Art, Commerce, and the Color Press.

Between 1895 and 1905 the comic strip coalesced as a new art form and newspaper feature. The gradual improvement of color presses throughout the 1890s led publishers, in their frantic circulation wars, to introduce color supplements to their Sunday papers. Only the doggedly serious New York Times refrained from adding comics. In order to meet the demand from readers, most papers reprinted art from humor magazines such as Puck and Life. Some political cartoonists began to draw weekly features, but most of the strip artists came to the new form directly.

Hogans Alley.

Richard Felton Outcault began his career doing technical drawings for Thomas Edison. In 1896 Outcault began drawing a weekly feature for Pulitzer's Sunday World titled Hogans Alley. In choosing the subject of a poor urban neighborhood, Outcault followed the literary realists...