bi-monthly. Some of its characters, such as The Fat Slags have been animated, shown
on television and released on video. Its style is a mixture of American ‘underground’ and
the British Beano, and if the humour of its young artists is not ‘adult’ in the true sense
of the word, it is definitely highly unsuitable for children!
American Comics and Comic BooksSuperficially, the American comic book is virtually the same as when it began in 1933, a
sturdy monthly magazine of comedy and adventure strips told purely in pictures, the
textual detail being carried in ‘speech balloons’ and descriptive boxes within the
pictures. The fictional stories, always dominant in the British comic, supported by a
single illustration, were never more than a page or two in the American comic books,
and were there only to pacify the US Post Office into allowing comics to receive a low-
price subscription postal permit.
The history of the American comic book which was to become such an influence on
the world’s comic publishing style, begins in a remarkably similar fashion to the British
comic and more especially the European. American comic books have their roots in
reprints from magazine and newspaper publication. The first appears to be a book
entitled Scraps, published in 1849 by the cartoonist himself, D.C.Johnston of Boston.
This was a mixture of cartoons and sequential striplets in the form of ‘scrap sheets’, but
whether they were originally issued as separate sheets is not known.
The first comic books intended for children were issued before 1876 by the Broadway
publishing house of Stroefer and Kirchner, who had links with Germany, where for some
time the large size picture-story sheets had been published as Münchener Bilderbogen in
Munich. Two sets of twenty numbered sheets were issued both loose and bound in two
hardback volumes. Translated into English they were also reprinted in Britain by Griffith
and Farran of St Paul’s Churchyard. Titles and artists included strip stories such as
‘Scenes from Fairyland’ by Thomas Hosemann, ‘Puck and the Peasant’ by
H.Scherenberg, and ‘Munchhausen’s Travels and Adventures’ by W.Simmler. The books
were entitled Illustrated Flying Sheets for Young and Old and sold for $1.25 a volume ($2
for colour). The same publisher also issued the pioneering picture strip books written
and drawn by Wilhelm Busch, the German credited with creating the modern comic
strip with Max und Moritz (1865).
More natively American was Stuff and Nonsense (1884) a collection of cartoons and
strips drawn by Arthur Burdett Frost for the magazine Harper’s Monthly, published as a
hardback book by Charles Scribner’s Sons. The book was divided into two parts: ‘Stuff’
being the strips, such as ‘Ye Aesthete, Ye Boy and Ye Bullfrog’, and ‘Nonsense’ being the
single cartoons. (This book also had a British edition, being reprinted by John C. Nimmo
no fewer than three times, and again in 1910 by George Routledge.) The same year saw
the start of strip and cartoon reprints from Life Magazine (then a weekly humorous
publication unrelated to the photo-journal of today), starting with The Good Things of
Life (1884) and followed by The Spice of Life (1888).
Joseph Keppler, a Viennese cartoonist, emigrated to New York and started Puck, a
German-language humorous weekly, in September 1876. An English-language edition
followed six months later and by 1880 Frederick Burr Opper, who became one of the
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