MIssed it last Sunday so here, a week late, is the historic anniversary of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World printing that paper’s first color comic Sunday supplement. The first Sunday Funnies?
From American Comics: A History by Jeremy Dauber:
The first color comic supplement appeared in the World on May 21, 1893, available on newsprint for a nickel, half the price of the fancy weeklies.
Acknowledging that The Chicago Inter Ocean color supplement came a year earlier, but Dauber notes, as do other comic historians, this was a comic color supplement.
From Insider Histories of Cartooning by R. C. Harvey:
… Joseph Pulitzer’s World, where, on May 21, 1893, Goddard had produced the first Sunday comics supplement in color. The idea of a color Sunday “magazine” had been under discussion at the World since 1891, …
From The Sunday Paper: A Media History by Paul Moore and Sandra Gabriele:
The first recurring, self-described “Colored Supplement” of the New York World appeared on May 21, 1893, featuring a Walt McDougall cartoon titled “Broadway Cable Car Possibilities.” Several special supplements had appeared earlier …
Moore and Gabriele get the title of the cartoon right (somewhere early on in comics history “Broadway Cable Car Possibilities” became “The Possibilities of the Broadway Cable Car”). And here, from The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum and their San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection by way of John Adcock’s Yesterday’s Papers, is that famed Walt McDougall cartoon in color.
The cartoon and a few inside drawings are about the only thing comic in the four page supplement.
Via newspapers.com:
