Abstract
The history of comic books is linked to the history of the american society. Studying the story of comic books is a good way to understand some evolutions of the american society through the 20th century. In this talk, you will also discover where a lot of american heroes are coming from. The creation of the modern American comic book began slowly. The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which appeared in New York in 1842, is the first comic strip to be published in America, it was written by the swiss Rodolphe Töpffer. At the beginning comic books were not as we know them with word balloons but blocks of text under a single scene. The first entirely US produced comic book was, The Yellow Kid in McFadden's Flats in 1897 which in addition to using word balloons regularly also introduced the term comic book. That is why we can use it as the starting point for the Platinum Age. The starting impulse is due to the prosperity which followed the Secession war (1861-1865) and to the european immigration. The increase of press publications helped the comics to get known among the american population.
