The 150th Anniversary of NOT The First Newspaper Comic Strip
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From American Studies a couple days ago:
The September 11, 1875 edition of the Daily Graphic illustrated newspaper featured “Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm,” a series of 17 images from the young cartoonist Livingston “Hop” Hopkins (1846-1927) that constitute the first newspaper comic strip in American history. I haven’t been able to find a complete digitization of the strip online, but I trust the description in this excellent 2017 Truthdig article that traces the history of political cartoons…
That Livingston “Hop” Hopkins link above leads us to the esteemed Lambiek Comiclopedia:
Livingston Hopkins, also known as Hop, was born in 1846 in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Hopkins worked for the Daily Graphic, New York’s first illustrated newspaper. For this newspaper, he made ‘Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm’ on 11 September 1875. With 17 successive pictures that filled a full page, this was the first U.S. newspaper cartoon strip.
From a few years ago ozTypewriter gives an account of Hopkins sojourn in Australia:
Livingston York Yourtee Hopkins was an Ohio-born pioneering cartoonist who worked for the Sydney weekly magazine The Bulletin (1880-2008). Writing humour and drawing cartoons under the name “Hop”, Hopkins contributed to The Bulletin from 1883 until he suffered a serious hand injury in an accident aboard the USS Tahiti while returning to Australia after a five-month tour of the US and Britain 1914.
A brief profile of Hopkins at the end of that article states:
Hopkins worked for the New York Daily Graphic, the city’s first illustrated newspaper, and his September 11, 1875, strip “Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm”, with 17 successive pictures that filled a full page, was the first newspaper cartoon strip.
The first newspaper account crediting “Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm” as the first newspaper comic strip is from a March 5, 1971 Cleveland Press Action Line column.
I am not finding the origin of that false assertion that the strip was the first newspaper comic strip, but it has been published as fact since at least 1971.
But we do have that Burglar Alarm comic strip.
And Mr. Fish’s description of the full page comic strip (coarse language warning at that link):
The date of the [9/11/2001 World Trade Center] attack also happened to be the 126th anniversary of the initial publication of the very first newspaper comic strip in the U.S., “Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm.” It was published by the New York Daily Graphic newspaper, whose offices had been located some 5,000 feet away from the site of the World Trade Center.
Appropriately, the 1875 strip depicted a self-aggrandized egomaniac who attempts to protect himself from the threat of a home invasion by stockpiling excessive firearms and weaponry and installing a foolproof security system designed to prevent a surprise attack. In the comic strip, the firepower and security system don’t work, and Professor Tigwissel is attacked, but he arrogantly claims success afterward. He promises to patent his device to perpetuate the notion that we are best protected by the machinery of our paranoia and a weaponized mistrust of the world, rather than by a less hysterical adherence to truth, justice, humanitarianism and mutual cooperation. Such was the premonitory power of the cartoonist in the late 19th century, and such was the sickening plunge of real life into the realm of gruesome fantasy many years later …
We also have via the Wayback Machine comics historian Doug Wheeler‘s account of Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm at The Daily Graphic which dispels the notion that it was the first newspaper comic strip:
We come now, to the moment of some gnashing of teeth. Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm. Published on the front page of the September 11th, 1875 edition of the (New York) Daily Graphic. The fifth published appearance of artist Livingston Hopkins’ recurring comic strip character, Professor Tigwissel.
Let me repeat for emphasis — the fifth appearance. Not Tigwissel’s “first” appearance. Nor anywhere close to being “the first comic strip in a newspaper”, as has for well more than a decade been reported incorrectly by a multitude of sources. Misinformation that, with the advent of the internet, has become rapidly disseminated and repeated by more and more outlets each every year, primarily by those providing long “On this Day In History”-type listings. Likely made worse, by our collective desire to find good things that happened on the now-infamous day of September 11th.
Before continuing into my rant against those whose “research” into history consists of repeating information others have written/said, without any attempt to verify that information (and, with rare exception, with no creditation as to their source) — before I continue that rant — please, first, click on the above picture, and enjoy Livingston Hopkins’ masterpiece of humor, Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm. First Tigwissel or fifth, it’s still a masterpiece of comic art, and deserves to be appreciated upon its own merits.
Doug Wheeler’s Hopkins history gives us a timeline of early comic strips in The Daily Graphic back to Tigwissel prototype Professor Simple by Livingston Hopkins in 1873.
Those links to Doug Wheeler via The Wayback Machine will provided supersized Daily Graphic comic strips.
Bonus Professor Tigwissel comic strip via newspapers.com:
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