10 Figures Who Completely Reshaped Comic Book History
Changing the world one KA-POW at a time.
Comics tend to focus primarily on characters. That's understandable: it's a character driven medium, and one based on the principle of return business. Unless you have compelling heroes and villains there's no way to engage your audience, at least not long term. Comics have any number of well-defined protagonists - larger-than-life heroes in brightly coloured pants - but we tend to focus very little on who put those heroes in those pants.
Some of those who shaped comic books into the industry and medium it is today are well known, possibly due to their habit of appearing in every movie they can (you know who we're talking about). But there are figures through history whose input is underrated or even ignored.
The evolution of comic books has been accelerated, redirected and shaped by the visionaries who created memorable heroes, catalysts of change who revolutionised the medium and a few villainous third parties with their own sinister agenda.
Through creative contribution, business acumen, some weird psychological theories, and a desire for world domination, these individuals shaped the world of comics into the multimedia behemoth of books, movies and crap games we see today.
10. Rudolphe Töpffer
It's pretty debatable where comics definitively began. It really depends on your own definition, if it's just sequential art that tells a story then we're due some reissues of the Bayeux Tapestry, but a dark gritty rebooted version. The earliest individual figure to affect the structure of comics, as we know them today, is Swiss artist Rudolphe Töpffer.
Using his experience as a caricature artist Töpffer created stories with captions and dialogue for his friends as a hobby. He was pushed into publishing his work and was met with instant success. 1837's Histoire de M. Vieux, reprinted in English in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, is widely considered by historians as the first comic book.
So this means the first comic book character is a bumbling Swiss man named Obadiah. And this leads to the debate of who will play him in the movie? Probably Tom Hardy.