Many people enjoy comics and have for decades. But where did they come from? Who invented them? How have they become the thing which we now know them today? Here's a brief history of how comics came to be.
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| Detail of Trajan's Column |
Comics can be traced to the earliest forms of writing that used images to represent letters, such as Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These forms are called pictography. People used these series of images to tell stories. Even as writing systems advanced and the Latin alphabet gained broader usage, people still used images in series to tell stories or other information. Trajan's Column is an example of this, where the story of Trajan's army conquering the Dacians is sculpted into the column.The Bayeux Tapestry is another example of images used to tell a story - of conquest.The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Normandy army under the Duke of William invading England in 1066. "Episodes" of the conquest can be read through the series of images from left to right, which are also accompanied with some text to supplement the story.
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| R.F. Outcault's Yellow Kid |
With the Industrial Revolution, the increasing use of technology made it easier and cheaper to print materials, let alone mass-print materials. This, as well as the established education system increasing literacy rates, led to the increase of cheap printed newspapers and books. Gradually, comic strips started to appear in papers around the 1890s-1900s; Richard Felton Outcault, considered by some as the father of the comic strip, started having his
Yellow Kid comic printed in the mid 1890s. Comic strips soon gained mass popularity; comic books gained just as much popularity, if not more, by World War II. Some of the still popular super hero figures today, such as Superman and Captain America, got their start in the 1930s and 1940s; part of their appeal may have come from the fact that they were depicted fighting the Axis armies, particularly the Nazis. Comics books continued to be popular throughout the 1950s with teenagers - so popular that some believed they were corrupting teenagers and brainwashing them into being rebellious. Comics continued to gain popularity throughout the 1960s and on; likewise, traditional comic strips continued their popularity as well, with the strips like
Peanuts: Featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown and
Calvin and Hobbes gaining iconic status within North American culture.
