12 comics like Frederick Burr Opper: Collected Cartoons

1. 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.

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. Happy Hooligan

by Frederick Burr Opper

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life

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.

4. 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.

5. Alphonse and Gaston

by Frederick Burr Opper

• Comedy (shared)

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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

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. 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.