Comic strips as serially published, episodic stories with consistent characters appeared in the US newspapers in the late nineteenth century drawing on European traditions of stories, caricature and publication. Comic books as separate publications with independent sales and narrative first drew on established strips. In the 1930s, they became a new genre with different audiences, themes and cultural issues. Despite overlapping form, content and readership, their histories have been differentiated in intriguing ways.

The first American comic strip, the Yellow Kïd, appeared in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal on October 18, 1996. Longer stories developed with strips like the Katzenjammer Kïds and Happy Hooligan, often taking outsiders and tricksters as their long-running heroes. These comics often incorporated ethnic, racial and class stereotypes in slapstick situations that depended on the interplay of word and picture.

Weekday comics followed in the 1900s, and Hearst added the full comics page to his newspapers in 1912, although the page included only four strips. The number of strips offered by competing newspapers grew over the next decades; distribution was soon controlled by syndicates like Hearst’s King Features or the Newspaper Enterprise Association.

Comic strips appeal to a general audience. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today carry none, although the International Herald Tribune makes a selection available to expatriates. In other newspapers, daily funnies and Sunday color sections have grown in pages to become family reading rituals.

The range of comics in contemporary newspapers still covers many themes worked out in early decades—domestic vignettes, adventures, humor with children and animals.

Many strips treat family and office, like the long-running Blondie, Dennis the Menace or Family Circus. Smart pets and children also convey philosophical commentaries in decades of the remarkably creative ensemble of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts; Snoopy earned global popularity. Later, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes evoked the imaginary world of a child and his tiger. Prince Valient and the Phantom seek exotic adventure.

Beetle Bailey offers comedy in an army that never fights, while Dick Tracy has battled generations of bizarre criminals. At the end of the twentieth century some once-popular genres and strips have faded, including soap operas (Mary Worth) and adventure (Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon). Nonetheless, all these narratives convey the idea of material the whole family can read.

One of the areas of greatest change in the postwar era is replacement of ethnic, racial and gender stereotypes that constituted humor in early comics. Many comics still represent white worlds and heterosexual families. Yet Cathy explores the employment, family and dilemmas of a single working woman, while Dilbert has become a symbol of office politics, with clippings taped to cubicles across the nation. Even Blondie, icon of domesticity took a job in the 1990s. Minority characters have appeared in Peanuts and other strips; in the 1990s, newspapers added focused African American stories in strips like Jump Cut and Boondocks.

Other timely specializations include political satire (Al Capp in Pogo, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, Berke Breathed’s strips) and basic surrealism (Gary Larson). These cartoonists target issues and politicians (Doonesbury on gay weddings, media and tobacco, as well as the presidency) for educated, adult readers. Hence, some newspapers have censored strips or moved them to the editorial pages (see editorial cartoons).

Comic books If comic strips began with children and immigrants, comic books began with superheroes. Booklets of reprinted comic strips had appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century but separate stories emerged in the mid-1930s. Detective Comics offered singletheme issues in 1937. In June 1938, Action Comics introduced Superman; within three years, the Man of Steel was selling 1,250,000 copies per month and had crossed over to comic strips as well. The Phantom, Captain Marvel, Batman, Captain America and others followed, with comics booming during the Second World War at home and among GIs, as illustrated heroes fought Nazis and Japanese. These comics also established a format for a mass cultural myth of the dual-identity superhero in the golden age of comics.

Superheroes diminished in popularity after the war, replaced by crime and horror comics sold at drug stores, news-stands and other outlets to children and adolescents.

These new consumers bought 180 million copies a year by 1941, alarming parents and educators who began a crusade against the lax morality violence and other dangers of comics that would last for decades and foreshadow later debates over music and television, movies and video games. Alternatives were created including Classic Comics/Classics Illustrated, whose illustrated versions of world literature became crib sheets as well as portals to culture.

After Estes Kefauver’s Senate investigations and academic studies of deleterious impact, publishers themselves created the first substantive Comics Code in 1954. This created conditions for the revival of the sexless superhero and anodyne comics, including Disney and Archie. By the mid-1950s, nonetheless, superheroes old and new (including the Flash, Fantastic Four and others from Marvel Comics) offered the complex stories and aesthetic styles of comics’ “second” golden age.

As Ariel Dorfman has pointed out, all of these texts tend to distill fundamental Amercan myths into child-palatable forms. “Truth, justice and the American way” in Superman intersected with capitalism, derogatory stereotypes of foreigners and intellectuals and sexless ducks and mice in Disney. These messages, moreover, were consumed by children outside the US even while US parents discouraged comics.

The 1960s saw many changes in comic books, including increasing crossover to television and film. Contents also changed—inspired by social ferment around them, artists and writers incorporated drugs, war and racism into the comic world in the 1970s, although this phase proved short-lived. Instead, new relevance came from underground comics like those of Robert Crumb. Later, more adult stories, like Darkman, which offer narrative and visual experiments as well as sexual and violent plots, would underpin the serious comics of the end of the century. At the same time, collectors have sought the innocence of earlier comics as first editions of Superman and other relics of the golden age skyrocketed in price beyond the reach of children.

Comics no longer sell primarily to the child in the drugstore, but to older adolescent males or young adults. Moreover, these people are buying specialty store items, sometimes in plastic bags to preserve their collectible value or in brown paper to avert them from other eyes. In this development, while comic strips have reflected the changing family,comic books have followed the aging and concerns of the baby boom, while creating new experiences in Generation X. They also inspire movies like Batman, Superman and X-Men (2000).