Yet today, the medium is flourishing in ways its ancestors could never have imagined.
Cheaply printed and barely edited, those pamphlets were not what a critic at the time would have called high art. When the first comics arrived on newsstands in the early 1930s, they were a cynical attempt to put old wine in new bottles by reprinting popular newspaper comic strips.
Rather, it took a steady progression over the course of more than 75 years for the form to fully understand, and then harness, its powers. No radioactive spider bite, atomic explosion, or shadowy experiment granted the medium the sort of ability that would have allowed it to arrive on early-20th-century drugstore racks as glossy, fully formed vehicles for sophisticated entertainment. The origin story of comic books isn’t flashy.
