This document provides a history of comic books, beginning with their origins in newspaper comic strips in the early 20th century in the U.S. and spreading to magazines. It discusses key developments like the establishment of recurring characters, speech bubbles, and early pioneers such as Rodolphe Topffer. By the 1920s-1930s, comic books emerged as a distinct medium, with Superman's debut in 1938 cementing the superhero genre's popularity in America. The history outlines how comics evolved into a global mass media phenomenon across countries.

1. Comic Books
1. What is a comic book?
2. History of comic books in U.S.A . and U.K.
3. Comic strips.
4.Pictures.
5. Bibliography.

2. Comic books
A comic book or comicbook, also called comic paper or comic
magazine (often shortened to simply comic or comics) is a magazine made up
of "comics"—narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that
represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog (usually in word
balloons, emblematic of the comic book art form) as well as including brief
descriptive prose.
The first comic book appeared in the United States in 1933,
reprinting the earlier newspaper comic strips, which established many of
the story-telling devices used in comics. The term "comic book" arose
because the first comic books reprinted humor comic strips. Despite their
name, comic books are not necessarily humorous in tone; modern comic
books tell stories in a variety of genres.

3. In Lucas Cranach the Elder's "Adam and Eve"
different scenes of the Biblical story are shown in the same
Sequential depictions on Trajan's Column painting: on the front, God is admonishing the couple for
their sin; in the background to the right are shown the earlier
scenes of Eve's creation from Adam's rib and of their being
tempted to eat the forbidden fruit; on the left is the later
scene of their expulsion from Paradise.
Comics as an art form established itself in the late 19th and early
20th century, alongside the similar forms of film and animation. The three
forms share certain conventions, most noticeably the mixing of words and
pictures, and all three owe parts of their conventions to the technological
leaps made through the industrial revolution. Though newspapers and
magazines first established and popularized comics in the late 1890s,
narrative illustration has existed for many centuries.

4. Early precursors of comic as they are known today include Trajan's
Column and the work of William Hogarth. Rome's Trajan's Column, dedicated in 113
AD, is an early surviving example of a narrative told through sequential pictures,
while Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek friezes, medieval tapestries such as the Bayeux
Tapestry and illustrated manuscripts also combine sequential images and words to
tell a story. Versions of the Bible relying primarily on images rather than text were
widely distributed in Europe in order to bring the teachings of Christianity to the
illiterate. In medieval paintings, many sequential scenes of the same story (usually a
Biblical one) appear simultaneously in the same painting.
However, these works did not travel to the reader; it took the invention of
modern printing techniques to bring the form to a wide audience and become a mass
medium.

5. The 15th–18th centuries and
printing advances
The invention of the printing press, allowing movable type,
established a separation between images and words, the two requiring
different methods in order to be reproduced. Early printed material
concentrated on religious subjects, but through the 17th and 18th
centuries, they began to tackle aspects of political and social life, and also
started to satirize and caricature. It was also during this period that the
speech bubble was developed as a means of attributing dialogue. William
Hogarth is often identified in histories of the comics form.
His work, A Rake's Progress, was composed of a number of canvases,
each reproduced as a print, and the eight prints together created a
narrative. As printing techniques developed, due to the technological
advances of the industrial revolution, magazines and newspapers were
established. These publications utilized illustrations as a means of
commenting on political and social issues, such illustrations becoming known
as cartoons in the 1840s. Soon, artists were experimenting with
establishing a sequence of images to create a narrative.

6. French Liberty. British Slavery, James
Gillray's 1792 caricature poking fun at the French
Revolution, anticipates the modern comic strip in
having both separate panel sand characters
speaking via speech balloons.
While surviving works of these periods such as Francis Barlow's A True
Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot (c.1682) as well as The Punishments of
Lemuel Gulliver and A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth (1726), can be seen to
establish a narrative over a number of images, it wasn't until the 19th century that
the elements of such works began to crystallise into the comic strip.
The speech balloon also evolved during this period, from the medieval origins
of the phylactery, a label, usually in the form of a scroll, which identified a character
either through naming them or using a short text to explain their purpose. Artists
such as George Cruikshank helped codify such phylactersas balloons rather than
scrolls, though at this time they were still called labels. Speech balloons weren't
reintroduced to the form until Richard F. Outcault used them for dialogue.

