Way Wayback Whensday – The World’s First Comic
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From Laurence Grove at The University of Glasgow: “The World’s First Comic and Its New Digital Format:”
The Glasgow Looking Glass, which in its initial run lasted for 17 issues from June 1825 until April 1826, has now, but only recently, been accepted as the world’s first modern comic. What was this satirically brilliant, thoroughly modern, publication that seems largely to have gone unnoticed? It was the creation of caricaturist William Heath (1795-1840[?]) who came up from London to create a panorama—a sort of latter-day IMAX—of the Battle of Waterloo on Buchanan Street, and maybe also to dodge some drinking debts.
By dint of the storytelling that mixes pictures with text, for example in The Story of a Coat from numbers 4, 5 and 6, as well as the use of speech bubbles and the enticing wording ‘to be continued’, the Glasgow Looking Glass is indeed now seen as the world’s first modern comic (i.e. publication), containing within its pages the world’s first modern comic (i.e. strip). ‘Modern’ is of course key because we might argue that image stories can be traced as far back as cave paintings, but John Watson’s technology meant that this ‘comic’ could be mass produced, distributed, and even thrown away, just like more recent Scottish examples of the phenomenon, The Beano or The Dandy.
The University of Glasgow invites you to “Explore the Looking Glass.”
The Yale Center for British Art also offers the Glasgow Looking Glass for reading.
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