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The next one up is another Englishman, and like Gillray he wasn’t afraid to satirise and lampoon the English gentry, including the king himself. Richard Newton (1777 - 1798) as you can see, died young, at the tender age of only twenty-one, and he was another who used rude toilet humour in his drawings, though he differs from Gillray in that he also supported the cause of the abolition of slavery through his cartoons. Again, like his more famous contemporary, a lot of Newton’s work was on single panel drawings, which, even though they used speech balloons, don’t for me qualify as comics, but mere cartoons. However he did also draw sequential ones, which certainly do.

Sketches in a Shaving Shop (1794), shows different men all wanting to be shaved, and while it does not use speech balloons (the text being sort of suspended above the characters’ heads like ghostly writing floating in the air) and there is no actual narrative here, you can still look at them and see the very precursors to later comic strips. Similarly, Samples of Sweethearts and Wives (1795) makes fun of the gentler sex at their least gentle, women when they are drunk. Whether this was meant to be a commentary on the disgrace of women being inebriated in public or not I don’t know, but given what I’ve read about these guys I would say no: Newton was just using their behaviour as a way to send up society and show them that, to be crude, no matter what they thought, their shit did indeed stink.

His other comics/cartoons include Progress of a Player (1793) which shows the trials and tribulations of a struggling actor on the road to hoped-for fame, Contrasting Husbands (1795), showing two different sides of the English husband (and wife), Progress of a Woman of Pleasure (1794) cataloguing the fall of a servant into destitiution and inevitably prostitution, and Clerical Alphabet (1795) which roundly mocks the clergy. He was, I think, the first satirist or cartoonist to use the figure of Death in his cartoons, as he does in Undertakers in at the Death (1794). Few if any of these cartoons use speech balloons, the text either written underneath the pictures or floating above the characters.

Typhus was one of many terrible diseases prevalent in the eighteenth century, largely down to the completely unsanitary conditions people lived in and the general lack of personal hygiene, and it was this which done for Richard Newton, struck down in his twenty-first year, just as he was beginning to make a name for himself. Perhaps somewhere, the Grim Reaper was laughing as he drew his caricature.

It’s over to Holland next, where the Dutch artist and poet Willem Bilderdijk created an eight-panel story for his young son, a humorous narrative called Hanepoot in 1807, though this was a private venture, not sold or published, only seeing the light of day almost two centuries later, in 1977, where it was recognised as one of the first examples of a Dutch cartoon.


As the nineteenth century gathered steam then (not literally, not yet, but later) and works of Gothic fiction, vampire fiction and horror all came onstream, it seems comics began to emerge a little more, as we have a slew of artists and even the very first magazine in the world dedicated exclusively to comics and cartoons.

William Charles (1776 - 1820), a Scot living in the USA, is credited with bringing the British style of political satire to America, with caricature and speech balloons, and how cool is it that a man born in the year of American independence should end up spending most of his life there? Charles did mostly one-panel cartoons, but he did illustrate Tom, the Piper’s Son (1808) with sequential cartoons which use speech balloons. In 1810, François Aimé Louis Dumoulin (1753 - 1834) published a series of drawings based on the Daniel Defoe novel Robinson Crusoe, thereby becoming the first comics artist from Switzerland, and Thomas Rowlandson, whom we met earlier, continued his career with perhaps the first real “adventure series”, that of Dr. Syntax, which sees, I think for the first time in comics or cartoons, the same character used in three different drawing sequences.

This begins with The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812) and continues with Dr. Syntax in Search of Consolation (1821) and finally The Third Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of a Wife (1822). Technically speaking, and to stick to my own rules here, these aren’t comics as we understand them. They do have multi-panels but there are no speech balloons, hardly even any text, as they are based on books by William Combe. But they are really important to the development and history of comics for other reasons. For one, they are one of the first cartoons which, as i said above, feature the same character in different stories, and years apart. Second, they are the first cartoons to lead to a line of merchandise: hats, coats, mugs, puppets, all sorts of things were produced to capitalise on the popularity of Dr. Syntax. Finally, they were the first English cartoons to be translated into other languages for consumption in other countries.

