Art of the comic strip
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, Fun times: Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids speech and thought balloons. In Britain, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday ( 1884) is regarded as the first comic magazine strip with a recurring character. Ally was a lazy schemer who often sloped through alleys to avoid his landlord and other creditors. It was popular, selling more than 350,000 copies a week.
Also well-loved were Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, launched in 1890 by Alfred Harmsworth, the future Lord Northcliffe and Daily Mail publisher.
Hogan’s Alley, by Richard F. Outcault, ran from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer’s New york World and is considered the first regular newspaper comic strip. It starred a bald, snaggle-toothed boy (the yellow Kid), who wore a yellow nightshirt and hung around in a slum alley typical of late 19th-century New york.
Ken o’Neill, Portsmouth. QUESTION How many British Armed Forces chaplains have been killed in battle? TO ANSWeR this definitively, you would have to go back to at least the 11th century, because armies have taken clergy to war from before 1066.
The role of chaplain in the military has changed, but their presence remains important. Chaplains are now strictly non-combatant.
The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department was formed in 1796. Chaplaincy in the Royal Navy was formalised by 1859. The Royal Air Force Chaplains’ Branch was created at the end of World War I.
Online resources suggest that in World War I, at least 179 Army, 25 Royal Navy and one RAF chaplain died in action. In World War II, the Army lost 96 British and 38 Commonwealth padres; the Royal Navy lost 32 (including 17 RNVR) and five Commonwealth chaplains, and the RAF lost 23.
In response to these deaths, all padres now undergo extensive military training on joining the services in the hope that they can minister to our military personnel in front-line situations without putting themselves at unnecessary risk. Rev Peter Meager (late RAChD),
Cupar, Fife. QUESTION Did Pigmeat Markham invent rap? FURTHeR to the earlier answer, another good candidate for first rap song must be the now late, great Chuck Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business, released as the B-side of Brown eyed Handsome Man (1956). The insistent beat, rapid rhymes, reliance on a single chord and disaffected lyrics all have rap-like qualities.
This song influenced Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. In 2004, Dylan cited this: ‘It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of Too Much Monkey Business and some of the scat songs of the Forties’.
Peter Rees, eastcote, Gtr London.
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