Malkin Lecture Series: The Formative Years of the Funnies

American newspapers and magazines first regularly started to feature cartoons in the 1860s, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that technology and demand for serial “picture stories” led to the regular publication of the “Sunday funnies.” The comics and their star characters became essential parts of American life and could be found in comic books, live-action and animated films, stage plays and radio programs and were used to market a wide range of products. This talk will focus on the pre-WWII period of comics history starting with the first printed cartoons in Europe and America, the major innovators, and the ground-breaking trends that developed in its earliest decades, illustrated in comics such as Hogan’s Alley, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye, Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, and others. Cartoonist and historian Brian Walker will also connect the comics in the Seventh Regiment Gazette published from this Armory in the wider context of the rise of comics nationwide and in New York in particular.