The first newspaper comic-strip is generally considered to be that which appeared on February 16 1896 in the New York Sunday World. It was a three-quarter page feature in colour called ‘The Great Dog Show in M’Googan’s Avenue’. Kids in the city’s slum backyards were organising their own dog show; the hero, dressed in a bright yellow nightgown, soon became the ‘Yellow Kid’ and ‘Hogan’s Alley’ achieved immediate popularity as a long-running comic strip.
Of course, the idea was not new. English cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) created a comic character, ‘Dr Syntax’, who was popular and considerably earlier. William Hogarth (1697-1764) included speech ‘balloons’ in his engraving satirising life in London.
George Orwell took comics seriously enough to write about them. In ‘Boys Weeklies’ (1939) published in Selected Essays Orwell analyses the social and political connotations of early publication in the genre.
What seems to characterise comics, in Orwell’s days or our own, is their social changelessness, deep down if not in the surface detail. Orwell did find differences between the older and the generation of weeklies. However, other than the better techniques, more scientific interest, more bloodshed and more sycophancy, there is hardly any advance in the social outlook.
As life appears to have become more complex, and society more complicated, the stereotype of the hero has had a sustaining appeal. Picture-strip heroes such as Clark Kent (Superman), who first made his appearance in 1938 in the US, have not only led popular (and charmed) lives on print but have also translated into immensely popular mainstream blockbuster movie heroes.
On the screen, Walt Disney dominated the field of cartoons. But there have been many others as well: Paul Terry’s ‘terrytoons’, Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat, Bob Cannon’s Gerald McBoing-Boing, Ernest Pintoff’s Human Rectangle, Flebus, Tex Avery’s Chilly Willy, Tom and Jerry created by William Hanna, Joseph Barbera and Fred Quimby, along with countless others such as Top Cat, Scooby Doo and the Flintstones, Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker and Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Among those artists who have attempted to push cartoons onto the screen are John Halas and his wife Joy Batchelor, Richard Williams and Bob Godfrey.
Of the scores of outstanding cartoonists in today’s English-speaking world how can one forget William Health Robinson and Rowland Emett, for comic fantasy; Norman Thelwell, for the world of horses and the horsey; Sir David Low, for political satire, who invented the embodiment of the diehard reactionary ‘Colonel Blimp’ and the Guardian’s Les Gibbard; Carl Gilles, for the creation of one of the great cartoons family sagas; Gerard Hoffnung, for services to the comical aspects of music, and; Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, for cartoons which scream with anguish rather than laughter. At the top of all is the satirical magazine Punch, founded in 1841.
In The Cartoon: A Short History of Graphic Comedy and Satire J Geipel writes: Cartoons may be called the slang of graphic art. Like verbal slang, they tend to rely for their impact on spontaneity, playfulness; popular imagery and often deliberate vulgarity…providing a most suitable outlet for man’s healthy and irresistible urge to poke fun at his fellows, his institutions and himself.