History of comics: from cave drawings to newspaper cartoons

The annual cartoon days are almost here so it´s a good time to focus on some chess games with a cartoon theme. With the donation of the Rademaker Collection, some remarkable cartoon chess games found a new home at the museum.

Wallace & Gromit, Shrek, Southpark. It is mainly animation and cartoon characters that have been given a place in the Rademaker Collection. But cartoon characters and animated characters are closely related. Tintin, for example, was originally a newspaper strip, but it found its way to the silver screen. The adventures of animated characters Wallace & Gromit can also be found in the English newspaper The Sun.

A selection of cartoon characters and types of comics have already been discussed in the historical articles of the Chessmen Museum. Spike & Suzy, Walt Disney characters, Manga cartoons… It is high time for an article on the history of the comic strip itself.

Moving Rhinos
What is a comic strip anyway? The main characteristic of a comic is that the story is told by way of consecutive and related images. For the history of the comic, this means that we can go back in the time a lot further than the arrival of the first comic books or the earliest newspaper cartoons from the nineteenth century.

The oldest example of a comic is about 31,000 years old, although not everyone considers it a comic strip. It concerns the cave painting of a rhino in Chauvet, southern France. The supporters of the comic theory see movement in the painting that indicates a passing of time: this is not an isolated image, no, a story is told over a period of time.

But even if we don´t go as far back in time as that, we can still find comics. The ancient Egyptians combined image with text 4000 years ago. The drawings and the accompanying hieroglyphs were carved out in stone and, applying chronological order, the Egyptians told stories about gods, pharaohs and heroes. The Romans followed suit, for example with the famous Trajan’s column, at the beginning of our era. The column shows a political cartoon of 155 scenes in chronological order, spanning 200 metres.

Comic lamentation
After the Romans there is a silence of a thousand years, when it comes to cartoons in Europe. The Bayeux Tapestry, with the portrayal of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, is the next one. After that we see the emergence of handmade drawings in medieval books that illustrate the writings.

The earliest known use of text balloons with images in the Netherlands can be found in a letter from 1493. In this letter, the Count of Meurs drew and described the event of his kidnapping by the French. The letter was written to the Duke of Gelre and therefore not aimed at a large number of readers. This also applied to books from before the emergence of the art of printing. These books were so expensive that only the clergy and the elite were able to afford them.

Mass production
The big turnaround came in the 16th century. Parchment was replaced by paper, and wood engravings were easily able to produce a larger circulation, with the help of the printing press. This greatly increased the reach of books in one fell swoop. Apart from texts, this also applied to cartoons, in which the text was often placed under the drawings. Through the use of images, the large group of illiterates could also be reached, for example in the case of political pamphlets.

In the Netherlands, we called a single page with successive drawings and some text by way of explanation ‘catchpenny prints’. They were certainly not only used as a political tool, but also purely for entertainment purposes. The low price made it a very popular item and most people were familiar with this type of comic strip. They were printed until the early twentieth century.

Comic books
The oldest Dutch comic book dates back to 1834 and is titled ‘History of the House of Adrian, one funny story’. Here too, it concerns images made with wood engravings, with a text at the bottom. Comic books as we know them today didn´t exist until the twentieth century. Newspapers played an important role in this case, following the American example. Cartoons were very popular in the USA among the many immigrants who didn´t speak the language (very well) yet. The amount of newspapers and the sales market grew strongly in the nineteenth century and newspapers placed their own cartoons daily. At the end of the century we can see the comic strip in the shape we are used to now: consecutive drawings in frames, combined with speech bubbles, which together tell a story.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the comic strip established itself in the Netherlands via the newspapers. ´De Telegraaf´(The Telegraph) started with a comic strip translated from English, about the adventures of a boy and a pig: Jopie Slim and Dickie Bergmans. Dutch cartoonists followed suit and in 1922 the strip Bulletje and Boonenstaak appeared in the social-democratic daily ´Het Volk´ (´The People´). The creators, George van Raemdonck (drawings) and A.M. de Jong (text), and their cartoon rebelled against the righteous adventures of Jopie & Dickie. Additionally, they didn´t only mean to entertain, they also shared their views on social issues in their comic.

May 1936 saw the arrival of the first weekly cartoon magazine, ‘Doe mee!’ (´Join us!´). After the Second World War, comics were really booming and many well-known heroes were born in that period, such as Tom Puss, Captain Rob and Eric the Norseman. Not everyone was happy with the growing popularity of cartoons, because of the ‘rough depictions´ in some of them. In order to protect the delicate children´s soul, the Minister of Education, Arts and Sciences TH Rutten, on October 25, 1948, summoned schools to prevent the distribution of comics among their pupils.

Although not everyone considered cartoons suitable, the minister did not get his way. The comic became more popular than ever in the years that followed, both among children and adults. Fortunately so, because who didn´t grow up reading cartoons? Also, without comic strips as a source of inspiration, the Chessmen Museum would have missed out on quite a lot of chess games!

By Marjolein Overmeer