Rowlandson did use other characters - John Bull, Johnny Newcome, Mary Anne Clarke - in continuation drawings prior to Dr. Syntax, but none were as popular and almost all were single panel drawings. And far, far, away, so far most people in England or even Europe could hardly even imagine it, in the distant land of Japan, Hokusai Katsushika (1760 -1849), usually just known as Hokusai, was pioneering new techniques in cartoons and laying the early foundations of what would become manga comics. In fact, the word manga in Japanese means sketch, and Hokusai first used it in a total of fifteen collections of his work he called Hokusai Manga, or Sketches by Hokusai which have had a massive influence, not only on later Japanese and other Asian artists, but many in the west too, including giants such as Van Gogh and Whistler.

Hokusai, unlike other contemporaries in the west, did not work with pencil and paper initially but with wood and chisel, making his comics on woodblocks, his most famous work, The Great Wave or The Breaking Wave off Kanagawa, shown above Japan’s most famous artwork. He himself was dismissive of his own talent, claiming "From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing."

In a Japan cut off from the western world, and where outside influences were forbidden, Hokusai nevertheless managed to make contact with smugglers who had managed to import into the country the banned art works from Europe, and he learned all he could from them. In a weird kind of full circle, Hokusai being influenced by the west became the west being influenced by Hokusai. Ouroboros or what? He was one of the first, perhaps the first Japanese artist to move away from the popular style of depicting figures such as samurai and geisha girls, and to concentrate on landscapes in particular, inspired by the great European painters of the time. He also began including normal working people in his works, something that had not been done up to then. He created a whole seismic shift in the way Japanese art would be approached and executed, and certainly, if not the father of manga, can be considered surely its grandfather.

He also painted what I assume must have been at the time the largest single artwork, certainly the largest portrait ever, in the 200-square-metre The Great Daruma in 1804, which he created with buckets of ink and a broom. His work with manga began when he was 51, as a way of quickly teaching students how to draw, with the manual Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing in 1812, which was an instant hit. Though his own epitaph was typically humble and self-deprecatory - “If only Heaven will give me just another ten years - just another five more years - then I could become a real painter” - the best tribute to the man comes perhaps from one of the Old Masters, when Degas himself noted of him that "Hokusai is not just one artist among others in the Floating World. He is an island, a continent, a whole world in himself."

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And back across the sea we go, back to merry old England, where the final of the “Big Three” was George Cruikshank (1792 - 1878), who was something of a child prodigy, already helping his father Isaac illustrate his cartoons by the time he was thirteen years old. Although he wanted to go to study at the Royal Academy, Isaac taught him at home, and George followed the same path as his contemporaries in satirising political parties and yes, good old King George himself, though this time George IV, who, as the Prince of Wales, had been so upset with James Gillman. Now he was in the crosshairs himself, and even went so far as to bribe Cruikshank not to caricature him, but to no avail. Seems these artists did not give a flying fuck. Fair play to them.

Cruikshank illustrated satirical text written by William Hone, the most interesting being The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder (1820), which was an fourteen-panel depiction of the scandalous love affair between the king’s wife and an Italian soldier, cleverly constructed as a ladder, with each sequence beginning at the bottom of the drawing and progressing up through to the top image, each labelled with a word ending in -ation, e.g. degradation, consternation… anyone remember INXS? After accepting bribes from the king not to ridicule him any more, Cruikshank turned to book illustration, and worked with some of the great authors such as Milton and Thackeray, and finally with the great Charles Dickens himself.

But like his fellows, Cruikshank was a pioneer of comics, drawing sequential strips complete with speech balloons and even, in one, The Preparatory School for Fast Men (1849), using title cards to show the passage of time. An earlier strip, Gent, No Gent and Regent (1816) goes after his favourite target, George IV, while Comic Alphabet (1836) is more gentle, depicting the alphabet in humorous ways.

His largest work however, outside of illustrating books, came in the form of The Tooth-Ache (1849), a six-page (not panel now, page) comic depicting the tribulations of a man with a sore tooth.

