series of adjacent drawn images, usually arranged horizontally, that are designed to be read as a narrative or a chronological sequence. The story is usually original in this form. Words may be introduced within or near each image, or they may be dispensed with altogether. If words functionally dominate the image, it then becomes merely illustration to a text. The comic strip is essentially a mass medium, printed in a magazine, newspaper, or book. The definition of comic strip as essentially containing text inscribed within “balloons” inside the picture frame aspires to a certain orthodoxy in the United States, but it is unworkable and would exclude most strips created before about 1900 and many since. The term graphic novel is now established for the longer and more novel-like coherent story, and the term sequential art is also in use.

A comic book is a bound collection of strips, each of which typically tells a single story or a gag (joke) in a few panels or else a segment of a continuous story. Most of the more popular newspaper comic strips eventually are collected over a varying period of time and published in book form.

Only in the English language is the word comic used in connection with these strips. Although now firmly established, it is misleading, for the early (pre-19th-century) strip was seldom comic either in form or in content, and many contemporary strips are in no sense primarily humorous. The terms comics and comic strip became established about 1900 in the United States, when all strips were indeed comic. The French term is bande dessinée (i.e., “drawn strip,” or BD for short). The older German term is Bildergeschichte (“picture story”) or Bilderstreifen (“picture strip”), but the Germans now tend to employ the English word, as do speakers of many other languages. The Italian term for this art form is fumetto (literally, “little puff of smoke,” after the balloon within which most modern strips enclose verbal dialogue). In Spanish both the comic strip and book are called historieta.

The comic strip, defined as a mass medium, cannot reasonably be said to have existed before the invention of printing. In the early period there were two principal forms: a series of small images printed on a single piece of paper (narrative strip proper) and a series composed of several sheets of paper, with one image per page, which when displayed on the wall of a house formed a narrative frieze or picture story.

The Reformation and the ensuing wars of religion through the 17th century, particularly in Protestant Germany and the Netherlands, gave rise to many propagandistic and patriotic strips based on contemporary political events. In the course of the 17th century, the narrative strip, hitherto an ill-defined and irregular phenomenon, became stabilized and typically took the form of an allegorical graphic centrepiece surrounded by narrative border strips. Although often crude in style, these strips managed to render accounts of political intrigue and moving descriptions of military terror; the best known in the latter category is the exquisitely executed and carefully cadenced narrative of the Thirty Years' War by Jacques Callot (Callot, Jacques). Little known, but as powerful in their way, are Romeyn de Hooghe's indictments of Huguenot persecution under Louis XIV. Romeyn, the first named artist to devote himself consistently to the narrative strip, also left colourful, forceful, and elaborate graphic accounts of the accession of William III to power in the Netherlands and England. English engravers, inspired by the Dutch example and led by Francis Barlow, retailed the complex political events of the period (e.g., the Popish Plot of 1678) in the form of playing cards, which were often sold in uncut broadsheets.

The earliest strips concerning private morality are German and recount atrocious forms of murder and their public punishment, the emphasis shifting from the latter (in the 16th century) to the former (in the 18th century). The crime strip eventually developed into the more or less exaggerated and romanticized life of the famous brigand, which is the precursor of the early 20th-century detective strip.

Narratives based on a wider spectrum of immoral and criminal behaviour took as their point of departure illustrations for the parable of the prodigal son, woodcut versions of which, independent of the biblical text, were first produced by Cornelis Anthonisz of Amsterdam. The riotous living of the prodigal, enriched with elements from illustrations for the seven deadly sins (see deadly sin) and the Ten Commandments, was distilled in various Italian lives of harlots and rakes, the most comprehensive and drastic of which are mid-17th-century Venetian. A generation later the Bolognese artist G.M. Mitelli was giving his narrative and semi-narrative satires almost caricatural moral emphasis. German artists in the 17th century specialized in satirically exposing the tyranny of shrewish wives and proposing violent remedies. The Dutch at this time produced expressly for children some frankly farcical strips of primitive design. By mid-18th century the Russians too were making satirical strips.

The various social and moral themes that had been crudely treated in different countries and at different times were the raw material for the English artist William Hogarth (Hogarth, William), who raised the broadsheet picture story to an aesthetic level that has rarely been surpassed. With a social insight both broad and deep, an unrivaled sense of satirical counterpoint and topicality of reference, and exceptional physiognomic finesse, Hogarth dealt with types from all classes of society. His narrative richness is entirely visual, for he dispensed with all the broadsheet paraphernalia of caption-balloon-legend-commentary, permitting only such inscriptions as could be introduced naturalistically into the scene. Hogarth's moral attitude was also new: he depicted the follies and the punishment of his protagonists with a measure of sympathy, reserving the full fire of his satire for those who exploit these unfortunates. Among Hogarth's many followers, two stand out: the German Daniel Chodowiecki (Chodowiecki, Daniel), who reduced the Hogarthian picture story to fit within the compass of almanac illustrations, and the Englishman James Northcote (Northcote, James), who tried to combine Hogarthian realism with a Neoclassical sentimentality (Diligence and Dissipation, 1796).

It was the introduction into the broadsheet of the essentially comic mechanism of caricature that established the “comic strip” as basically comic in both form and content. The major exponents of the caricatural strip during the great age of English caricature (about 1800) were minor artists such as Henry Bunbury, George Woodward, and, notably, Richard Newton, who in his brief career combined elements of Hogarthian satire with the grotesque exaggerations of Thomas Rowlandson (Rowlandson, Thomas) and James Gillray (Gillray, James). Economy of line, instantaneity of comic effect, and visual and verbal wit now became the hallmark of the strip. With the story concentrated on a single page, backgrounds and narrative incident were minimized in favour of striking facial expressions and silhouetted poses.

The heir to the experiments of the English caricaturists and the father of the comic strip in its modern sense was Rodolphe Töpffer, a schoolmaster of Geneva who was active in the 1830s and '40s. Largely exempt from the preoccupations of the English caricaturists, Töpffer created a species of absurdist antiheroes who struggled desperately, fruitlessly, and farcically against the caprices of fate, nature, and an irrational, mechanistic society. The stories (lithographed in little oblong albums containing up to 100 pages) are purposefully purposeless, flow with calculated non sequiturs, and make digression a narrative principle. The pace is sustained by another revolution in draftsmanship, for Töpffer discovered how to turn systematic doodling to account, how to exploit the accident, and how to vary physiognomies experimentally. By abandoning anatomical three-dimensional drawing, he showed how to render movement for movement's sake. Töpffer's strips are also morally mobile: in his work the normal relationship between cause and effect or crime and punishment, which had underpinned all the older stories, disintegrated. Töpffer's satire was broadly based: he mocked social climbing, educational systems, parliamentary chaos, political scaremongering, scientific and medical pretensions, and revolutionary zeal; but his sense of fun and taste for the silly are always uppermost.

The French caricaturist Cham (pseudonym of Amédée de Noé) published in the 1840s several albums modeled on Töpffer, before choosing a style nearer to that of Honoré Daumier (Daumier, Honoré). By this time caricature had settled into satirical periodical journalism. A special place is occupied by illustrator Gustave Doré (Doré, Gustave), who published little Töpfferian albums as a youth and then—in a style of his own—farcical travel tales that culminated in his tremendous Histoire…de la Sainte Russie… (1854). This crudely anti-Russian (Crimean War-era) chronicle used a hodgepodge of picturesque and absurd effects arranged casually or with deliberate incongruity into a loose chronological sequence. Léonce Petit, armed with Töpffer's lightness of graphic touch but lacking Töpffer's imaginative flair, specialized in caption-heavy, novelettish rustic farce (“Histoires Campagnardes” 【“Rustic Stories”】, in Le Journal Amusant 【1872–82】). Britain, lagging behind the Continent, flirted ineffectually with the genre (George Cruikshank (Cruikshank, George) tried it several times) and began to make original contributions only toward the end of the century.

Though the strip “Ally Sloper” is often credited to the English novelist Charles Henry Ross, it was his wife, Marie Duval (pseudonym of the French actress Emilie de Tessier), Europe's first (and still obstinately unrecognized) professional woman cartoonist, who developed the character Ally Sloper. Featured in roughly 130 strips in Judy—an imitator of Punch magazine—and in albums published separately between 1869 and the 1880s, Ally Sloper was a scheming proletarian loafer, the star of rather formless and crudely, even childishly drawn “gag” strips. Discounting a few short-lived or intermittent German forerunners such as Franz von Pocci's Der Staatshämorrhoidarius (published in Fliegende Blätter, 1848–56), Duval's Ally Sloper should be considered the first truly popular continuing comic strip character. He was compared at the time to the feckless Charles Dickens character Wilkins Micawber (in David Copperfield) and moreover was merchandised on commonplace objects in a 20th-century manner. Duval's Ally was rerun in a new magazine named after him (from 1884) but also was raised to a new level and mock-gentrified in nonnarrative (large single-scene) cartoons by W.G. Baxter and W.F. Thomas.

“McNab of That Ilk,” a strip by James Brown featuring an irascible Scot (published in Judy, intermittently 1876–88), is the first ethnically stereotyped continuing character. In Fun, another Punch imitator, J.F. Sullivan ran a series of attacks on working-class and petty bourgeois types under the titles “British Working Man” (1878) and “British Tradesman” (1880).

Busch revived the tradition of realistic social satire, directing it at what he saw as a society locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival, coded most famously in the childish rebellion of “Max and Moritz” (1865) but carried through a “chain of being” from insects (“The Bees,” a political allegory of 1869) upward, through rodents and simians to various classes of humans. He created a gallery of social types that have since entered German folklore: the drunkard, the disrupted poet, the frustrated painter, the hapless schoolteacher, the perennial bachelor, the sexually precocious self-destructive nymph. The politically conformist Protestant German petty bourgeoisie was ready after 1870 for realistic social satire: “Pious Helene” (published in English as “Pious Helen”) and “St. Anthony” take (Roman Catholic) religious hypocrisy as their butt.

Busch seemed obsessed with the farcical situation and its potential for physical violence. For him, happiness appeared to lie in the avoidance of the petty annoyances of life and in the repression of instinctual behaviour. His cautionary tales of naughty children and animals may be regarded on one level as sophisticated parodies of the didactic juvenile literature of Germany and on another as condemnations of the childish sadism that is assumed to lie in everyone. On yet another level his work can be viewed as one long essay on the vulnerability of human dignity. His best-known characters, the infant pranksters Max and Moritz, have spawned innumerable progeny down to the 21st century. Busch's graphic inventiveness was tremendous; his use of patterns of oscillation to represent movement and new conventional signs to express shock, pain, and other emotions constitute a vocabulary that has served the humorous strip cartoonist to the present day. The rolling rhythm of Busch's graphic line has its counterpart in his facile comic verse, which is both independent and complementary, engaged in both duel and duet (and remains infinitely quotable). Variation in the amount of verse accompanying each picture plays an essential part in the pace of the narrative.

The only German follower of Busch worthy of the association was Adolf Oberländer, a sharp observer of human behaviour. In France the heirs to Busch were Adolphe Willette and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, both pioneers in Le Chat Noir (“The Black Cat”)—house magazine of the world's first cabaret—of the wordless, or “silent,” strip (first employed by Busch). Willette created a black-clad Pierrot, a volatile, poetic, and amoral trickster (1882–84), and Steinlen specialized in cats (1884–86); in both there is a calculated, anarchistic cruelty that is both philosophical and physical. They were followed by Caran d'Ache, who was also much influenced by Busch and who in supplements to Le Figaro in the later 1880s drew the first strips to appear in a general-interest daily newspaper rather than in a weekly satirical magazine of relatively restricted readership. Always witty in a purely graphic sense, he frequently dispensed with captions altogether. In this respect, as in his technique of motif accumulation—his manner of letting a motif or movement snowball or crescendo ad absurdum—he taught much to later cartoonists, especially the Australian-born cartoonist H.M. Bateman (Bateman, H M) in the 1920s.

Other European countries that early produced comic strips include Austria, where the Busch-influenced cartoonist Karl Klič (Klič, Karl) made political comment in a Sunday weekly, Der Floh (1868–72; “The Flea”); Italy, where Casimiro Teja (influenced by Daumier and Cham) was a dominant figure in the satirical magazine Pasquino; and notably Spain. There, despite heavy, erratic government censorship, a combination of Busch (Spanish edition, 1881) and the French models produced several original masters: Apeles Mestres, Angel Pons, Francisco Ramón Cilla, and Mecáchis (Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa), the latter two creating strips of extraordinary length and coherence. The European pioneer of the exotic adventure strip, Cilla was preceded, in a genre whose fruition in the comic book lay many years in the future, by Angelo Agostini, an Italian who settled in Brazil. His “As aventuras de Zé Caipora” (1883–86; “The Adventures of Zé Caipora”) set a record length of 23 chapters and 378 drawings, a number eventually tripled to a total of 75 chapters by 1906. Thereafter the story was turned into a popular song, four plays, and two silent movies. In Russia the satirical magazine Strekoza (1875–1918; “Dragonfly”), which reached its apogee in the late 1870s through the 1880s, published French-influenced Chekhovian comedies of everyday domestic life.

