Page 159 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 159/206
Rudolph Dirks + Harold Knerr: The Katzenjammer Kids (1889 - 2015) + The Captain and the Kids
(1912-1979)
The more or less coeval emergence of mass-media comics and animated film was remarked upon as early as 1920: Edwin George Lutz introduces his Animated Cartoons: How they are Made, their Origin and Development (the first book on animation) with a summary history of the serial picture, its important educational aspects, as well as its dominant entertainment value. He explains the use of the word cartoon in art (as a preliminary sketch), and says "nothing seemed more natural than that the word 'animated' should be prefixed to the term describing their products, and so bringing into usage the expression 'animated cartoons" (Lutz 1920 pps IX).
The fact is that from the mass publication of comics - beginning in the late 1880s - it is only a decade or so before the first widely recognised animated cartoons - Reynaud's Theatre-Optique demonstrations in 1888-1892 (with Pouvre Pierrot); Emile Cohl (Fantasmagorie 1908); Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland 1911). In 1917 Max Fleischer invented rotoscoping - an apparatus for tracing live-action film - and made several mixed live-action/cartoons (Mechanical Doll 1922). By 1926, Lotte Reiniger had produced the first animated feature film (Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed); Walt Disney produced the first short sound-cartoons in 1928 (Ub Iwerks: Steamboat Willy 1928), and the first sound-cartoon feature (Snow White and the Seven Dwarves 1937). So the emergence of the animated cartoon closely maps the emergence of the film, and the popularisation of printed comic strips and comic-books, the latter internationally significant by that year, with syndicated strips like Chester Gould's Dick Tracy (1931); George Herriman's Krazy Kat (1913), Herge’s 1929 TinTin (to name but a few); and Bob Kane's Batman (1940), Shuster and Siegel's Superman (1938), and Will Eisner's Spirit (1940) soon to come.
For some original perspectives on the evolution of comic art and its remediation in other media, see Scott McCloud's graphic novel/textbooks: Understanding Comics (1993) and Reinventing Comics (2000). And see Scott Bukatman: The Poetics of Slumberland - Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (2011) - a wonderful set of essays on comics and animation.