I’m certain we’re all preoccupied with the anniversary of a much later September 11th, but for this blog, I’d like to focus on something a bit lighter. On September 11, 1875, “Professor Tidwissel’s (possibly Tigwissel’s) Burglar Alarm,” a seventeen-panel comic strip, appeared in The New York Daily Graphic. This was the first multi-panel comic strip to ever appear in an American newspaper.
The strip shows an eccentric professor who designs an overly complicated contraption to catch burglars, only for the invention to (inevitably) backfire on himself. It was a satire on the growing, overly complicated home security business. The artist, Livingston “Hop” Hopkins, later emigrated to Australia, where he became one of the country’s most influential political cartoonists.
While political cartoons and single-panel illustrations were common in the mid 19th century, this comic “pioneered sequential storytelling in newsprint, paving the way for the golden age of newspaper comic strips like The Yellow Kid and The Katzenjammer Kids decades later.” In the 1870s, American newspaper illustrations were almost entirely single-panel political cartoons or isolated satirical sketches with heavy text underneath. By combining seventeen successive pictures across a full page, Hopkins introduced Americans to “sequential art:” the process of reading a narrative that unfolds across a grid of images over time.
The comic strip introduced the physical structure that modern readers take for granted: “a structured grid of individual cells (‘panels’) separated by blank spaces (‘the gutters’).” This established a “visual language” where the reader’s eye naturally tracks action from left to right and top to bottom, “training the American public how to consume a visual narrative layout.” Instead of using static characters, Professor Tidwissel’s Burglar Alarm relied heavily on “physical comedy, motion, and chronological progression:” showing a character setting an alarm, the alarm malfunctioning, and the immediate comedic consequences. This greatly influenced later “screwball” slapstick strips like Mutt and Jeff.
The character of the eccentric professor “obsessing over an overly engineered, counter-productive technological contraption” became a staple of early comics—and later, movies and tv shows. This “directly anticipated” the “Rube Goldberg machines” and comic characters like Gus Mager’s Professor Bughouse, “demonstrating that technology and modern domestic frustration were fertile ground for newspaper satire.”
Later famous comics like Richard F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid (1895) popularized speech balloons and mass market syndication, but they built “upon the real estate” that Professor Tidwissel’s Burglar Alarm originally carved out. Hopkins proved that a whole page of a daily newspaper could be “dedicated exclusively to a fictional cartoon sequence, prompting editors to realize that visual humor could be a powerful tool for driving newspaper circulation.”
Your characters could have easily picked up a copy of The New York Daily Graphic at their local saloon or men’s club—or, if they had the money, might even have had a subscription themselves. Readers at the time probably had no idea they were seeing something brand new, something that would begin a trend toward the modern graphic novel. However, the comic strip would have evoked a chuckle, and that’s all “Hop” Hopkins was after.
J.E.S. Hays
www.jeshays.com
www.facebook.com/JESHaysBooks
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