go to homepage

Comic strip


A definition of terms



The origins of the comic strip

The comic strip, defined as a mass medium, cannot reasonably be said to have existed before the invention of printing. In the early period there were two principal forms: a series of small images printed on a single piece of paper (narrative strip proper) and a series composed of several sheets of paper, with one image per page, which when displayed on the wall of a house formed a narrative frieze or picture story.

From the outset two basic groups of themes emerged: political morality and private morality. Surviving pre-1550 strips, most of which are German woodcuts, deal with such subjects as the lives of saints (subdivided in the manner of late medieval painted altarpieces, which were a decisive factor on the compartmentalized layout of broadsheets), accounts of contemporary miracles, mockery of worldly love, and politically inspired accusations against the Jews.


The Reformation and the ensuing wars of religion through the 17th century, particularly in Protestant Germany and the Netherlands, gave rise to many propagandistic and patriotic strips based on contemporary political events. In the course of the 17th century, the narrative strip, hitherto an ill-defined and irregular phenomenon, became stabilized and typically took the form of an allegorical graphic centrepiece surrounded by narrative border strips. Although often crude in style, these strips managed to render accounts of political intrigue and moving descriptions of military terror; the best known in the latter category is the exquisitely executed and carefully cadenced narrative of the Thirty Years’ War by Jacques Callot. Little known, but as powerful in their way, are Romeyn de Hooghe’s indictments of Huguenot persecution under Louis XIV. Romeyn, the first named artist to devote himself consistently to the narrative strip, also left colourful, forceful, and elaborate graphic accounts of the accession of William III to power in the Netherlands and England. English engravers, inspired by the Dutch example and led by Francis Barlow, retailed the complex political events of the period (e.g., the Popish Plot of 1678) in the form of playing cards, which were often sold in uncut broadsheets.

The earliest strips concerning private morality are German and recount atrocious forms of murder and their public punishment, the emphasis shifting from the latter (in the 16th century) to the former (in the 18th century). The crime strip eventually developed into the more or less exaggerated and romanticized life of the famous brigand, which is the precursor of the early 20th-century detective strip.

Test Your Knowledge
Charles Schulz, 1956.
Peanuts: Fact or Fiction?

Narratives based on a wider spectrum of immoral and criminal behaviour took as their point of departure illustrations for the parable of the prodigal son, woodcut versions of which, independent of the biblical text, were first produced by Cornelis Anthonisz of Amsterdam. The riotous living of the prodigal, enriched with elements from illustrations for the seven deadly sins (see deadly sin) and the Ten Commandments, was distilled in various Italian lives of harlots and rakes, the most comprehensive and drastic of which are mid-17th-century Venetian. A generation later the Bolognese artist G.M. Mitelli was giving his narrative and seminarrative satires almost caricatural moral emphasis. German artists in the 17th century specialized in satirically exposing the tyranny of shrewish wives and proposing violent remedies. The Dutch at this time produced expressly for children some frankly farcical strips of primitive design. By the mid-18th century the Russians too were making satirical strips.

The various social and moral themes that had been crudely treated in different countries and at different times were the raw material for the English artist William Hogarth, who raised the broadsheet picture story to an aesthetic level that has rarely been surpassed. With a social insight both broad and deep, an unrivaled sense of satirical counterpoint and topicality of reference, and exceptional physiognomic finesse, Hogarth dealt with types from all classes of society. His narrative richness is entirely visual, for he dispensed with all the broadsheet paraphernalia of caption-balloon-legend-commentary, permitting only such inscriptions as could be introduced naturalistically into the scene. Hogarth’s moral attitude was also new: he depicted the follies and the punishment of his protagonists with a measure of sympathy, reserving the full fire of his satire for those who exploit these unfortunates. Among Hogarth’s many followers, two stand out: the German Daniel Chodowiecki, who reduced the Hogarthian picture story to fit within the compass of almanac illustrations, and the Englishman James Northcote, who tried to combine Hogarthian realism with a Neoclassical sentimentality (Diligence and Dissipation, 1796).

