Newspaper Comic Strips

 

Welcome on this blog full of information about Newspaper Comic Strips, and offcourse the comics.

The first newspaper comic strips appeared in North America in the late 19th century. The Yellow Kid is usually credited as the first. However, the art form combining words and pictures developed gradually and there are many examples of proto-comic strips.

The Swiss teacher, author and caricature artist Rodolphe Töpffer (Geneva, 1799–1846) is considered the father of the modern comic strips. His illustrated stories such as Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1827), first published in the USA in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck or Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (1831), inspired subsequent generations of German and American comic artists. In 1865, the German painter, author and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created the strip Max and Moritz, about two trouble-making boys, which had a direct influence on the American comic strip. Max and Moritz was a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children’s stories such as Struwwelpeter (“Shockheaded Peter”); in one, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill and consumed by a flock of geese. Max and Moritz provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids in 1897. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, sawing logs for snoring, speech balloons, and thought balloons originated in Dirks’ strip.

Hugely popular, Katzenjammer Kids occasioned one of the first comic-strip copyright ownership suits in the history of the medium. When Dirks left William Randolph Hearst for the promise of a better salary under Joseph Pulitzer, it was an unusual move, since cartoonists regularly deserted Pulitzer for Hearst. In a highly unusual court decision, Hearst retained the rights to the name “Katzenjammer Kids”, while creator Dirks retained the rights to the characters. Hearst promptly hired Harold Knerr to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks renamed his version Hans and Fritz (later, The Captain and the Kids). Thus, two versions distributed by rival syndicates graced the comics pages for decades. Dirks’ version, eventually distributed by United Feature Syndicate, ran until 1979.

In America, the great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war (1887 onwards) between Pulitzer and Hearst. The Little Bears (1893–96) was the first American comic with recurring characters, while the first color comic supplement was published by the Chicago Inter-Ocean sometime in the latter half of 1892, followed by the New York Journal’s first color Sunday comic pages in 1897. On January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation’s first full daily comic page in his New York Evening Journal. The history of this newspaper rivalry and the rapid appearance of comic strips in most major American newspapers is discussed by Ian Gordon. Numerous events in newspaper comic strips have reverberated throughout society at large, though few of these events occurred in recent years, owing mainly to the declining role of the newspaper comic strip as an entertainment form.

You can access the information and comics through the sidebar.

The comics are mostly in packages from around 100mb, inside these rar-packages you will find the comics in cbr format.

You can view the comics with any cbr-reader like CDisplay or ComicRack.

I did not scan the comics myself only collect them from various sites on the internet, internet archive, Usenet Newsgroups and torrents.
So thanks to all the scanners and uploaders.
This blog is purely ment to preserve the comics and to enjoy them, no financial meanings are involved, if you like the comics buy them as long as they are availabe, because nothing can beat the feeling of reading a real comic.

If you find something wrong (downloads, numbering, information) please let me know so that i can correct the error.

 

Thanks to the following sites for information :

Barnacle Press

Wikipedia

 

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