When he illustrated William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839), an account of the life and incarceration and finally death of the famous thief, he used a ten-panel drawing to show Sheppard’s escape and a six-panel one to show his execution.


Unlike our friend James Gillray, he was not a supporter, but in fact an opponent of abolition, and became a fanatical advocate for temperance, having been previously a notorious alcoholic. Oh, there’s nothing worse than a reformed smoker, is there, unless it’s a reformed drinker! And he was both! His moralising would not sit well with many, as he rewrote fairy tales such as Cinderella and Puss-in-Boots in order to preach his own high-handed message of temperance and abstinence. Yeah, ruin it for the rest of us, why don’t you? His pontificating and judgemental stance turned out to be hypocrisy though, as when he died in 1878 it came to light that he had had no less than eleven illegitimate children with his maid, the last born when he was, wait for it, 82! The dirty old bastard!

One of the first I can see to feature an anthropomorphic animal as its main character was Allen Robert Branston (1778 - 1827) in his The Comical Cat (1818) which shows, among other things, a cat at table, standing on its hind legs on the chair cutting up its food, doing a handstand and playing cards with a dog. However as this was all carved in wood I can’t consider it a proper example of any sort of comic. Interesting though.

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The Glasgow Looking Glass/The Northern Looking Glass (1825 - 1826)

Though it lasted less than a year (in which time it was considered by the editors expedient to change the name) The Glasgow Looking Glass holds a place in history as the very first publication in the world to feature only cartoons, which therefore makes it pretty much the first comics magazine. Launched by cartoonist James Heath, lithograph printer Thomas Hopkirk and his print manager, the interestingly-named John Watson on June 11 1825, The Glasgow Looking Glass lampooned local and national politics, with a strong bias on those matters which might appeal more to a Scottish audience. Despite changing its name and trying to broaden its target audience a mere three months into its life, becoming the Northern Looking Glass in August, the magazine failed to catch the public interest and sold poorly, folding before its one-year anniversary on April 3 1826.

Heath resurrected it four years later, with publisher Thomas McLean, under a new name: McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Caricatures (sounds like Herschel Krustofsky’s Clown-related Entertainment Show, doesn’t it?) or The Looking Glass. This time the two aimed higher, looking to sell to a better class of reader, and were rewarded with a four-year run. For all its very limited success though, the (let’s just call it this okay) Glasgow Looking Glass did start a custom later to be picked up by comics whole-heartedly, the serialisation of stories across several issues. This of course gives one the incentive, even the imperative to buy the next issue, lest they miss some important part of the story.

Heath began the rather dully-titled Embarkation: Voyage of a Steam-boat from Glasgow to Liverpool, which did exactly what it said on the tin, but is notable for using self-referential comedy, as in it a passenger is drawn reading the magazine in which his strip is published, the Glasgow Looking Glass. The second serialised story is The Morbiade, more interesting at least as it’s about a riot and its consequences. The magazine is believed to have been the first comic to use the words “to be continued” at the end of the sequence, both as a marketing tool to sell the next issue and to assure readers the story was not over. Its most celebrated story though came in the fourth issue, with the History of a Coat, perhaps the first cartoon to feature an inanimate object as the main character.

Macabre humour proliferated in An Essay on Modern Medical Education, which shows students at a medical university mucking about, digging up corpses, stitching bodies back together, experimenting, watching skeletons walk through the corridors; all very darkly satirical, and maybe not without a note of truth in there somewhere. It is noted as being one of the most gruesome cartoons written at the time, quite graphic in the visceral depictions of body parts, experiments and even soldiers being sewn back up and sent back out onto the battlefield, surely some sort of comment on the pointless loss of life in war?