7. Rodolphe Töpffer, a Francophone Swiss artist, is seen as the key figure of the
early part of the 19th century. Though speech balloons fell from favour during the
middle 19th century, Töpffer's sequentially illustrated stories, with text
compartmentalized below images, were reprinted throughout Europe and the United
States. The lack of copyright laws at the time allowed these pirated editions, and
translated versions created a market on both continents for similar works. In 1843,
Töpffer formalised his thoughts on the picture story in his Essay on Physiognomics:
―To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master
craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material—often down to the dregs!
It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it
simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent some kind
of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do
not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad,
sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense."

8. In 1845, the satirical drawings, which regularly appeared in
newspapers and magazines, gained a name: cartoons. (In art, a cartoon is a
pencil or charcoal sketch to be overpainted.) The British magazine Punch,
launched in 1841, referred to its 'humorous pencilings' as cartoons in a
satirical reference to the Parliament of the day, who were themselves
organising an exhibition of cartoons, or preparatory drawings, at the time.
This usage became common parlance, lasting to the present day. Similar
magazines containing cartoons in continental Europe included Fliegende
Blätter and Le Charivari, while in the U.S. Judge and Puck were popular.
In 1865 saw the publication of Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch by
a German newspaper. Busch refined the conventions of sequential art, and
his work was a key influence within the form, Rudolph Dirks was inspired
by the strip to create The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897.

9. In 1884, Ally Sloper's Half Holiday was published, a magazine whose selling
point was a strip featuring the titular character, and widely regarded as the first
comic strip magazine to feature a recurring character. In 1890, two more comic
magazines debuted to the British public, Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips,
establishing the tradition of the British comic as an anthology periodical containing
comic strips.
In the United States, R.F. Outcault's work in combining speech balloons and
images on Hogan's Alley and The Yellow Kid has been credited as establishing the
form and conventions of the comic strip, though academics have uncovered earlier
works that combine speech bubbles and a multi image narrative. However, the
popularity of Outcalt's work and the position of the strip in a newspaper retains
credit as a driving force of the form.

10. The 20th century and the mass-media
Little Sammy Sneeze (1904–06)
by Winsor McCay
The 1920s and 1930s saw further booms within the industry. In China,
a market was established for palm-sized picture books like Lianhuanhua,
while the market for comic anthologies in Britain had turned to targeting
children through juvenile humor, with The Dandy and The Beano launched.
In Belgium, Hergé created the Tintin newspaper strip for a comic
supplement; this was successfully collected in a bound album and created a
market for further such works. The same period in the United States had
seen newspaper strips expand their subject matter beyond humour, with
action, adventure and mystery strips launched. The collection of such
material also began, with The Funnies, a reprint collection of newspaper
strips, published in tabloid size in 1929.

11. A market for such comic books soon followed, and by 1938 publishers were
printing original material in the format. It was at this point that Action Comics#1
launched, with Superman as the cover feature. The popularity of the character
swiftly enshrined the superhero as the defining genre of American comics. The genre
lost popularity in the 1950s but re-established its domination of the form from the
1960s until the late 20th century.
In Japan, a country with a long tradition for illustration and whose writing system
evolved from pictures, comics were hugely popular. Referred to as manga, the
Japanese form was established after World War II by Osamu Tezuka, who
expanded the page count of a work to number in the hundreds, and who developed a
filmic style, heavily influenced by the Disney animations of the time. The Japanese
market expanded its range to cover works in many genres, from juvenile fantasy
through romance to adult fantasies. Japanese manga is typically published in large
anthologies, containing several hundred pages, and the stories told have long been
used as sources for adaptation into animated film. In Japan, such films are referred
to as anime, and many creators work in both forms simultaneously, leading to an
intrinsic linking of the two forms.

12. During the latter half of the 20th century comics have become a very popular
item for collectors and from the 1970s American comics publishers have actively
encouraged collecting and shifted a large portion of comics publishing and production
to appeal directly to the collector's community. Writing in 1972, Sir Ernst Gombrich
felt Töpffer had evolved a new pictorial language, that of an abbreviated art style,
which allowed the audience to fill in gaps with their imagination.
The modern double use of the term comic, as an adjective describing a genre,
and a noun designating an entire medium, has been criticized as confusing and
misleading. In 2005, Robert Crumb's work was exhibited in galleries both sides of
the Atlantic, and The Guardian newspaper devoted its tabloid supplement to a
weeklong exploration of his work and idioms.
Comics have been a popular source for film and television adaptations. For a list
of film adaptations, see List of films based on comics.