Imagerie d'Épinal, based in Épinal and other French towns, developed a distinct form of comic strip. Throughout the 19th century the common people and particularly children in rural areas of France, The Netherlands, and Germany had subsisted on Imagerie d'Épinal, single, cheap broadsheets hawked about the countryside and in small towns. These documents covered, often in narrative form, such topics of folk interest as religious stories, patriotic histories, and fairy tales. The severe and simple didactic plates had a more or less realistic social emphasis. Some Imagerie d'Épinal is comic in content, although not always in style, relating, for instance, the folly of certain traditional social stereotypes or satirical characters from folklore and literature such as Tyl Eulenspiegel (Eulenspiegel, Till) and Baron Munchausen (Münchhausen, Baron). Christophe (pseudonym of Georges Colomb) raised this type of popular imagery to the level of the intelligent urban child, first in the children's periodical and then in various albums published separately. These were originally designed, like Töpffer's, for the children of his own household and the pupils of his school. Christophe's gentle mockery of such types as the naïve bourgeois and the absent-minded professor is now a staple of French folklore. Christophe established a format for English and French children's comics that survived down to World War II, whereby the text is excluded from the image rather than incorporated in the balloons, as in American practice.

In the United States the comic strip antedates by many years its “official birthday” in the newspapers in 1896, as celebrated for instance in 1996 by the U.S. postal service with a special commemorative set of stamps showing classic comic strip characters. Several American magazines from the 1870s and '80s—notably Puck and Judge—began to incorporate comic strips of the European, especially German type and were the first to print them in colour (from 1888). This was an era of massive plagiarism in the United States and Europe, with Germany at first the primary source, and then, as native artists found their feet, borrowings occurred in both directions. Plagiarism, flouting ineffective international copyright laws, helped to launch new, very cheap (10 cents or one half-penny) magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Frederick Burr Opper (who went on to create the comic strip “Happy Hooligan”), F.M. Howarth, Syd Griffin, and especially Eugene Zimmermann were original and prolific artists of this period. The Swiss-born Zimmermann's taste for grotesque forms of violence, animal antics, and racism seems as much American as German.

The modern newspaper strip was born in the heat of rivalry between giants of the American press. In January 1894 a comic strip filled for the first time a full-colour page of Joseph Pulitzer (Pulitzer, Joseph)'s newspaper the New York World; in October 1896 the publisher William Randolph Hearst (Hearst, William Randolph) announced in his rival paper, the Morning Journal, the first regular weekly full-colour comic supplement. This supplement ran to eight pages and included the “Yellow Kid” of Richard Outcault (Outcault, Richard Felton), whom Hearst had enticed away from the New York World. The “Yellow Kid,” set in a large, single scene, not a narrative strip, was the first continuous comic character in the United States. Outcault established earthy, strictly urban farce as the keynote of the early American strip, which thereafter grew in sophistication and sentimentality. The “Yellow Kid” also standardized the speech balloon, which had largely fallen into disuse since the 17th century and its occasional appearance in the English caricatural strip about 1800. In 1897 Rudolph Dirks (Dirks, Rudolph), at the instigation of Hearst, who as a child had enjoyed the work of Busch, worked up a strip based on “Max and Moritz,” called the “Katzenjammer Kids,” which proved an instant success. It survived in syndication into the 21st century, under its sixth author. The market-driven tendency to continue strips in their formula if not their spirit after the death of the original author(s) has given extraordinary longevity to many strips that should have died a natural death; most decline into prolonged senility before being finally scrapped. “Katzenjammer Kids” had for the first time the fully developed form of the newspaper strip; i.e., it used word balloons, had a continuous cast of characters, and was divided into small regular panels (dispensing with the full panoramic scenes in which the “Yellow Kid” had appeared).

The spread of comics to other newspapers was rapid and was aided by the development of newspaper syndication. The aesthetically outstanding strip of the early years was Winsor McCay (McCay, Winsor)'s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” (1905–11, 1924–27), which created a dreamworld at once gentle, exciting, and humorous. The strip was executed in fairy-tale illustration style, with a conscious display of colouristic effects. (A musical based on the strip and called Little Nemo was produced in 1908, and an animated cartoon by McCay followed in 1909.)

The daily strip in black and white, indispensable to all major newspapers from 1915, was effectively inaugurated by the San Francisco Chronicle with Bud Fisher (Fisher, Bud)'s “Mr. A. Mutt” (later “Mutt and Jeff”). At first set in a horse-racing milieu, it soon became a general interest comic.

During the years 1907–20 most of the major categories of American comics were established, including the first aviation, ethnic character, and career girl strips. The most important gag strip was George McManus's “Bringing Up Father” (begun 1913/16), also the first American strip to achieve international fame. Outstanding among the family saga or domestic problem strips that burgeoned during the 1920s was Frank King (King, Frank)'s “Gasoline Alley,” which started in 1918. It strove for realism rather than farcical effects and had a strict continuity (as opposed to the daily gag), during which, moreover, characters actually grew older. The first career girl strip was Martin Branner's “Winnie Winkle” (1920–96), followed by the fashion-conscious “Tillie the Toiler” (1921–59) by Russ Westover. Another major group of the 1920s were fantastic, satirical, and parodistic. Elzie Crisler Segar (Segar, Elzie)'s “Popeye” (first appearance in “Thimble Theater,” begun 1929) still depended upon slapstick, but George Herriman (Herriman, George)'s “Krazy Kat” (1911–44) placed the slapstick in a tender world of poetry, at once surreal and humorous. Drawn with the greatest of graphic economy, it presented the absurd interrelationships of a tiny cast of characters (basically three) using the thinnest imaginable plot line. “Krazy Kat” was the first newspaper strip anywhere to be aimed at relatively intellectual adults and to claim philosophical significance.

During the 1930s the comics page expanded both in quantity of strips and in range of subject matter. Several of the strips created then survive today. One of them, Chic Young (Young, Chic)'s domestic comedy strip “Blondie” (begun 1930), has achieved unparalleled international renown, syndicated by the turn of the 21st century to 2,300 newspapers and read by some 250 million people in 55 countries and in more than 33 languages. Twenty-four Blondie films were made between 1930 and 1950.

A new category of immense significance emerged: the continuous-action adventure strip. This took many forms: domestic and detective drama, science and space fiction, and, by 1938, war and superhero strips. The earliest adventure strip was “ Tarzan” (begun 1929), whose Canadian-born creator Harold Foster (Foster, Harold Rudolf) broke completely with the prevailing caricatural style, adopted cinematic techniques, and sought picturesque, documentary realism. No less concerned with classic aesthetic effects was Alex Raymond (Raymond, Alex), first master of the exotic space strip (“Flash Gordon,” begun 1934). An aggressively cinematic adventure strip, meticulously researched, was evolved by Milton Caniff (Caniff, Milton) in his “Terry and the Pirates” (begun 1934). Caricatural simplifications and grim forms of humour were introduced into the genre by Chester Gould (Gould, Chester)'s “Dick Tracy” (begun 1931), the detective strip par excellence, which is laced with science fiction gadgetry and bizarre eroticism. Truly satirical forms of exaggeration and of social content returned to the strip with Al Capp (Capp, Al)'s “Li'l Abner” (1934–77).

