The Comics Journal

The traditional definition of comics is the one conjured up by Coulton Waugh in his book Comics (1947). He says comics consist of three elements: (1) sequence of pictures that tell a story or joke, (2) words incorporated into the picture usually in the form of speech balloons, and (3) continuing characters.

The last item snatches at sophistry. It’s there under false pretenses. Its function is purely rhetorical — to eliminate anything that came along before the Yellow Kid, the most conspicuous of the combatants in New York’s newspaper circulation battles of the 1890s. The Yellow Kid was seen as the first comic strip character mostly because he was a highly visible and successful commercial enterprise — the commercial aspect establishing the value to newspapers of comic strips