13. Comic strip
Jimmy Hatlo's They'll Do It
Every Time was often drawn in the
two-panel format as seen in this 1943
example.
Winsor McCay's Little Nemo (1905),
an American Sunday comic strip
featuring a heightened use of perspective,
a sequential narrative in panel tiers and dream-like plots.

14. A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to
display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and
captions.
Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these were
published in newspapers, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily
newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color
comics sections. There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily
cartoon panels in American newspapers alone each day for most of the 20th
century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes.
Strips are written and drawn by a comic’s artist or cartoonist. As the name
implies, comic strips can be humorous (for example, "gag-a-day" strips such as
Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Marmaduke and Pearls Before Swine).

15. History of comic strips
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.

16. The first newspaper comic strips appeared in North America in the late 19th
century. The Yellow Kid is usually credited as the first. However, the art form
combining words and pictures evolved gradually, and there are many examples of
proto-comic strips.
The Swiss teacher, 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 USA in 1842
as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck or Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (1831),
inspired subsequent generations of German and American comic artists.

17. Hugely popular, Katzenjammer Kids occasioned one of the first comic-strip
copyright ownership suits in the history of the medium. When Dirks left William
Randolph Hearst for the promise of a better salary under Joseph Pulitzer, it was
an unusual move, since cartoonists regularly deserted Pulitzer for Hearst.
In a highly unusual court decision, Hearst retained the rights to the name
"Katzenjammer Kids", while creator Dirks retained the rights to the characters.
Hearst promptly hired Harold Knerr to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks
renamed his version Hans and Fritz (later, The Captain and the Kids).
Thus, two versions distributed by rival syndicates graced the comics pages
for decades. Dirks' version, eventually distributed by United Feature Syndicate,
ran until 1979.

18. In America, the great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war
(1887 onwards) between Pulitzer and Hearst. The Little Bears (1893–96) was the
first American comic with recurring characters, while the first color comic
supplement was published by the Chicago Inter-Ocean sometime in the latter
half of 1892, followed by the New York Journal's first color Sunday comic pages
in 1897.
On January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first full daily comic
page in his New York Evening Journal. The history of this newspaper rivalry and
the rapid appearance of comic strips in most major American newspapers is
discussed by Ian Gordon.
Numerous events in newspaper comic strips have reverberated throughout
society at large, though few of these events occurred in recent years, owing
mainly to the declining role of the newspaper comic strip as an entertainment
form.

19. The longest running American comic strips are:
1. Katzenjammer Kids (1897-present)
2. Gasoline Alley (1918-present)
3. Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (1919-present)
4. Thimble Theater/Popeye (1919-present)
5. Little Orphan Annie (1924-2010)
Newspaper comic strips come in two different types: daily strips and
Sunday strips. Most newspaper comic strips are syndicated; a syndicate hires
people to write and draw a strip and then distributes it to many newspapers for a
fee. A few newspaper strips are exclusive to one newspaper.
For example, the Pogo comic strip by Walt Kelly originally appeared only in
the New York Star in 1948 and was not picked up for syndication until the
following year. In the United States, a daily strip appears in newspapers on
weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which
typically only appears on Sundays. Daily strips usually are printed in black and
white, and Sunday strips are usually in color.

20. During the 1930s, the original art for a daily strip could be drawn as large as 25
inches wide by six inches high. As strips have become smaller, the number of panels
has been reduced.
The popularity and accessibility of strips meant they were often clipped and
saved; authors including John Updike and Ray Bradbury have written about their
childhood collections of clipped strips. Often posted on bulletin boards, clipped strips
had an ancillary form of distribution when they were faxed, photocopied or mailed.
The Baltimore Sun's Linda White recalled:
"I followed the adventures of Winnie Winkle, Moon Mullins and Dondi, and
waited each fall to see how Lucy would manage to trick Charlie Brown into trying to
kick that football. (After I left for college, my father would clip out that strip each
year and send it to me just to make sure I didn’t miss it.)"

21. Proof sheets were the means by which syndicates provided newspapers with
black-and-white line art for the reproduction of strips (which they arranged to have
colored in the case of Sunday strips). Michigan State University Comic Art Collection
librarian Randy Scott describes these as:
―Large sheets of paper on which newspaper comics have traditionally been
distributed to subscribing newspapers. Typically each sheet will have either six daily
strips of a given title or one Sunday strip. Thus, a week of Beetle Bailey would arrive
at the Lansing State Journal in two sheets, printed much larger than the final version
and ready to be cut apart and fitted into the local comics page."
Comic strip historian Allan Holtz described how strips were provided as mats
(the plastic or cardboard trays in which molten metal is poured to make plates) or
even plates ready to be put directly on the printing press. He also notes that with
electronic means of distribution becoming more prevalent printed sheets "are
definitely on their way out."

