Everything about Comics

Welcome to our blog about comics! Here you will be able to find everything about the insanely addictive world of comics. We are gathering at one place comics enthusiasts only and would like to share articles and some interesting views and facts with all the fans out there. For us comics are the match between great art and fantastic writing and we get very excited every time we find more people thinking like us. For young children, comic books are encouraging in the learning process of how to “read between the lines”, or how to understand the actual meaning from images, but comics are not only good for children. They offer all of us a way to escape and disengage from our everyday issues and to enter a world of imagination and dwell deep into the stories that are not based on real-life. We might find ourselves attracted to some characters in one way or another and we feel deeply inspired by them sometimes. Comics also help us think differently, they are cool, they help people learn to love reading and reading, as we all know, is good for our brains. They are not only Superhero stories, as many of them contain complex, deep and well-written characters, whose stories we follow as they grow up, mature and evolve in front of us and we can relate to their struggles. Have you ever wondered how and where comics were created? Well, we have and would like to share with you just few facts from the rich history of comics.

The Origin of Comics

The father of comic strips is considered to be the Swiss teacher, author, painter, cartoonist and caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer. He was born on either 31 January or 1 February, 1799 in Geneva, Léman, French First Republic. He studied in Paris from 1819 to 1820 and later on, became a school teacher in Geneva, following his return there. He established a boarding school for boys by 1823 and became a Professor of Literature at the University of Geneva in 1832. He used to entertain his students with his caricatures and in 1837, he published the first comic book printed in the U.S.A. and the first newspaper comic in America, Histoire de M. Vieux Bois. It was created in 1827 and first published in Geneva, in Switzerland in 1837, then in London in 1841 and then in New York, U.S., in a newspaper on September 14, 1842. In 1849 it was published as the book The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck.

The first American comic strip was The Yellow Kid, that appeared on newspapers from 1895 to 1898 and was created and drawn by Richard F. Outcault. The Yellow Kid is also commonly known for its link to the origination of the term “yellow journalism”. The term that refers to emphasizing of sensation over the actual facts in newspapers for the sake of higher sales. Despite the fact that The Yellow Kid was a cartoon, the humor and the social commentary of the strip were intended for the adult readers of the paper.

Japan has history of satirical cartoons and comics. In the early 19th century Hokusai, who was an Innovative in his compositions and exceptional in his drawing technique ukiyo-e artist, helped popularizing the term manga, that is the Japanese term for comics and cartooning. His actual name was Katsushika Hokusai, but he is widely known simply as Hokusai. He was supposedly born on October 31, 1760 in Edo, Japan and is considered one of the greatest masters in the history of art. He had a successful career and up until his death on May 10, 1849 he had produced over 30,000 art pieces for pictured books in total.