Connect with Britannica

It was the introduction into the broadsheet of the essentially comic mechanism of caricature that established the “comic strip” as basically comic in both form and content. The major exponents of the caricatural strip during the great age of English caricature (about 1800) were minor artists such as Henry Bunbury, George Woodward, and, notably, Richard Newton, who in his brief career combined elements of Hogarthian satire with the grotesque exaggerations of Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray. Economy of line, instantaneity of comic effect, and visual and verbal wit now became the hallmark of the strip. With the story concentrated on a single page, backgrounds and narrative incident were minimized in favour of striking facial expressions and silhouetted poses.

The 19th century

The heir to the experiments of the English caricaturists and the father of the comic strip in its modern sense was Rodolphe Töpffer, a schoolmaster of Geneva who was active in the 1830s and ’40s. Largely exempt from the preoccupations of the English caricaturists, Töpffer created a species of absurdist antiheroes who struggled desperately, fruitlessly, and farcically against the caprices of fate, nature, and an irrational, mechanistic society. The stories (lithographed in little oblong albums containing up to 100 pages) are purposefully purposeless, flow with calculated non sequiturs, and make digression a narrative principle. The pace is sustained by another revolution in draftsmanship, for Töpffer discovered how to turn systematic doodling to account, how to exploit the accident, and how to vary physiognomies experimentally. By abandoning anatomical three-dimensional drawing, he showed how to render movement for movement’s sake. Töpffer’s strips are also morally mobile: in his work the normal relationship between cause and effect or crime and punishment, which had underpinned all the older stories, disintegrated. Töpffer’s satire was broadly based: he mocked social climbing, educational systems, parliamentary chaos, political scaremongering, scientific and medical pretensions, and revolutionary zeal, but his sense of fun and taste for the silly are always uppermost.

The French caricaturist Cham (pseudonym of Amédée de Noé) published in the 1840s several albums modeled on Töpffer before choosing a style nearer to that of Honoré Daumier. By this time caricature had settled into satirical periodical journalism. A special place is occupied by illustrator Gustave Doré, who published little Töpfferian albums as a youth and then—in a style of his own—farcical travel tales that culminated in his tremendous Histoire…de la Sainte Russie… (1854). This crudely anti-Russian (Crimean War-era) chronicle used a hodgepodge of picturesque and absurd effects arranged casually or with deliberate incongruity into a loose chronological sequence. Léonce Petit, armed with Töpffer’s lightness of graphic touch but lacking Töpffer’s imaginative flair, specialized in caption-heavy novelettish rustic farce (Histoires Campagnardes [Rustic Stories] in Le Journal Amusant [1872–82]). Britain, lagging behind the Continent, flirted ineffectually with the genre (George Cruikshank tried it several times) and began to make original contributions only toward the end of the century.

Though the strip Ally Sloper is often credited to the English novelist Charles Henry Ross, it was his wife, Marie Duval (pseudonym of the French actress Emilie de Tessier), Europe’s first (and still obstinately unrecognized) professional woman cartoonist, who developed the character Ally Sloper. Featured in roughly 130 strips in Judy—an imitator of Punch magazine—and in albums published separately between 1869 and the 1880s, Ally Sloper was a scheming proletarian loafer, the star of rather formless and crudely, even childishly drawn “gag” strips. Discounting a few short-lived or intermittent German forerunners such as Franz von Pocci’s Der Staatshämorrhoidarius (published in Fliegende Blätter, 1848–56), Duval’s Ally Sloper should be considered the first truly popular continuing comic strip character. He was compared at the time to the feckless Charles Dickens character Wilkins Micawber (in David Copperfield) and moreover was merchandised on commonplace objects in a 20th-century manner. Duval’s Ally was rerun in a new magazine named after him (from 1884) but also was raised to a new level and mock-gentrified in nonnarrative (large single-scene) cartoons by W.G. Baxter and W.F. Thomas.

