Who first wrote the comic book?
That’s an interesting (if ungrammatical) question, but the only true answer is: it depends, on what you mean by “comic,” “book,” and “wrote.” Candidates range from whomever did those cave paintings in the south of France, 10,000 years ago, to Rudolphe Toppfer (who published books using sequential pictures to tell a story in the first half of the 1800s) to Major Malcolm Wheeler, whose New Fun, published in 1935, is generally considered the first comic in the format we’re familiar with today — a floppy pamphlet, for 10 cents — which consisted mostly of original material, as opposed to the newspaper-strip reprints that had been appearing for some years before that.
The Overstreet Price Guide has articles on Victorian era, “Platinum” era (the early 1900s), and “Golden Age” (from 1929 on) comics, and they cover many other potential candidates, too; they’re worth reading, just to get a sense of the sprawling, complicated history of the medium we on this site are so fascinated with.