World War II hastened the development of strips and comic books dealing with war and crime, the latter finding a new and avid readership among American soldiers stationed abroad. Being outside the control of newspaper editors, the comic book became increasingly violent and gruesome. The sadism of the American comic became proverbial; the “comic” became equated by Europeans with the “horror comic,” and voices of educators were raised against it on both sides of the Atlantic. The psychiatrist Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (1954) blamed rising juvenile deliquency on the pernicious influence of the comic book, and U.S. congressional investigations confirmed this opinion. The industry responded by instituting systems of self- censorship, administered by several organizations; the more vicious-looking material was restrained, but in Europe some American adventure strips continued to be criticized for their pursuit of violence and for their racist, militarist, and fascist tendencies. Wertham's book had reverberations in many other countries.

Perhaps as a reaction, there was a parallel postwar development in newspaper strips devoted to sentimental soap-opera-like domestic drama—such as “Rex Morgan, M.D.” (begun 1948), “Mary Worth” (begun 1938), and “The Heart of Juliet Jones” (begun 1953)—and simple-looking but subtly conceived gag strips. The latter included “Beetle Bailey” (begun 1950), featuring an incorrigible army private (though the gags were never tainted by military reality), and “Dennis the Menace” (begun 1951), a sophisticated Katzenjammer, not to be confused with the much cruder English strip of the same name in the young children's comic The Beano (begun 1938). “Pogo” (1948–75), by former Disney artist Walt Kelly (Kelly, Walt), was the most cerebral, socially pointed, and self-reflective of all strips in the mid-20th century, without sacrificing humour. Disneyish in style, the Pogo social menagerie transcended Disney's moral simplism, presenting a highly nuanced world populated with an almost Dickensian multitude of characters, all depicted as swamp animals. “Pogo” exuded a tender, nostalgic air, perpetually ruffled by the breezes of sociopolitical allusion and rendered stormy with the caricature of Senator Joseph McCarthy (McCarthy, Joseph R.). Kelly's dialogue, both bizarre and poetic, was admired for its contrast with the generality of strips, which were criticized for their verbal poverty.

Of comparable psychological finesse and imbued with truly satirical flashes was Johnny Hart's “B.C.” (begun 1958) and his “Wizard of Id” (begun 1964; in collaboration with Brant Parker), which had prehistoric and medieval settings, respectively. The major strip of political satire, “Feiffer” by Jules Feiffer (Feiffer, Jules) (first appearing weekly in The Village Voice, 1956), was run in the more liberal or left-wing papers; as a mainstream newspaper strip, it was consigned to the editorial rather than comics pages. In “Feiffer” the dialogue was more important than the deliberately repetitive drawings, which never went beyond the human figure; the content played upon the logic-twisting, deceptive rhetoric of politicians and the neurotic relationships between social competitors and lovers. Feiffer created scenes in the manner of absurdist or “noir” drama; indeed, a play based on his strip was mounted in 1961.

The first recurrent British (United Kingdom) comic characters, after Ally Sloper appeared in the 1870s, were those in Jack Yeats (Yeats, Jack Butler)'s Conan Doyle burlesque “The Adventures of Chubblock Homes” (published in Comic Cuts, begun 1893) as well as Tom Browne's tramps “Weary Willie and Tired Tim.” The latter strip was sponsored in 1896 by the publisher Alfred Harmsworth and was originally intended for the newly literate and semiliterate masses, but it developed into children's fare.

Distinctive British contributions were the magazine of strips designed for preliterate children, such as Tiger Tim's Weekly, which carried “Tiger Tim” (1904–80), the oldest and longest-lived of British comic heroes and the first British newspaper strip (in the Daily Mirror); the picture paper based on film comedy (Film Fun, Kinema Comic); and the multitude of children's magazines containing both articles and comic strips. The first strip for young children to appear in an adult newspaper was “Rupert, the Adventures of a Little Lost Teddy Bear” (begun 1921), created by Mary Tourtel for the Daily Express. The text was fitted in below the balloonless pictures in order to facilitate reading aloud by adults.

In the juvenile market the outstanding British successes in the 1950s were Dandy (begun 1937), with characters Desperate Dan and Keyhole Kate being perennial favourites, and the aforementioned The Beano, both of which offered innocent fun for younger children. For older children there was The Eagle, with “Dan Dare” (begun 1950; strip killed and relaunched a number of times, most recently in 2007) by Frank Hampson and the Reverend Marcus Morris, based on “healthy” Christian principles and directed against the American horror comic. At its peak “Dan Dare” reached a circulation of 250,000 to 500,000 weekly, but that figure had fallen to 20,000 by 1993.

The cultural shift that occurred in the 1980s can be measured by the success of an entirely different kind of comic, such as Viz (begun 1979), which, in a crude Beano-like style and in Beano parody, offered story lines complete with juvenile sex, profanity, and scatology to a market composed chiefly of males ages 18–25. Viz reached a peak audience of 1.25 million a month in 1990, but in the 21st century its circulation was much diminished as its audience aged.

The first British adult newspaper strip—and, after “Krazy Kat,” the first daily strip anywhere designed exclusively for adults—was the witty “Pop” (1921–60), by John Millar Watt. “Pop,” together with Reginald Smythe's “Andy Capp” (begun 1957), were among the very few European strips to be exported to the United States. For all its satire on the working class, “Andy Capp,” with its work-shy title character, surprisingly also ran in the Russian daily newspaper Izvestiya. A notably original strip was Norman Pett's “Jane” (1932–59), published in the Daily Mirror. It used an artful striptease theme and had great popularity with servicemen during World War II. The mildly satirical strip was pioneered in the Daily Express by “Flook” (begun 1949), a continuing narrative of various kinds of adventure (drawn by Wally Fawkes and written from 1958 by George Melly), and by Frank Dickens's “Bristow” (begun 1960; books published beginning in 1966), a daily gag strip set in a business office. The outright satirical and political strip flowered in the new satirical magazines such as Private Eye (begun 1961).

In France Jean-Pierre Pinchon's “Bécassine” (1905–60, with a six-year gap), modeled on Christophe (see above The 19th century (comic strip)), depicted the humorous adventures of a none-too-intelligent but well-intentioned Breton servant; Louis Forton's “Les Pieds-Nickelés” (begun 1908; “The Nickel-Plated-Feet Gang”), although ostensibly for children, had political touches and a mocking tone that appealed to adults as well. “Les Pieds-Nickelés,” with its gang of swindlers, constitutes the oldest still-existing European strip and the second oldest in the world (after the “Katzenjammer Kids”); it has also been the subject of several plays and movies. The first European strip to be fully developed in the American sense (notably as regards the use of balloons) was Alain de Saint-Ogan's “Zig et Puce” (1925–late 1960s). France had no daily comic strip until 1934. There and in Italy, even more than in England, the market was smothered in the 1930s and '40s by American imports and imitations.

