Today we don’t think of a cartoon as being associated with great art, but at one time it was. During the period of the Italian Renaissance, the term “cartoon” meant the first sketch in actual size of a large work of arts such as a mural. When news papers and magazines began to use drawings to illustrate news and editorial opinion and to provide amusement, these drawings became known as cartoons.

In the days before newspapers, artists like Hogarth, Daumier, and Rowlandson made series of drawings on a single theme. Sometimes such a series of drawings pictured the adventures of one character. They were the ancestors of present-day cartoons and comic strips.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were a number of magazines which specialized in cartoons. In Paris there was one called Charivari and in London there was the famous Punch. It may be that newspapers and other magazines got the idea of including cartoons as a regular feature from these publications.

The first comic strips appeared in the early 1900’s. Richard Outcault, the artist who created “Buster Brown,” published this comic strip in 1902. It was so popular that children all over the country wanted to dress in “Buster Brown” clothes.

Another of the early comic strips was “Bringing Up Father.” This came out in 1912. It has since been translated into at least thirty languages and published in more than seventy countries.

In an effort to make a continuous story out of some of the better-known comics, one publisher printed a series of them in a book. This idea spread very quickly and dozens of comic books began to appear in a new edition every month.

Now comic books are being used for educational purposes, and history, scientific subjects, and classical stories and novels have been put into comic book form.