comic books in the 19th century

The history of the comic is the history of the comic strip, and the history of the cartoon in newsprint really.

Comic books were, at their beginning, simply collections of comic strips from the newspapers bound in one cheap magazine. It was an easy way for the newspapers to make extra money on the side. Then came the idea of taking these "Comic books" and not just reprinting the comic strips from the papers, but creating totally new stories. I believe that idea came from the founder of DC. And then it rolled from there. Now, originally comic books weren't superhero dominated like they are today. There was a lot more variety with horror stories and crime dramas and pirates and comedy and all that. I believe it was during the Comic scare in the 50's (for those who don't know, there was a Witch-hunt around that period linking comics to all sorts of horrible problems like creating delinquency, youth rebellion, violence, homosexuality, etc) that Comics became Superhero dominated, since all the other comics were forced to shut down.

To create comics for the Victorian era, you have to push the developments back further. Or lead to an earlier jump between illustrations in print media and a collected magazine with pictures used to forward a narrative.
What a Victorian comic industry would look like, I don't know. You may not see certain major developments like the panel and speech/thought balloons, so what you may end up with is something like a Thomas Nast cartoon, where you have one image per page, with dialogue typed underneath. The contents of them could be anything. I don't know if it'd be superheroes, though. At least not anything sci-fi. Certainly detective stories and tales of strongmen with the strength of Hercules is possible.
 
I'd guess Victorian comics would draw heavily on mythic subjects, like Norton suggested. So we'd likely have things like the illustrated labors of Hercules, the illustrated Iliad & Odyssey, the illustrated tales of King Arthur, etc.

This may not be as unlikely as it seems at first glance: there is precedent in the early history of printed books, after all, as 16th & 17th century books often used woodcuts to illustrate the content of the book. There were even emblem books where the woodcuts were the centerpieces of the pages, and they usually had some kind of short poem underneath them to explain the moral lesson of the picture.

English literature scholars have gotten very interested in these emblem books lately; this is a good site that will let you look at facsimilies of a few emblem books. The French "Metamporse d'Ovide figuree" is especially cool, and looks not terribly unlike a comic book / graphic novel.

I think emblem books sort of fell out of style after the 17th century; if that doesn't happen, there's no reason why there can't be "comics" much earlier.
 
Well as J.D Ward points out, there were comics of a kind in Victorian Britain. I built on that slightly in "Fight and Be Right" (see sig); by having a craze for Japanese culture, much as OTL, really. Reprints of works by Kobayashi Kiyochika get rather popular and Alfred Harmsworth, of the Daily Mail fame, starts producing knock-offs of them featuring Britsh war heroes. It's not too long before you get the Commando Comic as a staple of children's magazines.

Here's the relavent segment FYI;

(Taken from ‘The British Newspaper said:
“The increasingly cut-throat newspaper market of the late 1890s led to other innovations. In August 1895, the veteran Daily Chronicle journalist and Orientalist Sir Henry Norman[9], who had spent the war in Japan and Siberia, sent back to London a package of wood-cut prints by the Japanese war-artist Kobayashi Kiyochika[10]. Kiyochika’s stark, dramatic images of wartime heroism were not to the taste of the pacifist Henry Massingham, the Chronicle’s editor, but when the publishing magnate Alfred Harmsworth caught sight of them he was transfixed and arranged for prints of the artworks to be made.

The result was a special edition of Harmsworth’s illustrated magazine Comic Cuts, where the copied images- all entirely unauthorised- were exhibited as “The War According To The Japs”. Kiyochika’s prints, especially a triptych depicting Australian and Indian troops advancing alongside Japanese forces on Formosa, were so popular that the edition had to be reprinted to keep up with demand. Working class audiences, particularly children, loved the simple lines, heroic poses, and the dramatic and often bloodthirsty content of the style; the illiterate also appreciated the fact that there was little to read.

Realising that he had hit on a successful format, Harmsworth employed artists to create similar wartime scenes in the same style; the result was a string of successful volumes featuring famous moments of the recent War, and subsequently the birth of a new genre, the serialised full-page wartime picture story known as the ‘Big Mac’ after Hector Macdonald, a frequent protagonist in the early tales. By 1896, the huge profit he had made on such comics was enough to allow Harmsworth to found his own newspaper, the Daily Mail; the following year, he was able to buy the ailing Observer, beginning his effective takeover of the British press...”
 
The format of comics as we know them wasn't new, either. IIRC, early on, they used the same page size as the dime novels, which is why that size was chosen: it produced a handy product, & paper was readily available & cheap...

As for content, you really can't rule out anything. Stuff like Katzenjammer Kids & Blondie is probably going to happen first. (I have my doubts you get "funny animal" books at all, but IDK enough about the first strips.)

Westerns & horror/Gothic titles are very likely.

Detective titles, maybe less so; the detective story had only just been invented by Poe ("Murders in the Rue Morgue", 1841, according to the usual credit I've seen), & it would be about half a century before the likes of Sexon Blake, Nick Carter, & Sherlock Holmes would appear.

SF was just getting started, too, so SF comics may be latecomers, but reprints of Frankenstein, Mary Shelly's The Last Man (think "Omega Man"), that like, are probable.

Romance titles are also very likely IMO.

The most likely are porn comics,:rolleyes: not unlike the "Tijuana bibles"... Kama Sutra, recall, was illustrated...& there was at least one magazine I know of publishing Victorian "erotica" (which is mild by today's standards...)

The evolution from captioned panels (Prince Valiant style) to the modern strip's conventions (everything from thought & word balloons to page structure to indicators of motion & sfx) was actually pretty rapid OTL; could be you get concurrent developments in both media.

IMO, the biggest question is literacy. Without universal education, are these books just for upper classes? And are the prices low enough the "average Joe" can read them? Are they aimed at kids, or adults? It was adult horror titles in the hands of kids, plus a flat wrong attribution of cause & effect, & purely irrational reaction to false propaganda that led to the horror backlash in the '50s; if Victorian comics are aimed at adults from the start, that never happens...
 
Similarly, we could get interesting knock-on effects on animation once it develops; the "Cartoons are for kids" mentality in the west (Animation Age Ghetto, as TV Tropes calls it) may never develop in such a scenario if animation is linked to comic books which are already identified as a medium suitable for adults.
 
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