The Comic Strip Century

Uses newspaper articles, historical overviews, and personal interviews to explain the history of American comic books and graphic novels.

Examples from the Yellow Kid of 1896 to Peanuts, B.C., and Doonesbury.

A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain, this text turns away from sentimental and polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals, variety shows and minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo and political correctness unimagined.

Comics flourished following the publication of the first Thai comics strip in 1907. Artists borrowed elements from European and American publications, such as Punch magazine, and created uniquely Thai mash-ups. In the 1930s, one artist combined E. C. Segar's Popeye with the codes of local 'likay' theatre, while another used the neoclassical realism introduced by Italian painters appointed at the Siamese court to give eerie form to the folklore pantheon of Thai ghosts. During the Cold War era, horror tales, anti-communist propaganda and socially engaged graphic novels bore witness to the country's darker years. Then, in the 1990s, Thai comics struggled to compete with the sudden influx of unlicensed manga from Japan that led to a disregard for local efforts and its current 'forgotten' status. After a hiatus, Thai comics made a comeback in the late '90s with a quirky, alternative scene that deserves wider international recognition. Beautifully designed and bursting with stories - from 20th-century interpretations of age-old Buddhist legends to tales of modern-day millennial angst - 'The Art of Thai Comics' opens an enlightening and visually spectacular window onto the country's history, culture and creativity. In doing so, it reinstates Thai comics into the wider story of global comics art.

Sixty years before the comics entered the American newspaper press, Rodolphe Töpffer of Geneva (1799–1846), schoolmaster, university professor, polemical journalist, art critic, landscape draftsman, and writer of fiction, travel tales, and social criticism, invented a new art form: the comic strip, or “picture story,” that is now the graphic novel. At first he resisted publishing what he called his “little follies.” When he did, they became instantly popular, plagiarized, and imitated throughout Europe and the United States. Töpffer developed a graphic style suited to his poor eyesight: the doodle, which he systematized and also theorized. The drawings, with their “modernist” spontaneous, flickering, broken lines, forming figures in mad hyperactivity, run above deft, ironic captions and propel narratives of surreal absurdity. The artist's maniacal protagonists mix social satire with myth. By the mid-nineteenth century, Messrs. Jabot, Festus, Cryptogame, and other members of the crazy family, comprising eight picture stories in all, were instant folk heroes. In a biographical framework, Kunzle situates the comic strips in the Genevan and European culture of the time as well as in relation to Töpffer's other work, notably his hilarious travel tales, and recounts their curious genesis (with an initial imprimatur from Goethe, no less) and their controversial success. Kunzle's study, the first in English on the writer-artist, accompanies Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips, a facsimile edition of the strips themselves, with the first-ever translation of these into English.

From its launch 1965, TV Century 21 (later known simply as TV 21) was the smash-hit British comic of the 1960s. Its in-house tie-in with the science-fiction puppet series created by Gerry Anderson's Century 21 Productions guaranteed success with young fans excited to read more about their TV heroes, in an era before video technology enabled viewers to relive favorite TV shows at will. Thunderbirds, Lady Penelope, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, and Joe 90 all burst forth in full color from the magazine's packed pages, in stories illustrated by such giants of the comic industry as Frank Bellamy, Don Harley, Mike Noble, Ron and Gerry Embleton, and "Cervic," the pen-name used by the team of Carlos Pino and Vicente Alcazar. This superb showcase of Anderson's most popular characters will be an essential purchase for all Anderson fans and all enthusiasts for classic British comics.