22. Cartoon panel
Jimmy Hatlo's “They'll Do It Every
Time” was often drawn in the two-panel format
as seen in this 1943 example.
Single panels usually, but not always, are not broken up and lack continuity.
The daily Peanuts is a strip, and the daily Dennis the Menace is a single panel. J. R.
Williams' long-run Out Our Way continued as a daily panel even after it expanded into a
Sunday strip, Out Our Way with the Willets. Jimmy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time
was often displayed in a two-panel format with the first panel showing some deceptive,
pretentious, unwitting or scheming human behavior and the second panel revealing the
truth of the situation.

23. Sunday comics
Gene Ahern's The Squirrel Cage (January 3,
1937), an example of a topper strip which is better
remembered than the strip it accompanied, Ahern's
Room and Board.
Sunday newspapers traditionally included a special color section. Early Sunday
strips, such as Thimble Theatre and Little Orphan Annie, filled an entire newspaper page.
Sunday pages during the 1930s and into the 1940s often carried a secondary strip by the
same artist as the main strip.
During the 1930s, the original art for a Sunday strip was usually drawn quite
large. For example, in 1930, Russ Westover drew his Tillie the Toiler Sunday page at a
size of 17" × 37". In 1937, the cartoonist Dudley Fisher launched the innovative Right
Around Home, drawn as a huge single panel filling an entire Sunday page.

24. Underground comic strips
The decade of the 1960s saw the rise
of underground newspapers, which often carried
comic strips, such as Fritz the Cat and The
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Zippy the
Pinhead initially appeared in underground
publications in the 1970s before being
syndicated. Bloom County and Doonesbury began
as strips in college newspapers under different
titles, and later moved to national syndication.
Underground comic strips covered subjects that
are usually taboo in newspaper strips, such as
sex and drugs. Many underground artists,
Russell Patterson and notably Vaughn Bode, Dan O'Neill, Gilbert
Carolyn Wells' New Adventures of Shelton and Art Spiegelman went on to draw
Flossy Frills (January 26, 1941),
an example of comic strips on
comic strips for magazines such as Playboy,
Sunday magazines. National Lampoon and Pete Millar's Cartoons.

25. Web comic
Web comics, also known as online comics and internet comics, are comics
that are available to read on the Internet. Many are exclusively published online,
while some are published in print but maintain a web archive for either
commercial or artistic reasons. Two of the most popular are Penny Arcade,
focused primarily on video gaming, and User Friendly, which bases its humor on
the Internet and other computer-user issues. The majority of traditional
newspaper comic strips have some Internet presence. King Features Syndicate
and other syndicates often provide archives of recent strips on their websites.
Some, such as Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, include an email address in each
strip.

26. Conventions and genres
Most comic strip characters do not age throughout the strip's life, but in
some strips, like Lynn Johnston's award-winning For Better or For Worse, the
characters age as the years pass. The first strip to feature aging characters was
Gasoline Alley.
The history of comic strips also includes series that are not humorous, but
tell an ongoing dramatic story. Examples include The Phantom, Prince Valiant, Dick
Tracy, Mary Worth, Modesty Blaise, Little Orphan Annie, and Tarzan. Sometimes
these are spin-offs from comic books, for example Superman, Batman and The
Amazing Spider-Man.
A number of strips have featured animals ('funny animals') as main
characters. Some are non-verbal (Marmaduke, The Angriest Dog in the World),
some have verbal thoughts but are not understood by humans, (Garfield, Snoopy
in Peanuts), and some can converse with humans (Bloom County, Calvin and
Hobbes, Mutts, Citizen Dog, Buckles, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine and Pooch
Cafe). Other strips are centered entirely on animals, as in Pogo and Donald Duck.
Gary Larson's The Far Side was unusual, as there were no central characters.

27. Publicity and recognition
The world's longest comic strip is 88.9-metre (292 ft) long and on display
at Trafalgar Square as part of the London Comedy Festival.[citation needed] The
London Cartoon Strip was created by 15 of Britain's best known cartoonists and
depicts the history of London.
The Reuben, named for cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is the most prestigious
award for U.S. comic strip artists. Reuben awards are presented annually by the
National Cartoonists Society (NCS).
Issues in U.S. newspaper comic strips
―Comics are sort of the 'third rail' of the newspaper.‖
—Jeff Reece, lifestyle editor of The Florida Times-Union
As newspapers change, the changes have also affected comic strips.

