History of Comics
Modern-day historians have retroactively termed some 19th-Century books “graphic novels,” but the first real comic was The Yellow Kid, which debuted in The World, a New York-based newspaper, in 1895. Originally referred to as “the funnies,” the term, “comics,” caught-on in the early 1900s.
While the earliest comic books were reprints of popular strips, by the 1940s and '50s, every literary genre was represented. The most popular were Romance, Western, Detective, and Horror comic books – the latter of which were largely published by EC Comics. These comics were so effective that they came under fire for “corrupting youth” and the comic book industry created the Comics Code in response. Some cite this self-imposed sanitation as the catalyst for the rising popularity of superheroes, as they had been around since the 1930s, but were not big-sellers before then.
In the 1980s, comics became more literary. Whether or not they existed before, graphic novels became a popular format and titles such as The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen established sequential art as a legitimate storytelling form. Today, comics are widely-accepted, and many of the highest-grossing films of the last decade were based on them.