An outstanding and hardy domestic product was “ Tintin” (1929–83), created by the Belgian Hergé (Georges Rémi), a realistically conceived and relatively didactic adventure strip with a kind of Boy Scout hero. Immaculately designed and researched (with the help of a studio of assistants) and the model of what became known as the ligne claire (“clear line”), the strip narrating Tintin's adventures took him all over the world into all kinds of social and geographical milieux, accompanied by a cast of comic and satirical characters that have become part of French folklore. The moral opposite of Carl Barks's avaricious arch-capitalist Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the selfless and righteous Tintin often found himself in exotic foreign lands engaged, like Scrooge, in what modern readers might regard as imperialist negotiations. Hergé had 23 “Tintin” albums in print at his death in 1983. His work had been translated into all major languages and extensively merchandised. Into the 21st century “Tintin” products flourished, especially on the Internet. Tintin's immense popularity was challenged (and no more) from the 1960s on by a warrior of ancient Gaul called “Astérix (Asterix)” (begun 1959), the work of the writer (and comic strip theorist) René Goscinny (Goscinny, René) and the artist Albert Uderzo. “Astérix,” besides being simply humorous and adventurous, indulges in sophisticated puns, witty anachronisms, and satirical flashes. Astérix also has been heavily merchandised and is the subject of a theme park near Paris.

The most significant innovations since about 1965 have been in the parodistic, satirical, erotic, and surrealistic comics and the graphic novel. The precursors of the great renewal of the medium were Mad magazine, founded in 1952 by Harvey Kurtzman, with its parodies of media and commercial visual stereotypes, and the parodistic-erotic acceptable only to the more liberal and vanguard press: “Little Annie Fanny” by Kurtzman and Will Elder in Playboy magazine (1962–88), followed by “The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist” by Michael O'Donoghue and Frank Springer in Evergreen Review (1965–66); both, for the first time in the United States, were luxuriously printed in a full-colour process.

About 1965 the so-called “underground” comics were launched in San Francisco. Originally self-published and small-circulation experiments in rendering the new consciousness inflamed by the Vietnam War, they took as their subjects drugs, psychedelia, kinky sex, and mockery of and rage against authority. The underground comics (often spelled “comix”), marketed with titles such as Zap Comix and Snatch, soon attained national and international celebrity among rebellious youth. One of the best-known comics producers was R. Crumb, who worked on a knife-edge between the grotesque and real, sexual extremism and social anxiety, the absurd and the philosophical. The most imaginative and yet the least playful and most introverted creator of underground comics, Crumb often seemed above all to be exorcising his personal demons. His best-known creation, “Fritz the Cat,” incubated through the 1960s, was in 1972 turned into a full-length X-rated animated film. Other figures from the underground were Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, and Gilbert Shelton, whose sex-and-dope-hungry pseudo-revolutionary “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” (begun 1968) circulated widely and has remained in print. The underground comics soon enjoyed aboveground popularity, and their effect was long-lasting; but as a coherent phenomenon they endured only one spectacular decade.

In Europe an entirely different renewal was brewing: the “adult comic strip” (bande dessinée pour adultes), pioneered in France and Italy in handsome booklike albums using good paper and fine colour that privileged the aesthetic (and often erotic) effect over simple comedy. Guy Pellaert (“Jodelle”), Guido Crepax (“Valentina”), and Nicolas Devil (“Saga de Xam”), all dating from 1967–68, employed techniques from Pop (Pop art), Op (Op art), psychedelic, and poster art. The influence worked both ways. American art, particularly the Pop movement with Roy Lichtenstein (Lichtenstein, Roy), was profoundly affected from roughly 1963 by traditional (American) comic strip styles.

Hitherto disdained as an essentially juvenile medium, the comics (and by extension the late-20th-century graphic novel, a self-contained novel-length treatment that is serious in content and coherent in plot rather than episodic; see below (comic strip)) attained increasing academic respectability from the late 1960s, within a wave of appreciation and concern for popular and youth culture generally. The comics became firmly established as a major evolving aesthetic and communicative medium appealing to the intelligent adult, with many comics shedding their juvenile allure altogether. The boom in comics for adults coincided with a general decline in the enormous juvenile comics industry and with the stagnation of the newspaper strip that continued into the 21st century despite stellar exceptions, such as Garry Trudeau's “Doonesbury.” Well-established in Europe by the 1970s, before the genre reached the United States, adult comics by the mid 1980s were being hailed in major news media as a maturation, a “growing up.” Many comic book anthologies and graphic novels began to carry the critical and intellectual clout associated with the better novels and films of the era and took on some of their modernist or postmodernist formal complexity, moral ambiguity, and philosophical ambition.

The sensationalist aesthetic ambitions of some comic books, in symbiosis with the animated cartoon and the more-advanced special effects in live-action movies, have led to new wine being poured into old wineskins. Frank Miller's “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” (c. 1986), for instance, relies on graphics so spectacular as to obscure any difference in content from the old Batman; as with the movies, it relies chiefly on technical wizardry.

When not self-published, as was often the case, the better comic book or comic strip compilations and graphic novels were marketed through mainstream bookstores and published by major publishers such as Penguin and Gollancz, as well as by smaller, specialized publishers, such as Fantagraphics and Kitchen Sink Press. Academic conferences since the first held in Lucca, Italy, in 1965, multiplied, as did exhibitions. Museums, libraries, and study centres were set up, the largest being The International City of the Cartoon and the Image in Angoulême, France, with a counterpart in Brussels (The Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art). In addition, a number of Web sites were created that were devoted to the cartoon and the comic strip, including digital encyclopaedias and virtual museums. The art of the comic strip was taught for the first time in major art schools (notably the School of Visual Arts in New York) and entered academic curricula. Critical magazines were launched to encourage quality and experimentation (in France, Phénix, 1960–77; in the United States, Comics Journal 【begun 1977】, followed by the International Journal of Comic Art 【begun 1999】).

Scholarship on comic strips abounded, including historical, aesthetic, ideological, semiological (especially in Europe), and philosophical approaches. The classics were reprinted and sold in boxed sets; guides, dictionaries, indexes, and series appeared with, on occasion, the whole corpus of a comic book artist's personal work and critical oeuvre catalogue in a luxury format such as had once been reserved to the great artists of the world. One of the greatest Disney artists of them all, Carl Barks, sole creator of more than 500 of the best Donald Duck and other stories, was rescued from the oblivion to which the Disney policy of anonymity would consign him, to become a cult figure. His Collected Works ran to 30 luxurious folio volumes. Walt Kelly (Kelly, Walt)'s “Pogo” was first republished in 11 volumes (1989–2000). Especially in Europe, elite intellectuals such as Alain Robbe-Grillet (Robbe-Grillet, Alain), Umberto Eco (Eco, Umberto), Roland Barthes (Barthes, Roland), and Alain Resnais (Resnais, Alain) have validated the comics; in the United States, major filmmakers—notably George Lucas (Lucas, George) and Steven Spielberg (Spielberg, Steven)—have acknowledged their artistic debt to comics, which they have used as both inspiration and source material.

