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Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The magic of the Sunday comics
The magic of the Sunday comics

While graffiti cartoons date to ancient Rome, the modern comic strip is an offspring of the American newspaper. At the turn of the 20th century, papers vied for a mass audience by cutting their price to a penny or two and broadening their appeal with screaming headlines, celebrity gossip and lurid crime stories. In 1895, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the Sunday New York World, opened a new front in those circulation wars with a front-page cartoon feature, "The Yellow Kid," the story of a plucky slum urchin. Its success set other papers furiously scrambling for comic strips to build their circulation. Comics quickly became a staple of Sunday morning's chapter of the...