McNab of That Ilk, a strip by James Brown featuring an irascible Scot (published in Judy, intermittently 1876–88), is the first ethnically stereotyped continuing character. In Fun, another Punch imitator, J.F. Sullivan ran a series of attacks on working-class and petty bourgeois types under the titles British Working Man (1878) and British Tradesman (1880).

The dominant figure of the later 19th century is the German Wilhelm Busch, whose immense popularity in his own day has survived to the 21st century. Busch was much plagiarized in various European countries in his own time, and his major works have been translated into many languages. At first in periodicals (Fliegende Blätter and the Münchner Bilderbogen from 1859) and then in separately published albums (from 1865), Busch quickly established himself as the first fully professional and truly popular comic strip artist, appealing to the educated and uneducated, the young and old alike. Not being bound to journals, he could, like Töpffer, develop much longer and wordier stories than his French contemporaries, whose strips rarely exceeded 50 or so scenes running over three successive issues of a magazine. His graphic and narrative line appears more controlled, more predictable than that of Töpffer; it is comic in an earthier and more rational way.

  • “Max and Moritz” by Wilhelm Busch.

Busch revived the tradition of realistic social satire, directing it at what he saw as a society locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival, coded most famously in the childish rebellion of Max and Moritz (1865) but carried through a “chain of being” from insects (The Bees, a political allegory of 1869) upward, through rodents and simians to various classes of humans. He created a gallery of social types that have since entered German folklore: the drunkard, the disrupted poet, the frustrated painter, the hapless schoolteacher, the perennial bachelor, the sexually precocious self-destructive nymph. The politically conformist Protestant German petty bourgeoisie was ready after 1870 for realistic social satire: Pious Helene (published in English as Pious Helen) and St. Anthony take (Roman Catholic) religious hypocrisy as their butt.

Busch seemed obsessed with the farcical situation and its potential for physical violence. For him, happiness appeared to lie in the avoidance of the petty annoyances of life and in the repression of instinctual behaviour. His cautionary tales of naughty children and animals may be regarded on one level as sophisticated parodies of the didactic juvenile literature of Germany and on another as condemnations of the childish sadism that is assumed to lie in everyone. On yet another level his work can be viewed as one long essay on the vulnerability of human dignity. His best-known characters, the infant pranksters Max and Moritz, have spawned innumerable progeny down to the 21st century. Busch’s graphic inventiveness was tremendous; his use of patterns of oscillation to represent movement and new conventional signs to express shock, pain, and other emotions constitute a vocabulary that has served the humorous strip cartoonist to the present day. The rolling rhythm of Busch’s graphic line has its counterpart in his facile comic verse, which is both independent and complementary, engaged in both duel and duet (and remains infinitely quotable). Variation in the amount of verse accompanying each picture plays an essential part in the pace of the narrative.

The only German follower of Busch worthy of the association was Adolf Oberländer, a sharp observer of human behaviour. In France the heirs to Busch were Adolphe Willette and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, both pioneers in Le Chat Noir (“The Black Cat”)—house magazine of the world’s first cabaret—of the wordless, or “silent,” strip (first employed by Busch). Willette created a black-clad Pierrot, a volatile, poetic, and amoral trickster (1882–84), and Steinlen specialized in cats (1884–86); in both there is a calculated, anarchistic cruelty that is both philosophical and physical. They were followed by Caran d’Ache, who was also much influenced by Busch and who in supplements to Le Figaro in the later 1880s drew the first strips to appear in a general-interest daily newspaper rather than in a weekly satirical magazine of relatively restricted readership. Always witty in a purely graphic sense, he frequently dispensed with captions altogether. In this respect, as in his technique of motif accumulation—his manner of letting a motif or movement snowball or crescendo ad absurdum—he taught much to later cartoonists, especially the Australian-born cartoonist H.M. Bateman in the 1920s.

