Text comics are older than balloon comics. Ancient Egyptian wall paintings with
hieroglyphs explaining the images are the oldest predecessors. In the late 17th century and early 19th century picture narratives were popular in Western Europe, such as
Les Grandes Misères de la guerre (1633) by
Jacques Callot,
History of the Hellish Popish Plot (1682) by
Francis Barlow, the cartoons of
William Hogarth,
Thomas Rowlandson and
George Cruikshank. These images provided visual stories which often placed captions below the images to explain a moral message. The earliest examples of text comics are the Swiss comics series
Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois (1827) by
Rodolphe Töpffer, the French comics ''Les Travaux d'Hercule
(1847), Trois artistes incompris et mécontents
(1851), Les Dés-agréments d'un voyage d'agrément
(1851) and L'Histoire de la Sainte Russie
(1854) by Gustave Doré, the German Max und Moritz (1866) by Wilhelm Busch and the British Ally Sloper'' (1867) by
Charles Henry Ross and
Émilie de Tessier. Töpffer often put considerable effort in the narrative captions of his graphic narratives, which made them just as distinctive and appealing as the drawings.
Wilhelm Busch used rhyming
couplets in his captions. During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century text comics were the dominant form in Europe. In the United States of America the speech balloon made its entry in comics with 1895's
The Yellow Kid by
Richard F. Outcault.
Frederick Burr Opper's
Happy Hooligan and
Alphonse and Gaston further popularized the technique. As speech balloons asked for less text to read and had the advantage of linking the dialogues directly to the characters who were speaking or thinking, they allowed readers to connect better with the stories. By the early 1900s most American newspaper comics had switched to the speech balloon format. While speech balloon comics became the norm in the United States, the format didn't always catch on as well in the rest of the world. In Mexico and
Argentina speech balloons were adopted very quickly, while in Europe they remained a rarity until deep in the 1920s. In other parts of Europe, most notably the Netherlands, text comics even remained dominant as late as the early 1960s. Many European moral guardians looked down upon on
comics as low-brow entertainment that made the youth too lazy to read. Christian comics magazines and newspapers closely supervised the content of their publications and preferred text comics, as the format still encouraged children to read actual written texts. They were also ideal to adapt classic novels and guide young readers towards "real" literature. In some instances, foreign balloon comics were simply re-adapted by erasing the balloons and adding captions underneath them. It even happened with the European
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929) by Hergé, which was republished in the French magazine
Coeurs Vaillants, but with captions. Other comics, like
Pip, Squeak and Wilfred by
Bertram Lamb, used both speech balloons and captions. Under the Nazi, Fascist and Communist regimes in Western and/or Eastern Europe balloon comics were even banned in favor of comics with captions underneath them. The success of
The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé from 1929 on, influenced many other European comics, especially in the
Franco-Belgian comics market, to adopt speech balloons. Translations of popular American comics such as
Mickey Mouse,
Donald Duck,
Popeye throughout the 1930s and especially after the liberation of Europe in 1945 further encouraged the speech balloon format. By the 1960s text comics had lost popularity worldwide and only a few remained. ==Classic text comics==