Latest releases

Neighbourhood boys, spelled the way they talk, arguing about the rules of games they are inventing as they go. Small stakes taken entirely seriously, which is what being eight years old is like.

A provincial shopkeeper takes his wife and daughters on a day out and they end up circling the globe, still complaining about the food. The first long-running French comic family, drawn by a botanist under a pen name.

An orphan with no pupils, a dog called Sandy, and a habit of walking into other people's troubles. Adventure serial and melodrama at once, and it argued with its own readers about politics for decades.

Jiggs came into money and would rather be eating corned beef with his old friends; Maggie intends them to be respectable and throws crockery about it. Drawn in a clean deco line that still looks modern beside the strips printed around it.

A baby was left on a bachelor's doorstep in 1921 and then did something no comic character had done before: he grew up, at the speed everybody else does. The strip has aged in real time ever since.

A doctor wrote it for his three-year-old because the children's books in the shops were unbearable. The result: a boy who sucks his thumbs loses them to a tailor with shears. Cheerfully drawn, and among the most frightening books ever aimed at children.

A twelfth-century handscroll about a courtier accused of burning down a palace gate. Unrolled right to left, the crowd runs, the rumour spreads and the accusation lands — a story told by moving the reader along the paper.

Two Frenchmen so determined to let each other go first that nothing ever gets done and the building burns down behind them. Their catchphrase outlived the strip by a century.

The rest of Busch — drunks, monks, cats, painters and children, most of them punished. Picture and verse locked together on the page thirty years before anyone thought to call the arrangement a comic.

Seven pranks by two boys, told in rhymed couplets under the pictures, ending with the pair of them ground into meal and fed to the ducks. Rudolph Dirks was asked to redraw it for an American paper and produced The Katzenjammer Kids instead.

An ordinary family with money troubles, told as a continuing story rather than a daily joke — the strip that first made readers buy tomorrow's paper to find out what happened. Everything serialised owes it something.

A trolley that meets all the trains, a skipper with a beard, and a suburb of people who know each other far too well. The trolley became famous enough that real towns claimed to be the original.

Eighteenth-century comic picture books of long-limbed figures falling over each other, named after the monk credited with the frolicking-animals scrolls. Cheap, printed in quantity, and sold to be laughed at rather than kept.

A red-nosed London schemer who slopes up the alley when the rent is due. The first comic character to carry his own magazine and to be sold as merchandise — he was on mugs before anybody had thought that through.

Two boys plan a prank on the old man; the old man saw it coming and turns it round on them. The joke never varies, which was the point — readers came back to watch the grandfather win again.

A tall schemer and a short optimist, running a small swindle a day and losing on it. It ran daily rather than on Sundays, which almost nothing did in 1907, and every daily strip since has inherited the habit.

Cinderella with a stepfamily, a newspaper contest instead of a ball, and Hollywood instead of a palace — where the prize turns out to be a job nobody wants.

A bald child in a yellow nightshirt, standing in a tenement alley with words printed across the shirt instead of a speech balloon. Histories of the newspaper comic usually start here, and the colour of that shirt is where the phrase yellow journalism came from.

A Geneva schoolmaster drew absurd little travel stories for his pupils in the 1830s, in panels, with the text underneath carrying the timing. Goethe read them and approved. They are usually called the first comics.

A neatly dressed boy, his talking dog Tige, and a prank every Sunday — followed by a written resolution never to do it again, which never survives the week.

A tramp with a tin can for a hat tries to do somebody a kindness and is arrested for it in the last panel. Every week, for thirty years, the same good intention and the same policeman.

A red-nosed London schemer who slopes up the alley when the rent is due. The first comic character to carry his own magazine and to be sold as merchandise — he was on mugs before anybody had thought that through.

Painted handscrolls from medieval Japan, read by unrolling with one hand and rolling up with the other. Scene runs into scene with no frame between them, which is a way of handling time that comics spent centuries rediscovering.

Wordless picture stories from Paris in the 1880s, told in strict panel sequence so the joke lands without a caption. He took his name from the Russian word for pencil, and he is the reason the story without words became a form.

A baby was left on a bachelor's doorstep in 1921 and then did something no comic character had done before: he grew up, at the speed everybody else does. The strip has aged in real time ever since.

An ordinary family with money troubles, told as a continuing story rather than a daily joke — the strip that first made readers buy tomorrow's paper to find out what happened. Everything serialised owes it something.

The rest of Busch — drunks, monks, cats, painters and children, most of them punished. Picture and verse locked together on the page thirty years before anyone thought to call the arrangement a comic.

A bald child in a yellow nightshirt, standing in a tenement alley with words printed across the shirt instead of a speech balloon. Histories of the newspaper comic usually start here, and the colour of that shirt is where the phrase yellow journalism came from.

A Geneva schoolmaster drew absurd little travel stories for his pupils in the 1830s, in panels, with the text underneath carrying the timing. Goethe read them and approved. They are usually called the first comics.

A doctor wrote it for his three-year-old because the children's books in the shops were unbearable. The result: a boy who sucks his thumbs loses them to a tailor with shears. Cheerfully drawn, and among the most frightening books ever aimed at children.