The History of Comics: Four Traditions, One Medium

When Did Comics Start? (The Honest Answer)

There are four contending dates, and the right one depends on how you define the medium. Each definition picks a different winner, and serious comics scholars genuinely disagree on which definition matters most.

No single date wins on the merits — each is correct under its definition. We surface all four because picking one and burying the others is how most online histories get this wrong. The rest of this guide treats this as the foundational debate, not a settled question.

The European Tradition (Bande Dessinée)

Töpffer to Masereel — 1837 to the 1920s

The Swiss schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer created Histoire de M. Vieux Bois as a private amusement in 1827 and published it commercially in Geneva in 1837. He invented the form — sequential panels with caption text and a unified narrative — without speech balloons. The American edition appeared in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, a supplement to Brother Jonathan on September 14, 1842. Töpffer's influence on subsequent European cartoonists is the through-line scholars like Scott McCloud use to locate the medium's origin here.

The next major European innovation was Frans Masereel's wordless woodcut novels — 25 Images de la Passion d'un Homme in 1918 and Passionate Journey (Mon livre d'heures) in 1919. Masereel proved sequential art could carry a feature-length narrative without text at all.

Hergé and the Brussels school — Tintin debuts January 10, 1929

Georges Remi (“Hergé”) launched Les Aventures de Tintin, reporter du Petit Vingtième, au pays des Soviets in Le Petit Vingtième, the children's supplement of Le Vingtième Siècle, on January 10, 1929. Tintin established the ligne claire (“clear line”) drawing style and the Brussels school that defined Franco-Belgian BD for the next forty years.

Post-war Franco-Belgian boom — Spirou, Tintin, Asterix, Pilote

Spirou magazine launched in 1938; Tintin magazine in 1946. Goscinny and Uderzo's Astérix le Gaulois first appeared in Pilote on October 29, 1959, and went on to become one of the best-selling comic series in the world. The 48-page hardcover album as a publishing unit consolidated during this period and remains the BD standard.

Adult BD and the 1970s — Métal Hurlant

Jean Giraud (“Moebius”), Philippe Druillet, and Jean-Pierre Dionnet founded Métal Hurlant in 1974. The magazine pushed BD into adult science-fiction and fantasy territory, and its international edition (Heavy Metal, launched 1977) carried Moebius's work into the American imagination — influencing everything from Alien production design to American comics auteurs.

BD today — the album as art object

BD remains anchored by the album format, sold in bookshops alongside literature rather than in specialty shops. The Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Angoulême (since 1974) is the medium's most prestigious annual gathering. France treats BD as le neuvième art — the ninth art — and the state-funded Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l'image in Angoulême is the institutional home.

The American Tradition (Comic Books)

The American line runs from newspaper strips through the newsstand pamphlet to the modern superhero monopoly and corporate consolidation. We cover this tradition in deeper detail in our companion guide.

Newspaper strips → newsstand format (1890s–1934)

The American line begins with Richard F. Outcault's Yellow Kid in Truth magazine (June 2, 1894), reprinted in Pulitzer's New York World on February 17, 1895 and printed in color from May 5, 1895. Newspaper strips dominated for forty years — Krazy Kat (1913), Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905), Mutt and Jeff (1907) — before Funnies on Parade (1933) and Famous Funnies #1 (cover-dated July 1934) established the newsstand pamphlet format.

The Golden Age — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman (1938–1941)

Action Comics #1 (Superman) was cover-dated June 1938 and copyrighted April 18, 1938. Detective Comics #27 (Batman) was cover-dated May 1939 and on sale March 30, 1939. All Star Comics #8 (Wonder Woman's debut) was on stands October 21, 1941; her first headlining feature ran in Sensation Comics #1 (cover-dated January 1942).

The Wertham crisis and the Comics Code (1954)

Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent was published in April 1954. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on April 21–22, 1954 (Estes Kefauver presided; Wertham and EC publisher William Gaines testified). The Comics Magazine Association of America adopted the Comics Code on October 26, 1954. Wertham's methodology was bad — later scholarship has documented how he selectively quoted his subjects. But the industry was producing genuinely exploitative work, and the Code, however much it crippled EC and the horror line, was the price of survival.

The Silver Age — Marvel arrives (1956–1970)

DC's relaunched Flash in Showcase #4 (cover-dated October 1956) is the usual Silver Age start. The Marvel arc began with Fantastic Four #1 (on sale August 8, 1961) and Amazing Fantasy #15 (Spider-Man, on sale June 5, 1962). Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko developed the “Marvel Method” — character-first storytelling that displaced DC's plot-first house style and reshaped the form.

Bronze Age (1970–1985) and Modern Age (1986–present)

Bronze Age start date is genuinely contested — Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (cover-dated April 1970) is most cited, with Conan #1 (October 1970) and Gwen Stacy's death in ASM #121 (June 1973) as alternative anchors. The Modern Age opens with Crisis on Infinite Earths (April 1985 to March 1986), The Dark Knight Returns (February to June 1986), and Watchmen (September 1986 to October 1987). Image Comics was founded in January–February 1992 by Marvel's top artists in a creator-rights breakaway. Marvel filed Chapter 11 on December 27, 1996. Disney acquired Marvel — announced August 31, 2009, closed December 31, 2009, for $4 billion.

The Japanese Tradition (Manga)

Pre-modern roots — kibyōshi and Hokusai

The word manga long predates the modern form. Katsushika Hokusai's Hokusai Manga sketchbooks (first volume 1814, fifteen volumes total) collected what we'd now call cartoon sketches — caricatures, animals, daily life, the supernatural. Edo-period kibyōshi (“yellow-cover books”) of the late 18th century combined image and text in ways that scholars debate as proto-manga.

