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.