The first half of the 20th century: the evolution of the form

The United States

The modern newspaper strip was born in the heat of rivalry between giants of the American press. In January 1894 a comic strip filled for the first time a full-colour page of Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World; in October 1896 the publisher William Randolph Hearst announced in his rival paper, the Morning Journal, the first regular weekly full-colour comic supplement. This supplement ran to eight pages and included the Yellow Kid of Richard Outcault, whom Hearst had enticed away from the New York World. The Yellow Kid, set in a large single scene, not a narrative strip, was the first continuous comic character in the United States. Outcault established earthy, strictly urban farce as the keynote of the early American strip, which thereafter grew in sophistication and sentimentality. The Yellow Kid also standardized the speech balloon, which had largely fallen into disuse since the 17th century and its occasional appearance in the English caricatural strip about 1800. In 1897 Rudolph Dirks, at the instigation of Hearst, who as a child had enjoyed the work of Busch, worked up a strip based on Max and Moritz, called the Katzenjammer Kids, which proved an instant success. It survived in syndication into the 21st century, under its sixth author. The market-driven tendency to continue strips in their formula if not their spirit after the death of the original author(s) has given extraordinary longevity to many strips that should have died a natural death; most decline into prolonged senility before being finally scrapped. Katzenjammer Kids had for the first time the fully developed form of the newspaper strip; i.e., it used word balloons, had a continuous cast of characters, and was divided into small regular panels (dispensing with the full panoramic scenes in which the Yellow Kid had appeared).

The spread of comics to other newspapers was rapid and was aided by the development of newspaper syndication. The aesthetically outstanding strip of the early years was Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–11, 1924–27), which created a dreamworld at once gentle, exciting, and humorous. The strip was executed in fairy-tale illustration style, with a conscious display of colouristic effects. (A musical based on the strip and called Little Nemo was produced in 1908, and an animated cartoon by McCay followed in 1909.)

The daily strip in black and white, indispensable to all major newspapers from 1915, was effectively inaugurated by the San Francisco Chronicle with Bud Fisher’s Mr. A. Mutt (later Mutt and Jeff). At first set in a horse-racing milieu, it soon became a general interest comic.

During the years 1907–20 most of the major categories of American comics were established, including the first aviation, ethnic character, and career girl strips. The most important gag strip was George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (begun 1913/16), also the first American strip to achieve international fame. Outstanding among the family saga or domestic problem strips that burgeoned during the 1920s was Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, which started in 1918. It strove for realism rather than farcical effects and had a strict continuity (as opposed to the daily gag), during which, moreover, characters actually grew older. The first career girl strip was Martin Branner’s Winnie Winkle (1920–96), followed by the fashion-conscious Tillie the Toiler (1921–59) by Russ Westover. Another major group of the 1920s was fantastic, satirical, and parodistic. Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye (first appearance in Thimble Theatre, begun 1929) still depended upon slapstick, but George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1911–44) placed the slapstick in a tender world of poetry, at once surreal and humorous. Drawn with the greatest of graphic economy, it presented the absurd interrelationships of a tiny cast of characters (basically three), using the thinnest imaginable plot line. Krazy Kat was the first newspaper strip anywhere to be aimed at relatively intellectual adults and to claim philosophical significance.

During the 1930s the comics page expanded both in quantity of strips and in range of subject matter. Several of the strips created then survive today. One of them, Chic Young’s domestic comedy strip Blondie (begun 1930), has achieved unparalleled international renown, syndicated by the turn of the 21st century to 2,300 newspapers and read by some 250 million people in 55 countries and in more than 33 languages. Twenty-four Blondie films were made between 1930 and 1950.

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A new category of immense significance emerged: the continuous-action adventure strip. This took many forms: domestic and detective drama, science and space fiction, and, by 1938, war and superhero strips. The earliest adventure strip was Tarzan (begun 1929), whose Canadian-born creator Harold Foster broke completely with the prevailing caricatural style, adopted cinematic techniques, and sought picturesque, documentary realism. No less concerned with classic aesthetic effects was Alex Raymond, first master of the exotic space strip (Flash Gordon, begun 1934). An aggressively cinematic adventure strip, meticulously researched, was evolved by Milton Caniff in his Terry and the Pirates (begun 1934). Caricatural simplifications and grim forms of humour were introduced into the genre by Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy (begun 1931), the detective strip par excellence, which is laced with science-fiction gadgetry and bizarre eroticism. Truly satirical forms of exaggeration and of social content returned to the strip with Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (1934–77).