28. Size
In the early decades of the 20th century, all Sunday comics received a full
page, and daily strips were generally the width of the page.
Daily strips have suffered as well, in 1910 the strips had an unlimited
amount of panels, covering the entire width page, while by 1930 most "dailies" had
four or five panels covering six of the eight columns occupied by a traditional
broadsheet paper, by 1958 those four panels would be narrower, and those would
have half of the space a 1910 daily strip had, and around 1998 most strips would
have three panels only (with a few exceptions), or even two or one on an
occasional basis, apart from strips being smaller, as most papers became slightly
narrower.
While most cartoonists decided to follow the tide, some cartoonists have
complained about this, with Pogo ending in 1975 as a form of protest from its
creators against the practice.

29. Format
In an issue related to size limitations, Sunday comics are often bound to
rigid formats that allow their panels to be rearranged in several different ways
while remaining readable. Such formats usually include throwaway panels at the
beginning, which some newspapers will omit for space.
As a result, cartoonists have less incentive to put great efforts into these
panels. Garfield and Mutts were known during the mid-to-late 80s and 1990s
respectively for their throwaways on their Sunday strips, however both strips
now run "generic" title panels.

30. British Comics
Originally the same size as a usual comic book in the U.S. (although
lacking the glossy cover), the British comic has adopted a magazine size, with
The Beano and The Dandy the last to adopt this size (in the 1980s). Although
the British generally speak of "a comic" or of "a comic magazine", and they
also historically spoke of "a comic paper". Some comics, such as Judge Dredd
and other 2000 AD titles, have been published in a tabloid form.
Although Ally Sloper's Half Holiday (1884), the first comic published in
Britain, was aimed at an adult market, publishers quickly targeted a younger
market, which has led to most publications being for children and created an
association in the public's mind of comics as somewhat juvenile.
Popular titles within the UK have included The Beano, The Dandy, The
Eagle, 2000 AD, and Viz. Underground comics and "small press" titles have
also been published within the UK, notably Ozand Escape Magazine.

31. The content of Action, another title aimed at children and
launched in the mid-1970s, became the subject of discussion in the
House of Commons. Although on a smaller scale than similar
investigations in the U.S., such concerns led to a moderation of content
published within British comics. Such moderation never became
formalized to the extent of promulgating a code, nor did it last long.
The UK has also established a healthy market in the reprinting and
repackaging of material, notably material originating in the U.S. The
lack of reliable supplies of American comic books led to a variety of
black-and-white reprints, including Marvel's monster comics of the
1950s, Fawcett's Captain Marvel, and other characters such as Sheena,
Mandrake the Magician, and the Phantom. Several reprint companies
were involved in repackaging American material for the British market,
notably the importer and distributor Thorpe & Porter.

32. Marvel Comics established a UK office in 1972. DC Comics and Dark Horse
Comics also opened offices in the 1990s. The repackaging of European material
has occurred less frequently, although the Tintin and Asterix serials have been
successfully translated and repackaged in softcover books.
At Christmas time, publishers repackage and commission material for comic
annuals, printed and bound as hardcover A4-size books; Rupert supplies a famous
example of the British comic annual.DC Thomson also repackages The Broons and
Oor Wullie strips in softcover A4-size books for the holiday season.
On 19 March 2012, the British postal service, the Royal Mail, released a set
of stamps depicting British comic-book characters and series.The collection
featured The Beano, The Dandy,Eagle, The Topper, Roy of the Rovers, Bunty,
Buster, Valiant, Twinkle and 2000 AD.

36. Bibliography
1. http://marvel.com/news/story/14587/preview_super_hero_sqaud_11
2. http://marvelkids.marvel.com/shows/122/the_super_hero_squad_show
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_vocabulary
5. http://marvel.com/comic_books/issue/44254/ultimate_comics_iron_man_2012_2
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_comics
7. http://marvel.com/comic_books/issue/44206/thor_god_of_thunder_2012_2
8. http://www.comicsuk.co.uk/
9. http://www.downthetubes.net/
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_strip
11. http://marvel.com/digital_comics/issue/25588/magneto_not_a_hero_2011_4

37. Have a nice day!
Thank you for your attention!