At the turn of the 21st century, there were several hundred comics (and cartoon) sites on the Internet and many dozens of comics available online, offering current and classic strips, with simultaneous opportunity to buy them on merchandise or have them delivered daily by e-mail. Archival links allowed users to access by date and subject any comic previously published in the series. Despite this easy access to the smaller formats, book-length graphic novels and comic strip anthologies sold in increasing numbers. The book format was more attractive to public and university libraries than the slim pamphletlike comic books that continued to be assiduously collected and preserved by private collectors, who paid four-figure sums for single issues at auctions for the classics and early, rare issues.

“Adult” as the character of the new comic book and graphic novel was proclaimed to be, the core market remained among youth and young adults (the 17–25 age bracket), and many of the creators were young, as was the case in popular music and film, to which comics were often linked. The transition from the juvenile to the “young adult” market is exemplified in Britain's 2000 AD, which flourished from 1978 to 1985 (and continues in the 21st century at a lower circulation level), was reprinted in the United States, and at its peak sold 120,000 copies per week. Its chief feature was “Judge Dredd”; written from a cynical perspective on American culture and the authoritarian state, the strip follows a quasi-fascist law enforcer in a post-nuclear-war world who rules Mega City One (part New York City, part Thatcherite London). Compared with other comics, it was printed on better paper and was flashier in style, and it was made into a book as well as a film. The French equivalent was Métal Hurlant (begun 1975), composed of adventure stories by Jean Giraud (also known as Moebius), which redefined the medium, using openly erotic, stunning visuals with glossy, airbrushed, fully painted effects. This work, together with the highly influential magazine (À Suivre) (begun 1978), reestablished the graphic novel and showcased new, experimental talent. The central figure in the European adult graphic novel was Giraud, a versatile master of the adventure and science fiction genres at their most sophisticated and considered by some to be the world's best in those genres. In popularity and quality, only the Italian comics creator Hugo Pratt, with his “Corto Maltese” (begun 1970), came close.

The shift of artists and public toward the graphic novel may have been facilitated by a commercial crisis in the later 1990s, when the traditional comic book lost sales and publishers collapsed. Even the mighty Marvel group declared bankruptcy in 1998, though it later revived. Shops were closed and titles canceled. This was connected to competition for the juvenile market from video and then computer games and the Internet. Indeed, every major comics publisher now has an Internet site, and some comics appear only there. But the industry as a whole was much sustained beginning in the 1970s by specialized shops—rather than newsstands—which now form the major outlet for comics.

The comic book format has long been used to retell history, myths and legends, and literary classics; a very precocious example of the latter is Cham's parody of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, published 1862–63 in installments parallel with those of the original novel. In the 20th century, Classics Comics and Classics Illustrated from the Gilberton Company, extracts from which passed into high school texts, were a conscious response to the gruesome excesses of the “horror comics” in mid-century. The didactic-communicative advantages of the text-and-image combination, and not least the humorous format, have been adopted for all kinds of educational, instructional, and even technical materials in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. A “for beginners” series, started in Britain and soon adopted in the United States and elsewhere, explained the life and thought of revolutionary thinkers (Darwin, Marx, Einstein, Freud, etc.), and cartoon “people's histories” (e.g., of the United States, of the universe) proliferated, the specialty of the award-winning Larry Gonick and the Mexican cartoonist Rius (Eduardo del Río). These are at once elementary introductions and sophisticated presentations of sometimes difficult material (Gonick, for instance, has produced “cartoon guides” to physics, genetics, and computer science); they mix line drawings and explanations with asides, political observations, touches of satire, and farcical, silly, and obviously anachronistic elements, and they sometimes use photographic and other kinds of visual documentation. The text naturally tends to become relatively significant without being totally dominant. In these works too the grid system of panel narrative is usually radically loosened or altogether abandoned. Such books have been welcomed into the classroom at all levels, from primary school to university. These graphic techniques have also been employed by the U.S. Department of Defense to demonstrate how to load warheads and by the Central Intelligence Agency to show how to subvert governments.

Left-wing American activists have made particular use of comics, from Kurtzman's narrative antiwar Korean War histories in Mad magazine to Leonard Rifas's informational comics opposing atomic and nuclear weapons and Joel Andreas's Addicted to War (1993). The comic book format has been used as investigative journalism critical of U.S. foreign policy in a way that the newspaper strips generally have not. Brought to Light (1989), published by the now-defunct nonprofit law firm Christic Institute, is a docudrama investigating the Iran-Contra Affair and the related La Penca bombing in a highly polished classic adventure-story manner. Using the graphic novel format, comics journalist Joe Sacco denounced Serb and NATO war crimes in the former Yugoslavia in Safe Area Goražde (2000), and he examined the Palestinian viewpoint in Palestine (published in a single volume, 2001; winner of an American Book Award in 1996). Jack Jackson, author of Comanche Moon: A Picture Narrative About Cynthia Ann Parker (1979) and Los Tejanos (c. 1982; “The Texans”), offered a revisionist view of the history of the American Southwest. In France Jacques Tardi's C'était la guerre des tranchées: 1914–1918 (1993; “It Was the War of the Trenches: 1914–1918”) brought an antimilitarist perspective to his treatment of World War I; and Nakazawa Keiji dealt with the effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Hadashi no Gen (begun 1973, originally published monthly in serial form; Barefoot Gen).

One of the earliest and most noteworthy cartoonists to offer opinions on controversial topics was the American cartoonist Garry Trudeau (Trudeau, Garry), whose " Doonesbury" (begun 1970) in the early 21st century ran in more than 1,400 newspapers throughout the world. Making clear through his strips his sympathy for liberal social movements such as feminism and his low regard for several conservative U.S. administrations, Trudeau placed his characters in the midst of such events as the Watergate Scandal and the onset of the Iraq War to comment negatively on those who were responsible. One of the most influential editorial cartoonists, he was regularly censored by newspaper editors. Nevertheless, he won a Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1975. Following a group of college classmates from adulthood through middle age, Trudeau alternated gag strips with episodes that continued over an extended period. His drawing style, though in itself unremarkable at best, is quite successful when combined with his acute and eloquent dialogue. Somewhat similar is the work of the British socialist cartoonist Steve Bell, whose caustic strip "If…" (begun 1981) appeared daily in The Guardian. His start in children's comics is evident in his crude, chaotic linear style and composition.

Compared with “Doonesbury” and “If…,” Scott Adams's “ Dilbert” takes office politics far more seriously than national politics. Set in a stereotypical business office, “Dilbert” takes a narrow, amused look at the bureaucratic excesses of the business world. It is extraordinarily successful, being printed in some 2,000 newspapers in more than 65 countries. Time magazine placed Dilbert among the most influential Americans of 1997 (he was the only fictional character to make the list), and Adams's The Dilbert Principle (1997) became the top-selling management book of that year.

