Comic Strips

This week we’re looking at the villains of everyone's favorite Belgian adventurer, Tintin! While travelling the world with Captain Haddock and his faithful dog Snowy, Tintin has built up an impressive and formidable rogues' gallery all of his own, but which one is his ultimate nemesis?

At a time when the syndicated newspaper strip was one of the biggest sources of entertainment in the world, Harold "Hal" Foster was its reluctant, undisputed king. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on August 16th, 1892, Foster's work on Tarzan and Prince Valiant narrowed the gap between fine art and cartooning, and paved the way for generations of artists to follow.

Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, has been around for over a century, with the latest of his 200+ movies, The Legend of Tarzan, hitting theatres this past weekend. Tarzan's swung through just about every storytelling medium you can think of from TV to radio to animation and, of course, comics. His status as one of the defining heroes of the pulp genre means he's the subject of some extraordinary comics art. We've compiled some of the best Tarzan art we could find, to give you a sense of the long comic book history of the jungle king.

Between the new television cartoon, last year's remarkable CGI movie, the new comics put out by Kaboom and the themed strip collections put out by Fantagraphics to supplement the The Complete Peanuts series, it's been a good time to be a fan of the work of Charles M. Schulz. But in absorbing a lot of this stuff, something leaped out at me that I can't push aside: Peppermint Patty --- formally known as Patricia Reichardt --- should be bisexual.

Everyone loves comic book trivia, but with 75 years of superhero comics behind us right now, there’s always some new obscure fact to learn. That’s why ComicsAlliance is going deep into the minutiae of your favorite names in comics in our continuing video series. You think you know comics? Well, here’s a few things you might not know! Charles Schulz's Peanuts is one of the most popular and influential newspaper comics of all time, running from 1950 until Schulz's death in 2000. Even in the years since that time, Peanuts has continued to run in nearly every major American newspaper in reruns, and thanks to animated specials, movies, and merchandising, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Woodstock and the rest are familiar presences all across the world. In this video you can learn about good ol' Charlie Brown and the gang from their earliest days to the end of the strip and beyond.

Comic artists come in many different varieties: stylists, technicians, craftsmen, visual revolutionaries. Some draw on real life, some experiment and push off into spectacular flights of fantasy. There are those who hone and improve on existing approaches, and those who look for something new and different. The amazing thing about Milton Caniff is that he was all of the above, and a whole lot more. He was the best-known and most popular cartoonist of his day. His narrative and artistic innovations expanded the comic vocabulary, and reinvented the form of the adventure strip. And his influence was felt both by his contemporaries in the comic field, and by the generations that followed.

Little Lulu is a truly iconic figure in the world of cartoons. At her peak in the 1950s, she towered over Times Square, broke down gender stereotypes, and was read by millions in comic books and newspapers around the country --- a massive level of success that was achieved through the dedication and vision of her creator, Marjorie Henderson Buell, a woman who navigated the treacherous waters of the publishing business and kept full control over her signature character.

Cartoonist Lee Falk debuted costumed hero The Phantom in his own newspaper strip on this day in 1936, two full years before Superman debuted in Action Comics #1. He isn't considered the first superhero, but Falk's pulp creation would establish quite a few tropes that would become hallmarks of the genre for decades to come. And like Superman, The Phantom has endured, with comic stories and re-imaginings continuing to this day.

It was Richard Felton Outcault, born this day in 1863, who first put together what we would recognize as a modern comic strip. While he did not necessarily invent all of these innovations, elements we would consider essential parts of a comic strip — panel borders, panel to panel continuity, word balloons, recurring characters, publication in a newspaper in color on Sunday, and so on — were first put together into a gestalt by Outcault in his strip Hogan's Alley, better known by its colloquial title, The Yellow Kid.

Between his debut in 1928's Steamboat Willie and the beginning of 1930, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse had appeared in fifteen critically acclaimed and commercially successful short films --- so it should be no surprise that the high-powered world of newspaper comics soon came calling. King Features approached Disney about licensing the characters, and on January 13, 1930, the Mickey Mouse comic strip was born.