DCML Digest Issue 36

[Don Rosa]

> From: "Olivier" <mouse-ducks at wanadoo.fr>
> "THE ADVENTURES OF OBADIAH OLDBUCK
>  The First American Comic Book. Originally published in 1842,
> more than half a century before the creation of Yellow Kid!
> In my (short) research on comic strips a couple of  years ago, I
> had found a
> reference to Tvpffer's as the first comic. As the name suggests, it was a
> European "comic", entitled "Histoires en Estampes", published in
> Switzerland
> in 1846-7.
> The next comic work was Wilhelm Busch's "Max und Moritz" (1860-70), in
> Germany.
> Anyway, this might help solve the dilemma (having Pothole meet Tvpffer?).

Yes, I'm aware that comics historians amuse themselves by trying to discover
an earlier comic strip than their peers know of, and it's interesting. But I
personally don't regard those things as comics. They are certainly
forerunners, but so is anything with words and pictures. These 1840-1890
things were a series of normal magazine illustrations with captions, or
sometimes dialogue type-set above a speaker with a line drawn to it. You
could make a case for any children's picture book with a series of
illustrations telling a story to be "a comic book", but I don't buy that. I
have a hard enough time accepting the idea that The Yellow Kid is the first
comic character when he wasn't in a strip and had no word balloon other than
his nightshirt, but he at least appeared in newspapers where comic art was
born. The style of art in these antique "comics" was realistic, or
caricaturistic at best (worst?), very scratchy and dense, like the art that
newspapers had in lieu of photographs or like the political cartoons of the
time. To me, just lining a bunch of them up into a string is not the
creation of the comic strip. True comic art, with that particular style of
simple line art & word balloons & such, developed on the comics pages of the
newspapers around 1900 and the first comic books were the reprintings of
popular newspaper in hardback books soon thereafter, which is where the
American expression "comic book" came from (even when referring to a
magazine). But the thingies that I hold dear and which have the misnomer of
comic "books" are the comic periodical magazines that appeared around the
mid-30's -- that's when the promo sponsors shifted the target audience from
adults to kids with dimes. Those would be the "comic books" that I would
want to have Pothole invent, but as I said, it won't work.
If you try to extend the creation of comic strips back any further, and
insist that any sequential series of illustrations telling a story is a
"comic", there's no way to stop -- you'd zip right on past the
picture-stories on the Great Pyramids and arrive at the tales of an Ice Age
mammoth hunt on the walls of a cave.
Anyway, involving Pothole in the invention of comics would be so complicated
and problematic that I'm sure I won't attempt it. I'd need to go into an
explanation of the history of comics, describing all I've mentioned above,
and the readers, not being comics collectors or scholars, would be beyond
caring. I can easily leave it at where I ended the last Pothole appearance,
with him inventing comic books in his mind. Maybe that's as much of that
"gag" as needs to be.