Part 1: before the flood:
there is much debate over the exact place and time that comics as we know it today started.
In recent years a discorvery proving that comic books may have started well before the Yellow Kid. This new age of comics is being referred to as the “Victorian Age” for the time being
Today the earliest known comic book is called The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck. Originally published in several languages in Europe in 1837, among them an English version designed for Britain in 1841. A year later it was reprinted in New York on Sept. 14, 1842 for Americans, making it the first comic book printed in America. Odadiah Oldbuck is 40 pages long and measured 8 ½” x 11″. The book was side stitched, and inside there were 6 to 12 panels per page. No word balloons, but there is text under the panels to describe the story. A copy of it was discovered in Oakland, California in 1998.
The comic was done by Switzerland’s Rudolphe Töpffer, who has been considered in Europe (and starting to become here in America) as the creator of the picture story.
side note: A picture story can range from a comic style book to a childrens pop up book. it does not always have to be told cronlogically or Sequential
(Sequential ART is the art form of the mordern comic book)
Rodolphe Töpffer
(31/1/1799 – 8/6/1846, Switzerland)
Rodolphe Töpffer was the son of painter Wolfgang Adam Töpffer, a German emigrant who had settled in Geneva, Switzerland. Unfortunately, due to an eye defect, Rodolphe was initially unable to pursue a career in the visual arts like his father. Instead, he devoted himself to literature, writing short texts such as ‘My Uncle’s Library’, ‘Nouvelles genevoises’ and, especially, ‘Voyages en zig-zag’, accounts of his walking trips in Switzerland. Töpffer studied in Paris and became a teacher, working in several schools in Geneva, and becoming titular professor of rhetoric at the Geneva Academy of Belles-Lettres. In 1825, he founded a boarding school for boys.
Töpffer has earned most fame for his “histoires en images”, picture-stories which are considered the first in the comics genre. He created six titles, ‘Histoire de M. Jabot’ (1833), ‘Monsieur Crépin’ (1837), ‘Les Amours de M. Vieuxbois’ (1839), ‘Monsieur Pencil’ (1840), ‘Le Docteur Festus’ (1840), ‘Histoire d’Albert’ (1845) and ‘Histoire de M. Cryptogame’ (1845). After Töpffer’s death in 1846, were posthumously anthologized in the series of volumes titled ‘Histoires en Estampes’. A story left unfinished by Töpffer was ‘Brutus Calicot’, the manuscript of which is kept at the University Library in Geneva. Another publication by Töpffer is ‘Essais d’autographie’ (1842). Töpffer’s picture-stories have been an influence on many of the early “comic” artists, such as Christophe, Wilhelm Busch and Cham. His ‘M. Vieuxbois’, translated as ‘Obadiah Oldbuck’, was the first comic book ever published in America, in 1842
Rudolphe Töpffer created several (7 is known) graphic novel style books that were extremely successful and reprinted in many different languages, several of them had English versions in America in 1846. The books remained in print in America until 1877.
There are an unknown amount of Victorian Age Comic Books, this era of comic book history is still being discovered, researched and recorded. .
An influential illustrated book to come out in this period was called The Brownies: Their Book. The Brownies feature wasn’t really a comic book per say. They were created by Palmer Cox and originally part of a children’s magazine called St. Nicholas. The Brownies first appeared in the magazine in 1883 in a story called The Brownies’ Ride. The Brownies were heavily merchandised and one of the products they put out was book featuring their illustrations with a text story beside the pictures. The Brownies: Their Book was first published in 1887 and several other books involving the same characters followed afterwards. It is likely to be the first North American Comic to be internationally successful.
Besides St. Nicholas, there were other magazines using picture stories of sorts and they were getting popular. Among the magazines were Harper’s, Puck, Judge, Life and Truth. Newspapers began to recognize their growing popularity and added a Sunday Comics feature to cash in. The newspapers couldn’t get the popular artists and their characters because the Magazines already had them signed up. But a Puck staff member, Roy L. McCardell told Morrill Goddard, the Sunday editor of The New York World (then largest newspaper) that he knew someone who could provide something.
That someone was Richard F. Outcault. He did a picture of street children in the June 2nd, 1894 edition of Truth. the above text was taken from history of comics
The Yellow Kid
Mickey Dugan, better known as The Yellow Kid, was the lead character in Hogan’s Alley, the first comic strip and the first to be printed in color in mass production. The Yellow Kid was a bald, snaggle-toothed child with a goofy grin in a yellow nightshirt who hung around in an alley filled with equally odd characters.
The strip was drawn by artist Richard F. Outcault. It first appeared on a few occasions in Truth magazine 1894–1895 in black and white print, but gained immense popularity in New York City in 1895 when it debuted in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World as a black and white cartoon on 17 February 1895 and subsequently as a color cartoon on 5 May 1895
what made the yellow kid stand out was,The device of using word balloons to contain character dialogue in comic strips was used in The Yellow Kid, though the kid himself usually communicated through statements that appeared printed on his shirt. He rarely spoke. His language was a ragged, peculiar ghetto argot.
The creator of the Yellow kid was, Richard Felton Outcault (January 14, 1863-September 25, 1928)
An American comic strip scriptwriter, sketcher and painter. considered the inventor of the modern comic strip. He was born in Lancaster, Ohio and died in Flushing, New York.
Tags: comicbooks