Another great book to add to the wish list. The technology of colour newsprint enabled an explosion of creativity every bit as disruptive as those in contemporary times.

Although replete with racial and ethnic stereotypes, the first newspaper comic strips were not so much an extension of vaudeville as precursors of the equally déclassé and temperamentally anti-authoritarian motion picture. The early strips thrived on choreographed violence, including runaway horse carts, baroque streetcar collisions, and a panoply of what Hearst might have termed polychromous explosions.