12 comics like Ally Sloper

1. The Yellow Kid

by Richard F. Outcault

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life (shared)

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.

2. Frederick Burr Opper: Collected Cartoons

by Frederick Burr Opper

• Comedy (shared)

Single-panel work from the man who drew Happy Hooligan — magazine cartoons, political drawings and book illustration, from the years when the newspaper comic was still being invented around him.

3. Wilhelm Busch: Picture Stories

by Wilhelm Busch

• Comedy (shared)

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.

4. Caran d'Ache: Collected Drawings

by Caran d'Ache

• Comedy (shared)

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.

5. Buster Brown

by Richard F. Outcault

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life (shared)

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.

6. Happy Hooligan

by Frederick Burr Opper

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life (shared)

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.

7. Mutt and Jeff

by Bud Fisher

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life (shared)

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.

8. Toonerville Folks

by Fontaine Fox

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life (shared)

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.

9. Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga

by Attributed to Toba Sōjō

• Comedy (shared)

Rabbits, frogs and monkeys wrestling, bathing and holding a funeral, brushed onto handscrolls in the twelfth century. Japan often calls it the oldest manga: no words, a running story, read right to left.

10. Rodolphe Töpffer: Picture Stories

by Rodolphe Töpffer

• Adventure
• Comedy (shared)

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.

11. Krazy Kat

by George Herriman

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life (shared)
• Supernatural

A cat loves a mouse, the mouse throws a brick, and the cat reads the brick as a token of love. Thirty years of the same joke, told in a shifting desert landscape that changes between panels.

12. Hokusai Manga

by Katsushika Hokusai

Fifteen volumes of sketches — swordsmen, bathers, birds, ghosts, people pulling faces — printed from woodblocks. This is the book that put the word manga into circulation, a century before the form existed.