and dates isn't too interesting without the stories behind them. So I've given a couple of links if you would like to get familiar with the cut and dry history that is comics, and I'll sidetrack to a few stories I came upon in the great history that is comic strips.

In the late 1800's, newspapers were doing everything they could to make a buck, Pulitzer and Hearst were at each other's throats in competition. Comics began for just that reason, to sell extra papers on Sunday. It all started with Outcault's Yellow Kid, originally called Hogan's Alley. The name 'Yellow Kid' was given as presses began to experiment with different color inks. One day the strip came out with the main character sporting a fine yellow smock. Why did they choose yellow? Well let's just say their ideas of fashion aren't the same as today's.

By 1900, hundreds of strips were being produced for a comic hungry public. In fact, the strips didn't even have to be funny, the public was that deprived of the funnies we now take for granted. Nowadays comic strips must be funny. Sometimes though we still run into those comics we don't understand. A whole site has been dedicated to this called Comics I Don't Understand. It's enlightening, thoughtful and makes you feel better since you're not the only one who doesn't get it.

The next strip that is considered the first bonafide strip is the Katzenjammer Kids printed by Hearst Publications. Written by Rudolph Dirks, this was one of the first strips to use word balloons to express the characters' ideas and also a multiple panel strip. Odd thing about these kids, they changed nationalities throughout their reign in the comics section from 1897 to today. First based largely on German humor and an earlier cartoon strip from Germany titled Max Und Moritz, World Wars I and II came along and the kids became Dutch. During this identity crisis Dirks lost his rights to the strip after taking a break from drawing. He eventually moved over to Pulitzer's papers, making a new strip entitled The Captain and The Kids. As Dirks was jousted out of his position and the strip was continued by Hearst under the artist Harold Knerr, the Katzenjammer Kids gradually became more Americanized in their speech.

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