Other European countries that early produced comic strips include Austria, where the Busch-influenced cartoonist Karl Klič made political comment in a Sunday weekly, Der Floh (1868–72; “The Flea”); Italy, where Casimiro Teja (influenced by Daumier and Cham) was a dominant figure in the satirical magazine Pasquino; and notably Spain. There, despite heavy, erratic government censorship, a combination of Busch (Spanish edition, 1881) and the French models produced several original masters: Apeles Mestres, Angel Pons, Francisco Ramón Cilla, and Mecáchis (Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa), the latter two creating strips of extraordinary length and coherence. The European pioneer of the exotic adventure strip, Cilla was preceded, in a genre whose fruition in the comic book lay many years in the future, by Angelo Agostini, an Italian who settled in Brazil. His As aventuras de Nhô-Quim & Zé Caipora (initially 1883–86; “The Adventures of Nhô-Quim & Zé Caipora”) set a record length of 23 chapters and 378 drawings, a number eventually tripled to a total of 75 chapters by 1906. Thereafter the story was turned into a popular song, four plays, and two silent movies. In Russia the satirical magazine Strekoza (1875–1918; “Dragonfly”), which reached its apogee in the late 1870s through the 1880s, published French-influenced Chekhovian comedies of everyday domestic life.

Imagerie d’Épinal, based in Épinal and other French towns, developed a distinct form of comic strip. Throughout the 19th century the common people and particularly children in rural areas of France, the Netherlands, and Germany had subsisted on Imagerie d’Épinal, single cheap broadsheets hawked about the countryside and in small towns. These documents covered, often in narrative form, such topics of folk interest as religious stories, patriotic histories, and fairy tales. The severe and simple didactic plates had a more or less realistic social emphasis. Some Imagerie d’Épinal is comic in content, although not always in style, relating, for instance, the folly of certain traditional social stereotypes or satirical characters from folklore and literature such as Tyl Eulenspiegel and Baron Munchausen. Christophe (pseudonym of Georges Colomb) raised this type of popular imagery to the level of the intelligent urban child, first in the children’s periodical and then in various albums published separately. These were originally designed, like Töpffer’s, for the children of his own household and the pupils of his school. Christophe’s gentle mockery of such types as the naïve bourgeois and the absent-minded professor is now a staple of French folklore. Christophe established a format for English and French children’s comics that survived down to World War II, whereby the text is excluded from the image rather than incorporated in the balloons, as in American practice.

In the United States the comic strip antedates by many years its “official birthday” in the newspapers in 1896, as celebrated for instance in 1996 by the U.S. postal service with a special commemorative set of stamps showing classic comic strip characters. Several American magazines from the 1870s and ’80s—notably Puck and Judge—began to incorporate comic strips of the European, especially German type and were the first to print them in colour (from 1888). This was an era of massive plagiarism in the United States and Europe, with Germany at first the primary source, and then, as native artists found their feet, borrowings occurred in both directions. Plagiarism, flouting ineffective international copyright laws, helped to launch new, very cheap (10 cents or one half-penny) magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Frederick Burr Opper (who went on to create the comic strip Happy Hooligan), F.M. Howarth, Syd Griffin, and especially Eugene Zimmermann were original and prolific artists of this period. The Swiss-born Zimmermann’s taste for grotesque forms of violence, animal antics, and racism seems as much American as German.

comic strip
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Harvard
  • Chicago
You have successfully emailed this.
Error when sending the email. Try again later.

Keep Exploring Britannica

film noir
The Toilet of Venus: hacked
Art Abuse: 11 Vandalized Works of Art
history of photography
Palace of Versailles, France.
Comic Books: Fact or Fiction?
motion picture
Scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
graphic design
A scene from A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969).
Peanuts: Are You a Blockhead?
Take this Pop Culture quiz at Encyclopedia Britannica to test your knowledge about the Peanuts comic strip and its characters.
Rediscovered Artists: 6 Big Names That Time Almost Forgot
Zoetrope, with six strips of zoetrope animation.
Pop Quiz: Fact or Fiction?
Email this page