What were comics like back in pre- and early America?

Question

I know they had them. Were they action? Moral? what?

Answer 1

The first comic book printed in America was The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck originally published in Europe in the 1830s and in 1842 in America.

http://www.collectortimes.com/~comichistory/frames.html

http://www.geocities.com/soho/5537/hist.htm
http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/comics.htm
http://www.thisispopculture.com/2006/04/best-history-of-comic-book-sites-on.html

Answer 2

The first comic strip was Hogan's Alley - often called "the yellow kid" because that was the main character.

Mickey Dugan, better known as The Yellow Kid, was the lead character in Hogan's Alley, the first comic strip and the first to be printed in color in mass production. The Yellow Kid was a snaggle-toothed child with a goofy grin in a yellow nightshirt who hung around in an alley filled with equally odd characters. The device of using word balloons to contain character dialogue in comic strips was used in The Yellow Kid, though the kid himself usually communicated through statements that appeared printed on his shirt. He rarely spoke. His language was a ragged, peculiar ghetto argot.

The strip was drawn by artist Richard F. Outcault. It first appeared on a few occasions in Truth magazine 1894–1895 in black and white print, but gained immense popularity in New York City in 1895 when it debuted in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World as a black and white cartoon on 17 February 1895 and subsequently as a color cartoon on 5 May 1895. Outcault moved the Yellow Kid to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal American in 1897. Pulitzer hired George Luks to draw a second version of the strip in the World, and thus the Yellow Kid appeared simultaneously in two competing papers. Both versions ended in 1898.

Answer 3

The forerunner of the newspaper comic strip was actually a series of satirical essays penned by Benjamin Franklin when he was in his teens, the 'Silence Dogood Letters.'

In these letters, allegedly written by a widow named Silence Dogood (pronounced 'do good'), Franklin poked fun at conditions in Boston, such as the muddy, potholed streets and the practice of punishing people in the stocks.

Interestingly, Franklin wrote these essays and slipped them under the door of his brother's printing shop, where he was an apprentice. No one knew that he was the author.