The term graphic novel was first successfully claimed by Will Eisner for his semi-autobiographical A Contract with God (1978), which offers a melancholy perspective on the author's Depression-era youth. Harvey Pekar's American Splendor (1986) series, set in the 1970s, illustrates the quotidian working-class life in Cleveland, Ohio. One of the most celebrated graphic novels is Art Spiegelman's Maus, a long tale of the Holocaust told (first in the pioneering Raw magazine anthology) in an austere style and complex narrative layers, featuring the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice. In its sobriety it was about as far as one can imagine from the world of Disney or just about any other ostensible animal comic. Maus II was the first comic book or graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism (1992), and the book won universal acclaim from critics who would not normally consider reviewing comic books. Maus and American Splendor are autobiographical (Maus incorporating the experience of the author's father), as have been many of the best adult comics, notably in the feminist domain. Marisa Acocella's snazzily drawn Just Who the Hell Is SHE, Anyway? (1993) was the first strip to be featured in a monthly fashion magazine (Mirabella). Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoirs Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2 (2004)—both combining two volumes first published in French (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003)—are moving manga-influenced accounts of her childhood in Tehrān and her adolescence and young adulthood in Europe.

Chris Ware's ironically titled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), a long, drawn-out, formally innovative, eerily desperate autobiographical mosaic, is designed in a haunting rhythm of differently sized and related panel clusters, with Proustian memorial parentheses. It presents a bleak vision of childhood suffering, the pain of which the rigidly calligraphic drawing and deliberately restrictive camera angles attempt, as it were, to suppress. In 2001 it became the first comic book to win a Guardian First Book Award.

The enormous popularity of the comic book in Mexico, where in one of its staples—the romance-domestic drama—it has a rival in the fotonovela, is noteworthy largely for the work of Rius. In his best-known series, starting in the 1960s, “Los supermachos” (“The Supermales”), followed by “Los agachados” (1968–81; “The Crouching”), which was very popular also in English translation, Rius was critical, controversial, and censored. He mocked social inequity and bourgeois values with an instinctive comic exuberance that occasionally lapsed into didacticism. He appealed primarily to students and the professional classes. Most other Mexicans were more attracted to Kalimán, an asexual superhero known throughout Latin America. The story of Kalimán started in 1963 as a radio serial, and two years later it was made into a comic book, reaching 1.5 to 3.5 million copies, or 3 to 7 percent of the Mexican public, and thus exceeding any U.S. equivalent (“Captain Marvel” at its peak reached 2 million). The Mexican comic book is generally poorly made, predominantly black and white, and ubiquitous and vulgar, but it maintains its hold even on the educated. In 1990, 8 of Mexico's 10 best-selling periodicals were comic books. There have been, in Mexico as elsewhere, more or less government-connected campaigns against the sex, violence, and luridness of their content.

A model of political comic geared toward socialist transformation, still unsurpassed, appeared as La firme (1970–73; “Steadfast”), in Salvador Allende (Allende, Salvador)'s Chile. It presented a graphic explanation of Chileans' need for socialist transformation, and as a result it was banned and existing copies were destroyed as soon as Augusto Pinochet wrested power in 1973. While La firme was taking root, another publication appeared, Para leer al Pato Donald (1971; How to Read Donald Duck) by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. This was a negative examination of the ubiquitous Disney comic (in the English-language edition of 1975, the subtitle Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was added). This book was a rare example of comics criticism reaching the wider audience; it became a best seller and was translated into more than a dozen languages. After Pinochet's accession to power, José Palomo, one of the principal artists involved in La firme, went into exile in Mexico. There he became known for a strip titled “El cuarto reich” (begun 1977; “The Fourth Reich”) in the newspaper Uno Más Uno. It featured a tiny Wizard-of-Id-like dictator backed by U.S.-trained death squads and notable for his contempt for and exploitation of his people. Despite its mordant and acute sensibility, the strip was little exported.

A local comics industry in native languages has flourished wherever the United States and Great Britain have held sway—notably in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and India (where the often cartoonlike Bollywood, centred in Mumbai 【Bombay】, is dominant). Even some Islamic countries, where for centuries figural representation was problematic, by the 21st century had more or less government-supported comics. China, after the 1949 revolution, gave official support to lianhuanhua (literally, “connected images”) to retell the classics and opera-based histories, as well as uplifting revolutionary stories, in a highly refined, classically derived style. The late 20th century brought a freeing up of styles and subject matter.

Japan (arts, East Asian) had by far the largest comics industry in the world—selling by 1984 1.4 billion and by 2000 2.3 billion comics per annum—and in the early 21st century comics constituted 25 percent of all publication. Thirteen of Japan's periodicals that made more than 17 million yen ($160,000) a year were manga (Japanese comics; literally, “aimless pictures”), which together employ 3,000 artists; one magazine, Shonen Jump, has a circulation that peaked in 1995 at 6.5 million, with multiple readership reaching an estimated 20 million, or one in six Japanese. By 2000, manga generated 5.4 billion yen ($43 million) per annum in sales (having doubled in the decade from the early 1980s to the '90s), 75 percent of which is concentrated in the hands of only four companies. Comic books are a major cultural force in Japan, a fact of life. In translation and in the original, they have penetrated the American market ($110 million per year), where there is a considerable cult following; they have also inspired many film animations.

The manga style, with all the term's connotations of the whimsical and risqué, can be considered to have originated with ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai in 1814. It reflects a long tradition in humorous art. As a narrative mass medium with serialized characters, manga started as early as 1902 under American influence. In the 1920s and '30s manga were exclusively juvenile fare, but, in the economic boom after World War II and under renewed American influence, they soon broadened to encompass all ages and social sectors, with a wide variety of subject matter. The emphasis, however, remained on sports, large-eyed adolescents, and the adventures of samurai and gangsters, with much sex and violence often shading into the pornographic. Most manga titles contain an English word, and, as in the West, manga, animated cartoons (anime), and video games often exist in symbiosis.

At 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 cm), manga are much thicker than the American single comics. They typically range from 150 to 350 pages and are printed on poor-quality paper in black and white, with a few pages of colour. They usually contain about 15 stories and are very inexpensive. They are designed to be speed-read (at an average rate of 3.75 seconds per page), much faster than the text of a novel, and quickly discarded. They accordingly depend more on visuals than on text, and they use more minimal and abbreviated drawings than most Western comics. Manga stories are longer and their action is depicted at a slower pace than that of Western comic books; it is not unusual for a single sword fight to last over 30 pages. Some stories achieved extraordinary length: Kozure Okami, a samurai series by Kojima Gōseki, has run to 8,400 pages and 28 volumes. It was introduced to English readers under the title Lone Wolf and Cub in 1987 and was made into a television series in 2002.

