The History of Comics
Before Superheroes, Comics Were a Weapon
The comic strip was not invented to entertain children — it was invented to win elections, start wars, and humiliate the powerful.
The Idea
Most people locate the origin of comics somewhere between Superman's debut in 1938 and the Sunday newspaper funny pages of the early 1900s. But the form is older, stranger, and far more politically charged than that origin story suggests. The sequenced image — pictures arranged in order to carry a narrative across time — has been doing ideological work for centuries. Hogarth's 'A Rake's Progress' in 1735 used a series of engravings to skewer Georgian excess with savage precision. The Mexican satirical press of the 1870s weaponised illustrated sequences against corrupt politicians. And in the United States, the so-called 'Yellow Press' wars of the 1890s — when William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer competed for readers in New York — turned the comic strip into a circulation machine, eventually helping to drum up public appetite for the Spanish-American War. What made the comic strip so effective as a tool of persuasion was exactly what makes it pleasurable to read: the gutter, the blank space between panels, forces the reader to complete the story themselves. You see a character raise their fist in one panel, and a crowd flinching in the next — your brain bridges the gap. That mental participation creates a strange intimacy. You feel complicit in the narrative. Propagandists, satirists, and storytellers alike understood this instinctively, long before Scott McCloud named it in 'Understanding Comics' in 1993. The gutter is not empty. It is where meaning is made.
In the World
In the 1890s, a scraggly, bald child in a yellow nightshirt named Mickey Dugan — better known as the Yellow Kid — became the first recurring comic character to grip an entire city. Created by Richard Outcault, the Kid lived in the slums of Hogan's Alley and his sarcastic commentary appeared on his yellow shirt rather than in speech bubbles. He was rude, knowing, and recognisably urban in a way that American popular culture had never quite managed before. Hearst and Pulitzer both wanted him. When Pulitzer's New York World hired Outcault, Hearst's New York Journal simply hired another artist to continue drawing the character in parallel. For a period, two Yellow Kids ran simultaneously in two competing papers — a copyright dispute that gave the sensationalist press of that era its lasting nickname: 'Yellow Journalism.' The Kid was not just a character; he was a proof of concept. Comics could sell papers. Papers could shape public opinion. Public opinion could be manufactured. What followed was an arms race of illustrated content. By the early 1900s, every major American paper had a comics supplement. The form had been established not by artists with grand aesthetic ambitions, but by proprietors who noticed that sequential pictures made people feel something quickly — and then reach for their wallet to buy the next edition. The art form and the attention economy were, from the very beginning, entangled.
Why It Matters
Understanding where comics came from changes how you read them now — and perhaps how you read other media too. The gut sense that comics are lightweight, disposable, somehow less serious than prose or film, is itself a historical artefact. It was partly constructed by the same newspaper proprietors who used comics as bait, and later reinforced by mid-century moral panics about juvenile delinquency that blamed everything on crime comics. But the form has always been capable of extraordinary things precisely because of its constraints. The gap between panels demands active readership. The combination of word and image creates meaning neither can make alone. When you encounter a graphic novel that moves you — Art Spiegelman's 'Maus', Marjane Satrapi's 'Persepolis', Chris Ware's 'Jimmy Corrigan' — you are experiencing a technology refined through centuries of satire, propaganda, and commercial competition. Knowing that history makes you a more alert reader of everything. Any medium shaped by money and politics carries that shaping inside it. The question is whether you can see it.
A Question to Ponder
What other art forms do you consume as entertainment that were originally designed — by someone with a specific interest — to make you feel or believe something particular?
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