Platinum Age (1897-1937)
An American comic book is a small magazine originating in the United States and containing a narrative in the comics form. The standard dimensions are 6 ⅝\" × 10 ¼\". more...
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Platinum Age (1897-1937)
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Since the invention of the comic book format in the 1930s, the United States has been the leading producer with only the British comic books (during the inter-war period and up until the 1970s) and the Japanese manga as close competitors in terms of quantity.
Comic book sales began to decline after World War II, when the medium was competing with the spread of television and mass market paperback books. In the 1960s, comic books' audience expanded to include college students who favored the naturalistic, \"superheroes in the real world\" trend initiated by Stan Lee at Marvel Comics. The 1960s also saw the advent of the underground comics. Later, the influence of Japanese manga and the recognition of the comic medium among academics, literary critics and art museums helped solidify comics as a serious artform with established traditions, stylistic conventions, and artistic evolution.
History
Proto-comic books and the Platinum Age
The creation of the modern American comic book came in stages. Comic strips had been collected in hardcover book form as early as 1837 with The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck which appeared in New York in 1842. This was the first of seven graphic novels/comic books. These were not comic books as we know them with word balloons but rather blocks of text under a single scene.
The first entirely US produced comic book was The Yellow Kid in McFadden's Flats in 1897 which in addition to using word balloons regularly also coined the term comic book which is why The History of Comic Books uses it as the starting point for the Platinum Age.
Despite a series of related Hearst comics being published soon afterwards (including the first known full color comic The Blackberries in 1901) the first monthly comic book (Comics Monthly) did not appear until 1922 and only lasted a year. In 1929 Dell Publishing, founded by George T. Delacorte Jr., published The Funnies, described by the Library of Congress as \"a short-lived newspaper tabloid insert\". (This is not to be confused with Dell's later same-name comic book, which began publication in 1936.) Historian Ron Goulart describes the 16-page, four-color periodical \"more a Sunday comic section without the rest of the newspaper than a true comic book. But it did offer all original material and was sold on newsstands\". It ran 36 issues, published Saturdays through Oct. 16, 1930.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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