A Short History of the Comic Strip: From Töpffer to Webtoon

For most of the twentieth century, the comic strip was one of the most widely read forms of storytelling in the world. Millions of people turned to the funnies before the front page, and characters born in newspapers became some of the best-known figures in popular culture.

The strip had a long prehistory, a boom driven by newspaper wars, and a slow decline as newspapers shrank. Its story explains much of how comics work today, from speech balloons to the strips we now scroll on phones.

Picture stories before the strip

The comic strip did not appear from nowhere. In 1827 the Swiss teacher and artist Rodolphe Töpffer produced Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois, a story told in sequences of drawings with captions underneath, and he is often called the father of the modern comic strip. Scott McCloud, in his study of the form, gives him the same title.

In 1865 the German artist Wilhelm Busch created Max and Moritz, the story of two boys and their pranks, told in rhymed verses under drawings. It was hugely popular and would directly influence the first American strips. In Britain, Ally Sloper, often called the first recurring comic strip character, made his debut in the magazine Judy in 1867.

Colour and competition

The strip as we know it was born in American newspapers in the 1890s. The Chicago Inter-Ocean printed an early colour comic supplement in 1892, and between 1893 and 1896 The Little Bears became the first American strip with recurring characters. Colour printing turned the Sunday paper into a showcase, and comics became a weapon in the circulation wars between rival publishers.

In 1897 the New York Journal published its first colour Sunday comic pages, and the same year Rudolph Dirks began The Katzenjammer Kids, a strip about two troublemaking boys plainly inspired by Max and Moritz. It is credited with popularising two conventions still used today: the speech balloon, and stars to show pain.

The daily strip

Sunday pages were large and colourful; daily strips were short and black and white, a row of a few panels with a joke at the end. In 1912 the publisher William Randolph Hearst introduced the first full daily comic page in an American newspaper, on 31 January.

The daily format shaped the strip's craft. Cartoonists had a handful of panels each day to set up and deliver a gag or move a story along, which encouraged clear drawing, recurring characters and a tight rhythm that is still taught to comic creators today. Our guide on how to read a comic covers the conventions that came out of it.

Syndicates and creators

Strips were sold to newspapers by syndicates, which distributed a single strip to hundreds of papers. For decades the syndicates usually owned the characters, and creators had little control. That began to change in 1970, when Universal Press Syndicate started giving cartoonists a 50 percent ownership share of their work, and in 1987, when Creators Syndicate gave artists full rights to their strips.

Strips also became a place for serious commentary. A Doonesbury sequence about Watergate, published in 1974, helped its creator Garry Trudeau win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1975.

Shrinking space

As newspapers changed, the space for comics shrank. The last full-page strip, Prince Valiant, appeared in that form on 11 April 1971; after that, Sunday strips were printed smaller and in fixed formats. Walt Kelly's Pogo ended in 1975, with his heirs protesting the rigid formats newspapers now demanded.

Newspapers could also be cautious. The daily Popeye strip ended in 1994 after papers objected to a storyline they read as satire on abortion. In 1995 the United States Postal Service marked the strip's centenary with a set of Comic Strip Classics stamps, a tribute that also felt like a farewell to a golden age.

From paper to screens

The internet gave the strip a new home. Webcomics let creators publish directly to readers, without syndicates or editors, and many of today's popular strips have never appeared in a newspaper. The daily rhythm, the recurring characters and the punchline in the last panel all survived the move.

In South Korea the strip took a different turn, into long vertical comics read by scrolling on a phone; we tell that story in how webtoons changed comics. Book-length comics took yet another path, explained in graphic novel vs comic book.

Why the strip matters

The comic strip taught the world to read comics. Speech balloons, panels as units of time, characters who never age and gags timed to the last frame all became common currency through the funnies. For generations, the daily strip was the first comic most people ever read.

Its history is also a history of creators fighting for their work, of newspapers deciding what readers could see, and of a form adapting to every new way of publishing. That adaptability is why, nearly two centuries after Töpffer, people are still reading stories told in sequences of pictures.