[150 years ago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debuted the first comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So in honor of that anniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four other examples of how the medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting other ComicsStudiers!]
On two
publications that can help contextualize the first American comic strip.
The
September 11, 1875 edition of the Daily
Graphic illustrated newspaper
featured “Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm,” a series of 17 images from the
young cartoonist Livingston “Hop”
Hopkins (1846-1927) that constitute the first newspaper comic strip in
American history. I haven’t been able to find a complete digitization of the
strip online, but I trust the description in this excellent 2017 Truthdig
article that traces the history of political cartoons (in response to a new
publication entitled The
Realist Cartoons). As described there by the journalist and former
Truthdig cartoonist Mr. Fish
(Dwayne Booth), Hopkins’s strip depicts the titular professor (who would
return in subsequent Hopkins comics such as “Professor
Tigwissel in the Adirondacks”) building an elaborate “burglar alarm” based
on firearms and weaponry, failing utterly to stop a burglary, and then declaring
success, “perpetuating a notion that we are best protected by the machinery of
our paranoia and a weaponized mistrust of the world rather than a less hysterical
adherence to truth, justice, humanitarianism, and mutual cooperation.”
Amen! Hopkins’s
1875 comic strip helped create a groundbreaking new media that has become
hugely popular in the 150 years since (as this week’s series will illustrate),
but it was also very reflective of his own evolving career and perspective as a
political cartoonist. Less than a year after that first “Professor Tigwissel”
strip appeared, Hopkins would publish a book that really embodied his evolving artistic
and political perspective and goals: A
Comic History of the United States, Copiously Illustrated by the Author from
Sketches Taken at a Safe Distance (1876; it’s available in full at that
link and I highly recommend checking it out!). By “Comic” in the title Hopkins means
first and foremost humorous, and the book is most definitely that, making it a
very worthy predecessor to something like my childhood favorite Dave Barry Slept
Here: A Sort of History of the United States (1989). But I really like
that the word is also a pun for the new medium that he was in the process of
helping create, and while this book has a higher percentage of words and fewer
illustrations than a typical comic strip, I would argue it nonetheless reflects
a parallel use of illustration to help tell a story.
Just seven
years after publishing that book Hopkins moved to Australia, where he worked for
the Sydney Bulletin magazine for the rest of his career (and lived with
his family for the rest of his life). But before then he took another important
professional step, drawing for New York City’s Puck magazine
between 1880 and 1883. Puck had been founded in 1876 as a
German-language humor and satire magazine (its founder, Joseph
Keppler, was an Austrian immigrant and political cartoonist) and began
publishing in English a year later, making it in the process the first American
magazine to focus on humor as its central goal. But it was also more specific
than that, focused especially on political
and social writing, cartoons, caricatures,
and the like. Hopkins continued to publish his comics and cartoons in multiple periodicals
during these final years in the U.S., but I would argue that every one of them—such
as this
cartoon published in the Daily Graphic in 1882—reveals the talents
as a political cartoonist he was honing at Puck, skills that had been visible
from that first comic strip back in 1875.
Next strip
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?
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