Rodolphe Töpffer

Innovator Of The Form: Happy Birthday To Rodolphe Topffer
Innovator Of The Form: Happy Birthday To Rodolphe Topffer
Innovator Of The Form: Happy Birthday To Rodolphe Topffer
The history of comics can be hard to trace, but there's one figure we can absolutely say played a major role in the early development of what we now think of as European and American comics. Rodolphe Töpffer was a Swiss cartoonist and caricaturist who created stories out of captioned panels. His 1837 book Histoire de M. Vieux Bois is regarded not only as the first European comic book, but it was translated into English and published in the United States as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck in 1842, making it the first American comic book as well.