Like comic strips in the West, manga have played a socially critical as well as an escapist role, the critical diminishing since the 1970s. Since the late 20th century there have been more manga by and for women, some showing feminist concerns. After a long period of depreciation and much serious opposition, again as in the West, the manga rose in social status. In 1989, when Tezuka Osamu—the inventor of the big-eyed look, who was known as “The God of Manga”—died, having drawn 150,000 pages in 40 years and sold some 100 million books in his lifetime, Japan mourned.

In 1987, 69 percent of Japanese teenagers read manga, as did many older people. The generational and gender crossover is much greater than in the West: businessmen read manga created for 10-year-olds; older males read manga aimed at girls. Manga are read on commuter journeys, much like and in lieu of newspapers (which in Japan do not include comic strips). Further, a manga was the basis of Japan's biggest movie hit of 1988, Akira, a thriller by Ōtomo Katsuhiro. Manga creators have achieved celebrity status, and some even host their own television programs.

In the West there was no successor to either the woman-developed comic character—i.e., Marie Duval's Ally Sloper in the 1870s—or a major female comic character such as Wilhelm Busch's Fromme Helene (1872). As there were relatively few women artists until the 20th century, so there were few—relatively even fewer—women cartoonists and comic strip artists, even in the 20th century. Until the 1940s men created the female figures—such as “Wonder Woman” (begun 1941)—and the many comics designed for the teenage girl (such as Real Romance) and for the preteen girl, but “Wonder Woman” has since been embraced by feminist theory, which sees it as liberating. The first popular comic by a woman about a woman was Dale Messick's “Brenda Starr, Reporter” (begun 1940); until that point, women in comics had by and large been seen only in relation to children.

Not until the second wave of feminism broke in the 1960s and early '70s, and partly in reaction to the often sexist and misogynist male-dominated underground comics, did women become conspicuous, both as creators and as strong and central characters. As creators they launched controversial feminist issues into the public arena. A key event was the founding of Wimmen's Comix magazine (1972–92; later spelled Wimmin's Comix) by a group of female cartoonists including Trina Robbins, also a chronicler of the topic.

Since the founding of Wimmen's Comix Collective, women have been featured in a number of newspaper strips. “Sally Forth” (begun 1982) by Greg Howard details the life of a woman coping with children, husband, and a career outside the home. “Cathy” by Cathy Guisewite (begun 1976) follows a young single woman obsessed with her weight, shopping, and her unmarried state. Canadian Lynn Johnston's loosely autobiographical “For Better or For Worse” (begun 1979) treats a typical contemporary nuclear family. In 1997 Johnston became the first woman to be inducted into the William Randolph Hearst Cartoon Hall of Fame, a part of the National Cartoon Museum (formerly the International Museum of Cartoon Art). Nicole Hollander's text-heavy but socially astringent “Sylvia” (begun 1976; not truly narrative) features a cynical, unattached, middle-aged agony aunt who dispenses her wisdom also on greeting cards and calendars, as do the main characters of many of the more popular comic artists.

In France, long hospitable to women artists and writers, Claire Bretécher specializes in cruel, Feifferish (non)communication. Active since the early 1960s, she has appeared in the elite political magazine Le Nouvel Observateur since 1973. A number of other women, including the radically political Annie Goetzinger and Chantal Montellier in her strip “Julie Bristol” (begun 1989), which features a female investigative reporter, have foregrounded feminist concerns. In Germany Franziska Becker's Feminax und Walkürax (1992) is a feminist response to Astérix (see above (comic strip)) and to macho Hollywood epics. The Finn Tove Jansson (Jansson, Tove)'s Moomintroll stories have been translated into 34 languages. In Japan, where more women are active in comics than in the United States, Takahashi Rumiko is the best-known woman working in women's comics. Known as “The Princess of Manga,” she is reportedly one of the richest women in the country.

Gay and lesbian (homosexuality) characters entered the comic book in the later 1980s, becoming main characters by the following decade; Trudeau and Johnston were among the pioneers of this subject matter. In the newspaper strip this topic was often censored, although the tendency was to assimilate these figures into the everyday “straight” world. For the most part, depictions of the “gay world” as such were to be found only in small-circulation comic books, alternative newspapers, and online. Yet lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the ongoing “Dykes to Watch Out For,” in 2006 made Time magazine's list of 10 best books of the year with her graphic autobiography Fun Home.

Schulz in “Peanuts” first introduced an African American character, but his Franklin was a minor figure. Aaron McGruder's “The Boondocks” (1997–2006), which was syndicated in some 300 newspapers and transformed into an animated television series, featured a black child of the inner city named Huey Freeman as its main character. This character was the only consistent voice of dissent in American comic strips regarding the war in Afghanistan.

The newspaper strip and comic book have become arguably the largest and most influential iconographic field in history, with literally millions, perhaps billions, of discrete pictures produced since 1900. They certainly represent the dominant graphic mythology of the 20th century. Not even film or television can boast of reaching a third of humanity, as can the comic strip. By mid-century, more than 100 million Americans, young and old, educated and not, read one or more comic strips in their Sunday and daily newspapers. In 1963 there were more than 300 different syndicated strips in the United States, down to 200 in 1975. “Pogo” and “Dick Tracy” reached more than 50 million readers in more than 500 newspapers. Superman comics circulated in the 1950s at the rate of 1.5 million monthly; in 1943, American comic books totaled 18 million copies monthly and constituted a third of total magazine sales, to a value of $72 million. Not surprisingly, reader participation reached extraordinary heights. For example, when his character Blondie gave birth, Chic Young received from his readers 400,000 suggestions for a name.

Perhaps in no other form of art has the creator become to such an extent prisoner of his creation, to which he may be locked for his lifetime; it becomes in a real sense independent of his own existence, for the successful strip will almost always be continued by other artists if its originator should die or lose interest in it. Traditionally the newspaper strip was also at the mercy of the syndicates, publishers, and editors who regarded it primarily as a circulation booster and were quick to censor. The conventional view has been that it must not offend any conceivable readership or commercial-interest group and therefore must observe strict conservative codes of morality and decorum. This explains the extent to which the newspaper strip generally has avoided controversial issues of the day. It was against such restrictions that the American underground comic and the European bande dessinée pour adultes (adult strip) rebelled, and in their wake some innovative newspaper strips—notably Trudeau's “Doonesbury”—began to break new ground.

The comic book and strip may be the capitalist art form par excellence, tying in so readily with other visual art forms—plays, films, animated cartoons, greeting cards, and calendars. They also help market to children all kinds of consumer commodities under an extremely lucrative licensing system. This type of marketing started in the early 20th century with “Buster Brown” (begun 1902), which sold the use of the character's name and image to the Brown Shoe Company, and the profits to be gained thereby have tempted every successful strip creator since. Disney, of course, has pushed the marketing of film and comics characters to the extreme. It is probable too that comics strips are the art form with the greatest variety of “cultural overflow.”