QUESTION What is considered the first comic strip?

CARTOON-TyPe drawings have been around for a long time. German woodcuts from the 16th century featured accounts of miracles, mockery of shrewish wives, and politically inspired accusations against the Jews.

Propaganda woodcuts and pamphlets were common in the Reformation and 17th-century holy wars, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands.

In england, engraver Francis Barlow depicted the complex political events of the period (including the 1678 Popish Plot) on playing cards, often sold in uncut broadsheets. William Hogarth’s depiction of social and moral squalor raised the broadsheet picture story to an aesthetic level that has rarely been surpassed.

The great age of english caricature began in about 1800 with post-Hogarthian artists such as Henry Bunbury, George Woodward, Richard Newton, Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray.

The father of the comic strip in its modern sense was Geneva schoolmaster Rodolphe Topffer. He created absurdist anti-heroes who struggled against fate.

His Histoire De M. Jabot (1831) follows a middle-class dandy’s attempts to enter the upper class. Monsieur Pencil (1831) begins with an artist’s sketch blowing away, which nearly results in world war.

In 1865, German painter, author and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created two troublemaking boys, Max and Moritz. This had a direct influence on the American comic strip.

They inspired German immigrant Rudolph Dirks in his 1897 creation of The Katzenjammer Kids. Dirks introduced familiar comic strip iconography, such as stars for pain, sawing logs for snoring,