[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?
Leave a Reply