As the Looking Glass closed its doors forever, across the Channel a French magazine was rising which would mirror it in some ways. I don’t know if it was the first French satirical magazine (probably not) but La Caricature morale, politique et littéraire may very well have been the first magazine in that country to collect together political and moral cartoons. It did a whole lot better than its Scottish counterpart, running in total for thirteen years and constantly and ferociously lampooned the French king Louis Philippe. You know, given that the magazine could only be founded after relaxation of the French censorship laws following the July Revolution (what? I don’t know: pick up a history book! You want me to do everything for you?) it may just be possible that this was the first satirical magazine in France. Or not. Anyway it was a mixture of articles and cartoons, so not, I would think, an actual comic magazine like its Scottish contemporary, but it did give rise to one of the men who is acknowledged as all but a father of the comic.

But before we get to him, this is interesting. Despite the lax censorship referred to a moment ago, it seems La Caricature, as it was usually known, pushed the king too much and was seized no less than twelve times, its editor thrown in jail and fined, and the magazine forced to close in 1835. Undaunted though, it was back open for business three years later, so my contention that it ran for thirteen years is incorrect - a thirteen-year period broken by a three-year one, so ten in all. Still very impressive. It seems William Makepeace Thackeray had something to say about the furore the magazine created:

Half-a-dozen poor artists on the one side, and his Majesty Louis-Philippe, his august family, and the numberless placemen and supporters of his monarchy, on the other.... The King of the French suffered so much, his ministers were so mercilessly ridiculed, his family and his own remarkable figure drawn with such odious and grotesque resemblance, in fanciful attitudes, circumstances, and disguises, so ludicrously mean, and so often appropriate, that the King was obliged to descend into the lists and battle his ridiculous enemies in form.

You know, I’m not sure whether he was siding with or against La Caricature there, but he surely must have been thinking of his own king, George IV, who had been in a similar situation with the likes of Cruikshank and Gillray, though he had been less successful.

Honoré Daumier (1808 - 1879) was a sculptor and a painter, but in 1830 he joined the staff of La Caricature, where a year later he was to draw his most famous and controversial cartoon, which depicted King Louis Philippe as a pear. Challenged on this, he drew a four-panel cartoon which showed the king transforming into a pear in stages. Eager to depose the hated monarch, the republicans grabbed the image and used it to mercilessly insult and depict the king on walls and in pamphlets. The cartoon, Les Poires (the Pears, duh) has become one of the most iconic political satirical cartoons of all time. It says here.

But there was a darker, more serious side to his work too. In 1834 he drew a cartoon commemorating the bloody suppression of a protest, during which people were murdered in their own homes, including a baby killed. His sketch, Massacre de la Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834 so pissed the police off that they confiscated the original lithograph stone and a year later press freedom in France was abolished. You just have to love this guy though. Even thrown in prison for insulting the king, he continued to write articles and draw cartoons, telling everyone he was doing so “just to annoy the government”.

He attacked the corrupt legal system in Le Gens de Justice, works so relevant still that they are often used by lawyers and judges and hung in courts of law, and he was a champion of the poor, like it seems many cartoonists of this era (and later) were, and continue to be. Yet you would have to think that few if any of these early cartoonists were paid well or made a living, as we have multiple reports of alcoholism, debt and poverty attending their lives. Daumier was no different; spent time in prison as mentioned but also struggled with debt and at one point had all his furniture confiscated to pay what he owed. You can’t help but think that the royal court may have had some hand in this - or at least tacitly approved it - given how much of a thorn he and his compatriots had become to Louis Philippe. Who would have thought merely drawing funny pictures could make you such an enemy of the state?

Still, like some of his peers he was not above (or below) mocking the ordinary man, if only gently. Similar to Gillray’s’ Elements of Skating and Newton’s Sketches in a Shaving Shop, his Les Baigneurs (1847) mocks people trying to swim. Perhaps harking a little towards Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick, his 'La Journée du Célibataire (1839) follows the adventures of a bachelor and was published as a text comic in a similar publication to La Caricature, La Charivari, while Les Mésaventures de Mr. Gogo, (1838) appeared in yet another short-lived magazine.