The demand for adventure stories spawned a new and highly lucrative vehicle for the comic strip: the cheap staple-bound comic book. The first true comic books were marketed in 1933 as giveaway advertising premiums. These had a 7.5- by 10.25-inch (19- by 26-cm) page size, a format that has continued. By 1935 such titles as Famous Funnies, Tip Top Comics, King Comics—at first chiefly reprints of newspaper strips and then with original stories—were selling in large quantities. Specialization soon set in with Detective Comics (begun 1937) and Action Comics (begun 1938). Superman, which appeared first in Action Comics, was the creation of Jerry Siegel (scenario or text) and Joe Shuster (art); it was soon syndicated and transposed to other media. The Superman formula of the hero who transcends all physical and social laws to punish the wicked was widely imitated. The animated cartoon animals of Walt Disney also took root in the comic book.

World War II hastened the development of strips and comic books dealing with war and crime, the latter finding a new and avid readership among American soldiers stationed abroad. Being outside the control of newspaper editors, the comic book became increasingly violent and gruesome. The sadism of the American comic became proverbial; the “comic” became equated by Europeans with the “horror comic,” and voices of educators were raised against it on both sides of the Atlantic. The psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) blamed rising juvenile deliquency on the pernicious influence of the comic book, and U.S. congressional investigations confirmed this opinion. The industry responded by instituting systems of self-censorship, administered by several organizations; the more vicious-looking material was restrained, but in Europe some American adventure strips continued to be criticized for their pursuit of violence and for their racist, militarist, and fascist tendencies. Wertham’s book had reverberations in many other countries.

Perhaps as a reaction, there was a parallel postwar development in newspaper strips devoted to sentimental soap-opera-like domestic drama—such as Rex Morgan, M.D. (begun 1948), Mary Worth (begun 1938), and The Heart of Juliet Jones (begun 1953)—and simple-looking but subtly conceived gag strips. The latter included Beetle Bailey (begun 1950), featuring an incorrigible army private (though the gags were never tainted by military reality), and Dennis the Menace (begun 1951), a sophisticated Katzenjammer, not to be confused with the much cruder English strip of the same name in the young children’s comic The Beano (begun 1938). Pogo (1948–75), by former Disney artist Walt Kelly, was the most cerebral, socially pointed, and self-reflective of all strips in the mid-20th century, without sacrificing humour. Disneyish in style, the Pogo social menagerie transcended Disney’s moral simplism, presenting a highly nuanced world populated with an almost Dickensian multitude of characters, all depicted as swamp animals. Pogo exuded a tender, nostalgic air, perpetually ruffled by the breezes of sociopolitical allusion and rendered stormy with the caricature of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Kelly’s dialogue, both bizarre and poetic, was admired for its contrast with the generality of strips, which were criticized for their verbal poverty.

The literate strip with philosophical, psychological, and sociological overtones was the principal innovation of the later 1950s. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (1950–2000) featured a small band of young children, a beagle, and a small yellow bird and dispensed entirely with the usual adult foil. The characters’ interactions and passions, which were of course easily readable as adult concerns, offered a broad psychological range without ever impinging on the political or controversial. Arguably the most successful and most translated gag strip ever, “Peanuts” entered American folklore and was heavily commercialized. An estimated 400 million Peanuts record albums had been sold by the time of Schulz’s death in 2000, and into the 21st century Schulz’s estate continued to earn tens of millions of dollars a year in syndication and merchandising fees. Schulz never used help in drawing, inking, or lettering a single design, as was the custom. Such was the repute of Peanuts that no attempt was made to continue it after the author’s death, when reruns of old strips began.

Of comparable psychological finesse and imbued with truly satirical flashes was Johnny Hart’s B.C. (begun 1958) and his Wizard of Id (begun 1964; in collaboration with Brant Parker), which had prehistoric and medieval settings, respectively. The major strip of political satire, Feiffer by Jules Feiffer (first appearing weekly in The Village Voice, 1956), was run in the more liberal or left-wing papers; as a mainstream newspaper strip, it was consigned to the editorial rather than comics pages. In Feiffer the dialogue was more important than the deliberately repetitive drawings, which never went beyond the human figure; the content played upon the logic-twisting, deceptive rhetoric of politicians and the neurotic relationships between social competitors and lovers. Feiffer created scenes in the manner of absurdist or “noir” drama; indeed, a play based on his strip was mounted in 1961.