In this paper we'll hub on comics and we will try to find out if this is a truly American trend, or if this can be disproved by arguing the existence of corresponding cultural developments in Europe. It is of central interest to discover mutual influences and probable existant peculiarities of the American or European comic culture. We will focus on initial trends, and developments against the background of the Second World War and the postwar years, in order to show why the United States dominate the European comic market and how nevertheless typical European comics remained important. The European comic was influenced until the beginning of the twentieth century by the form ... Rodolphe Tpffer gave his fanciful picture stories about Monsieur Cryptogam or Monsieur Jacob". The Americans revived the trend originating from Europe and developed the comic strip. In 1895 the first coloured newspaper comic strip appeared in America. Richard Outcault's The Yellow Kid in Pulitzer's metropolitan New York World was vastly appreciated by the readers so that other newspapers picked up the idea and fostered the publication of the comic strip in American newspapers. At the same time, in Europe, comic strips were still restricted to pictures with accompanying texts, which were only published in children's magazines". This was due to the fact that Europeans at the beginning of the twentieth century falsely regarded comics as a media restricted to children readership. In 1908, for example, a series called Les Pieds Nickels from the French drawer Louis Forton was published in a children's magazine, although the political hints in it were rather addressed at adults". American comics, though, were, especially through their publication in daily newspapers, mainly addressed to adults. The developments in the United States were even great enough to influence international comic artists who adopted the American newspaper model and published comic strips first on a weekly and later on a daily base. It is interesting to note for instance that the technique of using balloons was originally European, since it existed already in the Middle Ages and was used in English caricatures at the end of the eighteenth century". But only the American drawers started to implement this technique intensively in the 1920s, since according to Sackmann these American artists were influenced by a mixture of artistic unconcern and the pressure to produce something sensational and new". Thus as early as in the 1920s this technique, which became one of the most decisive features of the comic strip, was regarded as an American way of narrating comics" i.e. by the French comic drawers Saint-Organ and Georges Remi. Some researchers and critics go even further and accuse American comic weeklies to be in the habit of borrowing freely, plagiarizing ... from England ... Germany and France". An example for this 'theft' might have been the American comic The Katzenjammer Kids of 1897 from Rudolph Dirks, which was based on Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz, and originated from William R. Hearst's enthusiasm for Busch's art. In the beginning of the history of comics, at the end of the nineteenth century, European comics culture exported its ideas to the United States. American artists developed out of these more popular and appealing methods, while in Europe comic drawers continued to use traditional ones. This new" American trend started to be used by European artists in the 1920s but they could not devise an own peculiar kind of comic art out of this because of the disruptions of the Second World War. That is why in a way the cultural trends of the postwar years can be considered as an Americanization of the European comic market. Still, the examples of Asterix, Tintin or the Smurfs show that there has as well been a European comic culture, which had distinctive features and was not directly influenced by trends from the United States of America.
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