Parts of a Comic Strip
The part of the comic that shows what characters are saying out loud.
What are speech bubbles, or word balloons?
Probably the most successful comic strip artist of all time, this WWII veteran created Peanuts in 1950 and ended it in 2000, just before his death.
Who is Charles Schulz?
This comic strip by Winsor McCay is about the adventures a young boy has in his dreams every night, and each week's strip ends with him waking up, often by falling out of his bed.
What is Little Nemo in Slumberland?
Swiss artist known as "the father of comics," he was the first to dedicate himself to longform storytelling through sequential art and text, creating six graphic novels and two essays about the topic in his lifetime.
Who was Rodolphe Topffer?
The bald-headed main character who acts as the put-upon everyman in the Peanuts comic strip.
Who is Charlie Brown?
A cloud shape with words inside to show what a character is thinking.
What is a thought balloon, or thought bubble?
This reclusive artist retired ten years after starting Calvin and Hobbes, one of the most beloved comic strips of the 20th century, about a boy and the tiger who's his best friend.
Who is Bill Watterson?
Richard F. Outcault created two famous comic strips: Buster Brown and this one, often called the "first comic strip."
What is The Yellow Kid, or Hogan's Alley?
Napoleon famously said of this early cartoonist that "[his] depictions of me did more damage than a dozen generals"; it is because of his cartoons that we still think of Napoleon as being a very short man.
Who was James Gillray?
Considered the first science fiction comic strip character, he helped shape our image of what an alien might look like.
Who is Mr. Skygack, from Mars? (Just "Skygack" is acceptable)
Most comic strips are made up of several of these, which are usually made up of squares or rectangles around a single drawing.
What are panels?
Considered the first person to ever put all of the elements of a modern comic strip together for the first time in 1896, giving him the title of "The Father of the Comic Strip."
Who was Richard F. Outcault?
A. D. Condo created this strip about a rotund man who corrects people's bad behaviors usually with a punch or a kick.
What is The Outbursts of Everett True?
This famous British magazine, named after a well-known puppet character, ran from 1841-2002, and its cartoons would go on to introduce Western-style caricature to Japan in the 1860s.
What is Punch?
This character, introduced in the British magazine Judy and co-created by Marie Duval, one of the first women in comics, is considered to be one of the first comic strip characters and was one of the first popular enough to get his very own spin-off magazine.
Who is Ally Sloper?
The small gap between different boxes in a comic strip, sometimes said to indicate the passage of time/space between images.
What is the gutter?
This comic strip artist was also a pioneer of animation, creating some of the first animated short films ever made, such as Gertie the Dinosaur and The Sinking of the Lusitania, which is the first animation made for an adult audience.
Who was Winsor McCay?
Created by George Herriman, this was one of the first comic strips that was embraced by critics and fine artists, including the poet E. E. Cummings and the painter Pablo Picasso; it follows a cat who is in love with a mouse that just wants to hit the cat in the head with a brick.
What is Krazy Kat?
This British artist, who famously illustrated some of Charles Dickens's novels, was one of the first to draw scenes that showed action-to-action movement by a character in his famous illustrations for Jack Sheppard (1839).
Who was George Cruikshank?
This comics award is named after this famous mouse whose greatest joy in life was hitting a certain cat in the head with a brick.
What is the Ignatz Award?
Usually a rectangular box that contains text that acts as narration.
What is a caption?
The creator of Nancy, a comic strip that became a darling of the alternative comix artists of the 1960s and that continues to find some success in new iterations today.
Who was Ernie Bushmiller?
In 1918, Frank King started this comic strip, called the first ever soap opera, which follows its characters as they age in real time -- the strip is one of the longest running and is still going 107 years later (it'll become the longest running strip if it lasts just two more years!)
What is Gasoline Alley?
This 1793 British cartoon by James Gillray could be considered the first four-panel comic strip.
What is John Bull's Progress?
It was the competition between these two newspaper tycoons that helped shape the face of American comic strips in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Who were William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer?