A Short History of the Comic Strip: From the Yellow Kid to Webtoon
Comics are an old idea, and in some ways a very modern one. People have told stories in sequences of images for thousands of years, from painted columns to illuminated manuscripts. The comic strip as we know it, with panels, speech balloons and recurring characters, grew up in newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century. This is a short guide to how it developed, and where it has gone since.
The newspaper boom
In the 1890s, American newspapers competed fiercely for readers, and colour printing was new and exciting. Richard F. Outcault's The Yellow Kid, which first appeared in New York papers in 1895, is often cited as the first newspaper comic. Its star was a bald child in a yellow nightshirt, and the words he spoke were printed on the shirt itself. The strip was popular enough to give its name to yellow journalism, a phrase for sensational reporting.
Not everyone agrees that it was the first strip, because there were earlier picture stories in Europe and America. But it was the first to become a national sensation and to establish how comics could work in a daily paper.
The Sunday funnies
By the early twentieth century, Sunday newspapers carried large colour comic pages. Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, which began in 1905, is still admired for its dreamlike imagery and bold use of the page. Each week the boy Nemo went to sleep and had a fantastical dream, and woke up at the end. George Herriman's Krazy Kat, from 1913, mixed poetry, slang and surreal desert landscapes, and was loved by many other artists.
Daily strips and the gag format
Daily strips were usually in black and white and ran in three or four panels, ending with a joke. Characters returned each day, and readers grew attached to them. The format shaped generations of cartoonists.
Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts began on 2 October 1950 and ran for nearly 50 years, ending in February 2000, one day after Schulz's death. It mixed gentle humour with loneliness, doubt and philosophy, and showed that a newspaper strip could be personal. Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, which ran from 1985 to 1995, was another high point, known for its imagination, its watercolour Sunday pages and its refusal to license the characters for merchandise.
The comic book
In the 1930s, publishers began to sell collections of strips, and then original stories, as magazine-sized comic books. The superhero era is often dated from Action Comics #1, published in 1938, which introduced Superman. In the years that followed, a wave of costumed heroes appeared, and the period is known as the Golden Age of comic books.
Comics also faced criticism. In the 1950s, a campaign led by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham claimed that comics harmed young readers. The resulting public pressure led the industry to adopt the Comics Code, a self-censorship system that restricted content for decades.
Underground and independent comics
In the 1960s and 70s, cartoonists such as Robert Crumb published what were called underground comix, which were aimed at adults and ignored the code. Independent publishing grew over the following decades. In Europe, series such as Tintin and Asterix were published as long, hardcover albums, and became part of popular culture. In Japan, a separate manga tradition developed with its own magazines, formats and audience.
The graphic novel
By the late twentieth century, comics were also being published as longer, book-length works. Will Eisner's A Contract with God, from 1978, helped popularise the term graphic novel, and works such as Art Spiegelman's Maus showed that comics could address serious subjects and win major prizes.
Comics move online
The internet changed how comics were made and shared. Cartoonists no longer needed a newspaper or a publisher. They could post pages on their own sites, build an audience, and sometimes make a living from it. Webcomics range from gag strips to epic serials, and many are free to read.
South Korea gave comics another new format. Naver launched Naver Webtoon in 2004, a platform where comics are designed for scrolling on a screen, with tall, single-column pages. The style spread to phones around the world, and many webtoons have since been adapted into television series and films. We look at this shift in more detail in our article on how webtoons changed comics.
What has stayed the same
Through all these changes, some things remain constant:
- A comic tells a story through a sequence of images, usually with words.
- Characters and voices that readers love can last for decades.
- New technology tends to create new formats rather than replacing the old ones.
- Creators keep finding ways to reach readers, whether by newspaper, magazine or phone.
Where to go next
If you want to see how the old strips look, many early newspaper comics are in the public domain and can be read online. Our Free Comics Shelf lists some of the places where you can find them, with notes about what is free and what is not.
Published October 8, 2026. Written with AI assistance and prepared for publication under our editorial policy. Spotted a mistake? Tell us and we will check it.
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