The Invention of Comics

Tracing the roots of this genre, from comic strips to graphic novels, Dr. Pat Mainardi, pioneer art historian of the nineteenth century, outlines the cumulative changes in culture, society and technological process that laid the ground work for the popular form. While urban audiences saw the birth of comic books in the 1830s, with the first publications of Rudolph Töpffer, rural audiences by that time were already familiar with colorful prints of sequential narration. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, both audiences were being served by producers of popular prints and comic strip had cross-fertilized and morphed into our modern comics.