12 comics like Rodolphe Töpffer: Picture Stories

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

8. 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.

9. La Famille Fenouillard

by Christophe

• Adventure (shared)
• 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Struwwelpeter

by Heinrich Hoffmann

• Horror
• Tragedy

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.