There don’t seem to have been any happy endings for cartoonists or caricaturists or nascent comic artists around this time, and Daumier was another whose life ended badly, and pitiably. Sliding into financial ruin he lost his eyesight and was completely blind by 1873. Having refused the Légion d'Honneur three years previously, he died a pauper in 1878. After his death there were tributes from noted admirers. Famous novelist Charles Baudelaire named Daumier "one of the most important men, not only of caricature, but also of modern art." His colleague Henry James said: "It [presumably his art/caricature/cartooning] attained a certain simplification of the attitude or gesture which has an almost symbolic intensity. His persons represent only one thing, but they insist tremendously on that, and their expression of it abides with us."


Another caricaturist who worked at the same time as Daumier was Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (1803 - 1847), who was usually known simply as J.J. Grandville, Jean-Jacques or just Grandville. His specialty was anthropomorphic animals, using the bodies of humans topped by animal heads, in an interesting style certainly. Whereas later illustrator Beatrix Potter would dress her animal characters, but retain their animal characteristics (squirrels would have bushy tails, paws and claws would still be used) Grandville seems to have obscured or omitted all animal traits below the neck, covering them in gentlemanly clothing or female dresses.

Unfortunately, he too came to a sad end, suffering badly from mental problems, and dying at the age of 44.

Brief mention must also be given to the already-nodded-at La Charivari which, though not exclusively a comic magazine, did provide work for many of the more famous French cartoonists and illustrators, but more importantly must be one of the oldest and longest-running of its type, at least in its own county, as it ran well into the twentieth century, from 1832 - 1937, and was in fact the forerunner of the most famous of them all, the English magazine that dominated and tortured English and foreign politics all through the nineteenth century, Punch.

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Rodolphe Töpffer (1799 - 1846)

And now we come to the man who is universally acknowledged by comic historians as the father of comic artists. You’ll forgive my omitting the umlaut from his name from here on in, as I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep pasting in one word. Born, as you can see, in an auspicious year, on the very cusp of the new century, Topffer was the first ever Swiss comic artist and, despite an eye defect which initially prevented him from drawing, would almost single-handedly invent the medium of comics as we know them today. What was different about his work compared to, say, Daumier, Gillray or Rowlandson, you ask? I’m glad you did ask, because I was asking the same thing, and I got the same answer, the one I’m now going to give to you.

Here it is.

I should probably really say, here they are, because not only were there several important differences, but Topffer’s cartoons were unlike anything that had been produced anywhere before, in the world. First, he didn’t use colour; all his drawing were on white paper in black pen. All were hand-drawn, none featured any political, royal or literary character; all were his own original creations. His comics all followed very clear narratives, text following on from text and picture from picture, leading the reader through the story. His figures were not realistic but stylised. He even invented a new drawing technique, autography, which involved drawing on special paper which was then reversed and traced onto a lithographic stone.

He produced seven different series: Histoire de M. Jabot (created in 1831, first published in 1833), Monsieur Crépin (1837), Les Amours de M. Vieuxbois (created in 1827, published in 1837), 'Monsieur Pencil' (created 1831, first published 1840), Le Docteur Festus (created 1831, first published 1846), Histoire d'Albert (1845) and Histoire de Monsieur Cryptogame (1845). I believe I recognise the second-last there, but will keep my counsel for now. Some of you may also. Quite aware of what he was creating, Topffer even wrote books and essays in which he explained and defended his techniques to a world perhaps sceptical to a new approach to cartoons, and used to the overly flamboyant and exaggerated colour depictions of his predecessors.

Initially though, Topffer was drawing only for himself, and it was famous poet Goethe who convinced him to publish them, though sadly the author of Faust died before he could see how popular his friend’s work would become. As is ever the case with genius though - and more to the point, genius that sells - there are always those ready to rip you off, and so bastardised copies of Topffer’s work were produced by German and French artists, as well as ones in Holland (Netherlands) where his fame lasted all the way to 1972, where a TV series was produced based on one of the spin-offs. And no, it wasn’t the same Albert as on the Genesis album Duke, so my bad there.

Topffer showed that there was a real appetite for comics outside of satirical magazines, and his drawings were published in several magazines and serialised, written specifically for public consumption, and indeed a translated version of Les Amours de M. Vieuxbois, renamed as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, was the first comic in history to sell in the USA. I can’t find any specifics about his death, but I think we can assume he did not die in poverty, and given no mention is made of the usual alcoholism or madness, hopefully he just died of natural causes (although he does seem to have died at an early age so maybe not) and peacefully.


