Richardwas refined in William Hogarth's Rake's Progress from the 1730s.I saw those engravings on the excellent site tybaltstone gave above: the characters are many and don't seem as recognizable or legible as those from the later comics you mentioned, who were also always given names, as it seems.
Moderator Note: You are once again behaiving in what might seem to be a vexatious manner: you have asked a question, which people have endeavoured to help; now you are setting arbitraray conditions, to gainsay their answers, without helping to further the debate. Why is it necessary for characters to be named? Where is that part of the definition of a "modern" strip-cartoon? If you [i]know what the answer to your questionis, why ask it? If you don't, and others do, why not accept what they tell you in good faith?[/i]
At this time, though, Europe was lagging behind.Maybe the difference between 'captions' and 'speech bubbles' is not so relevant?
Moderator Note: Again - you are not accepting that the use of speech-bubbles is generally considered a mark of the modern strip-cartoon, and a major sttep forward in the change from picture-book to comic; as you yourself are want to say, you can look for links yourself, if you are not prepared to accept it.There's early word-and-picture stories such as Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz and Richard Outcault's Yellow Kid but I'd say the first comic strip proper is Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, an American strip begun in 1905. Do you think the European and American comics could have a common origin?
tybaltstoneThanks for this excellent link!
Here's an interesting site with short articles about the issue:
The Yellow Kid, USA, (1895)Little Nemo, USA, (1905)