Comic Strip Coloring Pages
Comic strips got their name because the first ones were meant to be funny. Artists soon found out that a row of pictures and a few speech bubbles could tell true stories just as well, like a stray dog who became a sergeant or a pilot who spotted nine shiny discs over a mountain.
Jump to: Greek Myths | UFOs | World War I | World War II | History of Comics
Greek Mythology
The ancient Greeks told these stories out loud for generations before anyone wrote them down. That's why the same myth often turns up in several versions.
Greek Mythology coloring pages
Unidentified Flying Objects
In 1947 a pilot told a reporter that nine shiny objects zipped past him like saucers skipping across water, and the newspapers turned that into the name flying saucers.
History of UFOs
History of UFOs coloring pages
Types of UFOs
UFOs come in different shapes and sizes and make all kinds of sounds.
World War I
The guns went quiet at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, which is why Remembrance Day and Veterans Day fall on that date. Not every hero in these comics was a person, either: one was a dog and one was a pigeon.
World War II
During World War II the Navajo language became a secret code that was never broken, and women went to work in factories building planes and ships.
Rosie the Riveter coloring pages
Where Comic Strips Came From
People have told stories in a row of pictures for a very long time. The Bayeux Tapestry, a stitched strip of cloth nearly 70 metres long, tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 one scene after another.
The modern comic got its start in the 1830s with a Swiss teacher named Rodolphe Töpffer, who drew funny picture stories with a caption under each drawing. Many people call him the father of the comic.
Newspapers took it from there. In the 1890s, New York papers were battling for readers, and one of them ran a bald kid in a yellow nightshirt called the Yellow Kid. The story goes that his yellow was a test of a new printing ink, and his words were printed right on the nightshirt.
Sunday papers soon had whole pages of color comics, called the funnies. Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, about a boy whose dreams took him to fantastic places, started in 1905, and Charlie Brown and Snoopy arrived with Peanuts in 1950.
Comic strips never really went away, they just got longer. A graphic novel tells a whole book's worth of story in panels, and manga, the Japanese comics that read from right to left, have a long tradition of their own. Both now get whole shelves in libraries and bookstores. Teachers and librarians like them because a story told in pictures can pull in a reader who gets stuck on a page of words. Manga even has its own four-panel strips, which work a lot like the funnies. It's the same idea Rodolphe Töpffer had in the 1830s, just with more pages.
More than a hundred years later, a comic strip is still a few pictures in a row and a story you can take in at a glance, the same way readers did over breakfast with the morning paper.