Comics

What part of the newspaper do you turn to first? Sports, finance, food? For many the most important item in the daily paper is the comics section. In fact, during the first half of the twentieth century 60 percent of readers surveyed admitted that this was their number-one reading priority. We want to know what horrible trick Garfield has pulled on Jon. It matters to us that Calvin is having trouble with the school bully, Moe.

Definitions

A few definitions are in order. Comics refers to an ongoing series published in newspapers of narrative cartoons with a regular set of characters. Cartoons were originally drawings used as the basis for paintings. By Victorian times cartoons referred to humorous single drawings in the newspaper. Comic books are booklets of comic strips. Originally they were collections of the weekly colored comics.

Why do we care about these little drawings? Pictures are important as signs to communicate in any culture. We doodle when we are thinking or bored. International highway signs use shorthand symbols to allow everyone to understand important information quickly.

History

Human beings have created narrative picture sequences for thousands of years. Egyptians combined painted images with hieroglyphics. The Assyrians carved low-relief stories of lion hunts in long, horizontal strips. The Bayeux tapestry, finished in the late eleventh century, described the Battle of Hastings in a band 20 inches high and 230 feet long! And in European Gothic churches stained-glass windows served as “reading” for illiterate peasants, communicating biblical truths through pictorial means.

In the Reformation, art met the new technology of printing. Printed on paper from engraved wood, and later from metal, these cheap prints at first were commonly used as propaganda for or against the Catholic Church. Both sides had their graphic artists. Hogarth, in eighteenth-century England, painted narrative sequences, which were quickly reproduced as engravings to be sold cheaply by unscrupulous dealers. Political satire became popular, mostly as single images printed in newspapers.

The first comics were developed in the last half of the nineteenth century in England. Funny Folks came into being as the first weekly comic tabloid, half text and half pictures. The first regular comic strip hero was Ally Sloper, going weekly in 1884, in Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. Sloper had first appeared seventeen years earlier in Judy, an imitation of Punch. Comic Cats appeared in 1890. Often thought to be the world’s first regularly appearing comic, Comic Cats introduced a new element—competition. It cost a halfpenny, which was half the price of the other comics at the time.

In the late nineteenth-century United States, newspapers were divided into sections. From 1892 they included color, and comics lent themselves readily to this. By 1894 strip-sequence cartoons were appearing in the Sunday World Comic Weekly, a section of the New York World. The Yellow Kid first appeared in 1895 as one of the kids of Hogan’s Alley. A creation of Richard Felton Outcault, The Yellow Kid was part of the lower-class, immigrant population that was new to the United States. The comic strip first appeared as a single-panel cartoon and later developed to a series of panels and used balloons to indicate dialogue between characters. The Yellow Kid has gone down in history as the first comic strip (at least in North America).

Competition was already cutthroat by 1895 with William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and other publishers outbidding one another for popular cartoonists, either buying the rights for the comic series or luring cartoonists to their newspaper. At first a cartoonist’s work would show in only one newspaper, but over the years, as publishing empires grew, comic strips were syndicated, appearing in newspapers across the country and around the world.

Comics as Entertainment and Propaganda

What are comics about? Right from the beginning they were conceived as entertainment. The ability to laugh at oneself and one’s surroundings, in good times and bad, is a healthy thing. Early on in the history of comics the colored Sunday comic supplements were called funnies, an abbreviation of funny papers.

Though the majority still are concerned with humor, or are trying to be, comics are not only funny. Comic heroes include those drawn from literature: Hercules, King Arthur, Tarzan. Various characters have had an effect on popular culture—for example, Popeye and spinach, Dagwood sandwiches and Buster Brown shoes. Batman has gone from comics to television and movies. Mickey Mouse has ended up with theme parks and a communications empire.

There is also satire: Li’l Abner, Pogo and Doonesbury. Adventures include Tarzan, Flash Gordon and Terry and the Pirates. Soap operas hit the comics long before television in Mary Worth; Rex Morgan, M.D.; and Judge Parker. And humor reigns in all of its slapstick, sarcastic joy in Beetle Bailey, Garfield, Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes.

Comics have been used as propaganda (especially at the time of the world wars) and in advertising. They have made learning information more palatable. Reading teachers have used them for students who have been unable to learn to read. It has been found that the student is led from comics to books, something like reading Howards End after seeing the movie.

Telling the Story

At the heart of comics’ strength is narration. Comics tell stories. They can deal with important human issues in humorous ways, in a disarming fashion. Though comics are a rarity in biblical dictionaries and commentaries, publications like Christianity Today and Leadership often use cartoons with telling effect. Some comics illuminate some spiritual as well as human issue, and that with telling effect.

Calvin and Hobbes often deals with important religious issues, usually while our heroes are rattling toward the edge of a ravine in their wagon, talking about the meaning of life. B.C. and Peanuts are more explicit in their inclusion of biblical material. The former often presents Scripture in the comic strip at Christmas and Easter without apology. Peanuts has used the Bible for inspiration for over thirty years, sometimes just quoting a verse or two, but often grappling with spiritual issues in a deeper way. When Linus finds out that his sister, Lucy, wishes he had never been born, he confesses to Snoopy, “Why, the theological implications alone are staggering.” Though this has been a regular feature in Peanuts, such thoughtful additions appear less frequently nowadays. But humor in comic strips remains an effective way of introducing biblical truth to a wide audience in a disarming manner.

But should we, as Christians, be involved with the comic? Is it not a distraction? Frivolity? Comic art is mostly positive and reinforces traditional Christian values of right and wrong. Morality is underlined: “Comedy implies an attitude towards life, an attitude that trusts in man’s potential for redemption and salvation” (Inge, p. xxi). This is the comic in the larger sense of Chaucer and Dante, a look at all of life, from hell to heaven. And those who can laugh are secure.

» See also: Culture

» See also: Humor

» See also: Laughter

» See also: Storytelling

References and Resources

D. Gifford, The International Book of Comics (London: Hamlyn, 1988); M. T. Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990); J. O’Sullivan, The Great American Comic Strip (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1990); G. Perry and A. Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics (London: Penguin, 1971).

—Dal Schindell