Meiji-era political cartoons — Wirgman and Bigot

The British cartoonist Charles Wirgman founded The Japan Punch in Yokohama in 1862. The French cartoonist Georges Ferdinand Bigot launched Tôbaé in 1887. Both Western artists in Japan helped seed modern political cartoon and comic-strip conventions among Japanese illustrators of the Meiji era (1868–1912).

Tezuka's post-war revolution

Osamu Tezuka's New Treasure Island (1947, written by Shichima Sakai with Tezuka illustrating) is the conventional start of modern manga. Tezuka brought Disney-influenced character design, cinematic panel-to-panel transitions, and feature-length narrative ambition to a medium that had been treated as ephemeral. Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) ran in Kobunsha's Shōnen magazine from April 3, 1952 to March 12, 1968.

Genre stratification — shōnen, shōjo, seinen

The 1960s–1970s saw manga split into demographic genres backed by dedicated weekly magazines: shōnen (young men, e.g., Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1968), shōjo (young women), seinen (adult men, Big Comic from 1968), josei (adult women). The magazine system funded long-form serialization and the now-canonical pattern of chapter publication followed by collected volumes (tankōbon).

The Akira moment

Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira serialized in Young Magazine from December 20, 1982 to June 25, 1990 — 120 biweekly chapters, ~2,000 pages. The 1988 anime film, which Otomo directed and adapted from his then-unfinished manga, opened Western anime imports. Most pre-1990 attempts to import manga and anime had failed commercially; Akira proved a Western market existed. We cover Akira in depth in our editorial analysis of the manga.

Manga today

The 2010s digital shift collapsed the print weekly magazine model in many genres; scanlation accelerated international reach long before official translation did. Weekly Shōnen Jump simulcasts globally through Viz's Manga Plus app. For the form, conventions, and major works, see what is manga and manga vs comics vs BD vs webtoons.

The Korean Tradition (Manhwa → Webtoon)

Manhwa origins

Manhwa — the Korean cognate for manga / manhua — developed under Japanese colonial occupation (1910–1945) and continued through the post-war division. Korean comics historians treat the 1950s–1970s as the foundation period, with rental-shop circulation as the dominant distribution model.

Manhwa magazine era — 1990s peak

IQ Jump (1988) and Comic Champ (1992) anchored a 1990s manhwa magazine boom that mirrored the Japanese model. The industry contracted sharply in the late 1990s — partly due to economic crisis, partly to readership shifting online.

The webtoon pivot — 2003 and 2004

Daum Webtoon launched on February 24, 2003. Naver Webtoon followed in 2004. Both are commonly misdated by a year in English-language sources — the correct dates are above. Webtoons solved the manhwa industry's distribution problem by skipping print entirely and publishing free, vertical-scroll comics directly on portal sites.

Vertical scroll as form

The vertical-scroll format isn't just a layout choice. It changes pacing — each scroll is a beat — and it's built for mobile phone reading from the start. Korean creators developed visual conventions for vertical pacing (long descending action panels, dialogue-timing through scroll speed) that didn't exist in page-based manhwa. For a fuller treatment of the form, see what is a webtoon.

Global webtoon — 2014 to today

Naver launched English-language WEBTOON in 2014; Kakao Page expanded internationally; Lezhin and others followed. WEBTOON's international CANVAS program unified across seven regional sites (English, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Thai, Traditional Chinese, German) on March 26, 2026 with an AI-assisted translation beta, lowered $25 minimum payout, and the Creator Residency Program as part of a $47M creator-ecosystem investment for 2026. South Korea's AI Basic Act, effective January 22, 2026, requires disclosure of generative AI content distributed commercially in Korea.

Where the Traditions Cross

The four traditions are not really parallel — they're entangled, with key moments where one reshaped another. The honest history surfaces these connections.

What Scholars Debate (and Why It Matters)

A history page that picks one answer and ignores the others is wrong in a way that hostile review catches quickly. The debates below are features, not footnotes — knowing them is how you cite this material accurately.

A Reading Path for Someone Starting from Zero

One title per tradition that respects your time and gives you the shape of why that tradition matters. Skip the comprehensive curriculum — start here, follow what interests you.

• → Tintin: The Adventures of Tintin, Reporter in the Orient (Cigars of the Pharaoh / The Blue Lotus) — Hergé's 1934–1936 turn toward research and tonal seriousness is where BD becomes a real medium for adult readers.
• → Astro Boy (selected stories) — Tezuka's post-war humanism, the Disney lineage in the character design, the moral problem of artificial intelligence framed in 1952.
• → Akira (Otomo) — see our full editorial analysis.
• → Watchmen (Moore & Gibbons) — see our full editorial analysis.
• → Persepolis (Satrapi) — French BD by an Iranian-French author. Memoir form. Shows what the European tradition can do when it abandons the album's genre conventions.
• → Tower of God or Solo Leveling (WEBTOON) — the post-2010 Korean vertical-scroll form at scale. Pick either to see what the format can carry.

2020s and Beyond

The 2020s reshape the medium in three ways relevant to anyone reading or making comics today.

• → AI generation arrives as a real category. By 2026 the working creator can generate panels, scripts, and full multi-page comics with consistent characters in minutes. See our 2026 capability map for what's solved, partial, and unsolved.
• → The WEBTOON international CANVAS unification (March 26, 2026) made vertical-scroll, AI-assisted translation, and a low $25 minimum payout the default infrastructure for a digital-native global creator.
• → The legal layer is unsettled. The U.S. Copyright Office's Part 2 report (January 29, 2025) holds that purely AI-generated output is not eligible for copyright registration without meaningful human authorship. Disney + Universal v. Midjourney (case 2:25-cv-05275, C.D. Cal., filed June 11, 2025) is in active discovery as of June 2026 and tracks reproduction of named characters.

Frequently Asked Questions