Years ago, I made a mistake.

It began when I found out something that, at the time, I couldn't believe I didn't know and hadn't noticed up to that point. It came from a post on the Zukahnaut blog, by Ötty Justason, where there was a handy image explaining how the capital "I" should be written when lettering comic strips and comic books. The blog is no longer there, but it can still be accessed on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Basically, the normal "I," without crossbars on the top, should be used in most circumstances, and the crossbar version of "I" should only be used in very specific cases, normally if it's a personal pronoun, the first letter of someone's name, or in an acronym.

Someone I followed on Twitter retweeted this, and I was a bit skeptical, as I had never heard of this rule before. I used the crossbar version of the "I" all the time, in drawing comics as well as in normal handwriting. At the time I regulary drew a webcomic called The Bird Feeder, and I even created a font for use w…

Most people think that the dawn of the superhero and the costumed crime fighter was in 1938 and 1939, when comic books started appearing and characters like Superman and Batman were first being published. The truth is that those comic book characters owe a lot to what was happening in the 20s and 30s in newspaper comic strips and are far from the first costumed heroes to appear.

Action and adventure comic strips had existed since the 20s and were quite popular. Some notable examples are Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, which began in 1937, and Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, which began in 1934. The storylines spanned months and years, put the characters in real danger, and always included incredible cliffhangers. The artwork was exquisite, and in my opinion was far better than anything published in golden age comic books.

There were also what were called "crime comic strips," which dealt with policemen and even costumed vigilantes. One of the most famous crime comics was Dick Tracy, who first appeared…

I'm not really a fan of dances myself, but I am aware of the phenomenon of the Sadie Hawkins dance. It's based on the idea that traditionally, at high schools and colleges mainly, boys are supposed to ask girls out to dances. Sadie Hawkins dances flip that around and require that girls ask boys to the dance. This was a thing when I was in college a few years ago, and a cursory Google search shows that it seems to still be a thing. People also still don't seem to know where it came from, though, or who Sadie Hawkins was.

Sadie Hawkins wasn't a real person, but a character that appeared in the comic strip Li'l Abner, by Al Capp. On an unspecified day in mid-November, the town where Abner lived, Dogpatch, would have Sadie Hawkins Day to commemorate her. It was said by the residents of Dogpatch that when the town was small, the mayor Hekzebiah Hawkins instituted the Sadie Hawkins Day race in order to help his daughter catch a husband. She was known as "the homeliest gal in all them hills," and had gotten to age…

I probably should have thought about writing this blog post last week, but it was the July 4th celebration that got me thinking about it. There are a lot of distinctly American characters that have first appeared in comic strips and have become American icons. However, there are also prominent American symbols that first appeared in comic strips as well. Two of them were clearly popularized by a particular newspaper cartoonist named Thomas Nast.

Nast was a very prolific cartoonist. He's often given credit for creating characters such as Uncle Sam and Columbia, and though he did use them in his cartoons, he didn't create them. He also didn't popularize Uncle Sam nearly as well as James Flagg did with his Army recruitment poster.

He did, however, popularize the use of the donkey as a symbol for the Democratic party as well as begin the use of the elephant as a symbol for the Republican party. The donkey had been used before, mainly to refer to Andrew Jackson. While it originally was meant to be derogatory, J…

When I say "Ripley's Believe It Or Not," the first thing that will probably come to most people's minds is a TV show, a museum, or even a book series. Most people will probably not think of Robert L. Ripley himself, and I'm not sure how many people know that Ripley got his start as a newspaper cartoonist.

His first full time gig was with the New York Globe as a sports cartoonist. At the time, the comic panel he drew was called Champs and Chumps, and would normally feature various sports facts and stories of amazing and unbelievable athletic feats. As time went on, Ripley would often include other interesting facts not related to sports. In the end, he dumped the sports theme entirely and renamed the panel "Believe It Or Not!"

I say he got his start as a cartoonist, because that's certainly not all that he did. Most of the other things that we associate with the "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" brand are things that Ripley himself started. His cartoons and facts were collected into several books, he opened muse…