Another Swiss comics artist, though he practiced and became famous for his art in Sweden, was Fritz von Dardel (1817 - 1901). A regular at the court of the Swedish king, Charles XV, he was of course hardly going to be satirising his patron, but instead concentrated on depicting life in Sweden and at the court, though in a sympathetic manner rather than a satirical one.


The mid-to-late nineteenth century was a time when political humour magazine began to flourish in England. Titles like Bell’s Life in London (1822 - 1866) and The Age (1825 - 1846) had whetted the public’s appetite for sharp political satire in cartoon form, but these were newspapers, not at all dedicated to cartoons and certainly not comics. The closest to an actual satirical journal seems to have been Figaro in London (1831- 1839), based on the French humour magazine of the same name, and which led, through its editor, Henry Mayhew, to a name which would loom large over English society, politics and humour for a century or more.


1841 saw a major event in comics history, as the English satirical magazine Punch was published. The brainchild of Henry Mayhew, journalist, playwright and reformist, and Ebenezer Landells, a wood-engraver and illustrator, it was to become the voice of the people over the next 100 years, mercilessly taking to task politicians, kings and queens, celebrities, nobles and trends and fashions with a sharp wit and keen eye for the risible in society. Mayhew did not stay with the publication very long, leaving it after four years, and though it would become incredibly influential in English politics over the next century, initially it failed to capture the public interest until Landells sold to a large publishing house who also handled someone called Dickens, and were able to invest more capital into producing it properly with the new printing techniques just coming into operation.

While Rodolphe Topffer may have been the world’s first real comic artist and virtually invented the medium as a mass appeal venture, Punch can claim the honour of coining the term we’re all so familiar with today. When making some sketches on cardboard for murals which were to be hung in the Houses of Parliament in 1843, the sketches were referred to as cartoons, from the Italian cartone, a term which Punch then used for its political drawings, and which became so popular and well-known that it was soon attributed to any comical drawing, and later of course to animated ones.

I’m not that familiar with Punch, only know of it through its reputation and through some quotes I used or read in other research, but I have the feeling it didn’t run actual comic strips, like its French counterpart, more single cartoons. But it is a very important part of the history of comics, and it would have been a proving ground for some of the wittiest writers and best comic artists over the next hundred years. I won’t pretend I know any of them, other than Gerald Scarfe and John Tenniel, but I’m reliably informed they were all big names. Punch also attracted huge names in the field of literature; apart from Dickens, who took an active part in editing the magazine, there was Kingsley Amis, Quentin Crisp, C.S. Lewis, Somerset Maugham, George Melly, William Makepeace Thackeray and P.G. Wodehouse, to name but a few.

Punch was quickly subject to imitators, pretenders to its comic crown, the most blatant of which was Judy (1867 - 1888) which also undercut its price. This magazine would in fact be the one to spawn perhaps the first real comic character - the first comic strip to concentrate on a single character’s adventures, at any rate - Ally McBeal sorry Ally Sloper, who would go on to have his own weekly self-titled comic in 1884. Sloper would make his debut in Judy in 1867.

Other imitators included Diogenes: A Light Upon Many Subjects (1853) and Fun (1861). This latter was in fact the basis for later magazine Judy, though it played upon Punch’s name. The two, Judy and Fun, were seen as rivals and divided along lines of political ideology, the former conservative while the latter was liberal. Fun made much use of its name in puns (not too hard really) and tried to attract the younger, more savvy reader away from Punch and (ahem) Judy, however in 1871 it was bought by the engravers Dalziel Brothers, who took all the (ahem, again) fun out of it, running it purely as a money-making enterprise. Judy was not laughing for long though, as the Dalziel’s bought it two years later, and for sixteen years the two publications had to run side by side. However by now the sleeping giant which would become the comic book proper was beginning to stir, and a seismic shift would occur in another ten years, as we will see in the next chapter.

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