12 comics like Caran d'Ache: Collected Drawings

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. The Yellow Kid

by Richard F. Outcault

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life

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.

6. Ally Sloper

by Charles H. Ross

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life

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.

7. Emakimono: Picture Scrolls

by Various

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.

8. 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.

9. Toba-e

by Various

• Comedy (shared)

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.

10. Ban Dainagon Ekotoba

by Attributed to Tokiwa Mitsunaga

• Drama

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.

11. The Katzenjammer Kids

by Rudolph Dirks

• Comedy (shared)

Hans and Fritz torment der Captain and die Mama, get caught, and are back at it the following week. One of the first strips to use speech balloons and a recurring cast — the shape everything after it copied.

12. La Famille Fenouillard

by Christophe

• Adventure
• Comedy (shared)

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.