A History of Comic Strips by Tom McEnteer

January 20th 2024 @ 2:00 P.M.

Museum program to present a history of Comic Strips.

The holidays are over; the Christmas trees are gone. O’Tannenbaum is complete and lucky auction bidders have picked up their winnings. But the Tioga County Historical Society still has some great things to see and wants you to visit. For more than twenty years the museum has had special exhibits during the holiday season, with each year being different, but always toy-related. This year’s exhibit will be up through the end of January and features comic strip characters.

On Saturday, January 20, 2024, at 2:00 PM, there will be a special program about the exhibit. The program will be presented by Tom McEnteer, who curated the comic exhibit. The program will feature a “Show & Tell” of a number of historic items related to comics, that were not included in the original display. There will be editorial cartoons that satirized people and events more than two hundred years ago as well as a few other news cartoons that produced unexpected world-changing results. Also featured in the program will be some original work by local comic artists from Broome and Tioga Counties.

This exhibit itself features characters introduced in comic strips and a few comic books. Characters originating in movies or on radio or TV (Disney, Warner Bros., Hanna-Barbera, and most cowboys, etc.) are not included. Comics in the exhibit were primarily chosen because there were toys or other items made for kids based on them.

American comics began as a feature of newspapers in the late 1800’s. Children did not buy newspapers, and comic strips were not really intended for them. Over time, children did discover the comics page and began to appreciate the characters and stories they found there. Of course, adults are also highly susceptible to childhood themes. The first strips were just black and white, and

were found in daily papers. Shortly, a few Sunday papers began to include a section devoted to large comic strips and printed in color. This quickly became a feature of many Sunday papers. A few of the comic strip characters were so popular with children that toys were made. This exhibit features those characters.

Comic books came along in the early days of the 20th century. The first comic books were collections of the daily strips, republishing up to a year’s worth in one volume. Most of these were soft covered; later a few were hardbound. Several of these early volumes are included in this exhibit. Collections of newspaper comics are still being published today.

The first regularly issued monthly comic book was Comic Monthly, issued in January of 1922 by Embee Distributing. It too was reprints of a variety of daily strips. The Big Little Book series, which adapted comics into stories, began in 1932. (A Dick Tracy story was the first one.)

The first modern looking comic, Famous Funnies, was produced in 1934, but it was not until the mid-1930’s that comics were published with original material. The first all-original comic book was New Fun in 1935, followed by More Fun in 1936.

Comics helped people survive the Great Depression. In 1938, comic book sales reached their all-time sales peak, with more than 2,500,000 sold each month!

Each comic is listed with the date of first publication and the original creators. Many of the strips are no longer being published, and others have changed authors and artists.

The exhibit will close at the beginning of February.