books each year. The comic strip, "Peanuts," is enjoyed by more
than 250 million readers a day. But, in 1906, no sane person would
have bet on the bastard offspring of horse racing, cheap pulp paper,
and origami to win that popularity title.

In 1907, Bud Fisher created the first daily newspaper comic strip,
which was published in The San Francisco Chronicle. It started as
funny, illustrated horse racing tips. But "A. Mutt" copped the daily
double by becoming the first daily sports panel to combine all of the
elements recognized in comic strips; these include dialogue bal-
loons and continuing themes, stories, and/or characters. "A. Mutt"
was wildly successful and trotted on to national syndication as
"Mutt and Jeff," still running in newspapers 87 years later.

The first horse out of the comic strip gate, however, was "The
Yellow Kid," which began publication in October 1896. This strip
eventually introduced the first newspaper color--yellow--and
bred the long-enduring slur, "yellow journalism." It and early
comic panels like "The Katzenjammer Kids" ( 1896) and "Happy
Hooligan" ( 1900) even carried thematic concepts from one week to
the next, but none contained all of the elements of contemporary
comic strips.

This American art form rapidly grew in popularity, and, by
January 31, 1912, the first full page of comic strips was published
in newspapers. By the 1920s, a crowded field of strips filled hun-
dreds of pages in hundreds of newspapers. By 1933, the illustrated
horse racing tips of Mutt and Jeff now ran with comic strips
featuring the vine-swinging "Tarzan," pipe-chewing "Popeye,"
and planet-hopping "Buck Rogers." Readers could have made
book that comic strips were becoming big business if they also had
bet on origami to win.

Origami was not a horse or even a comic strip about a horse. It
was and is the art of folding paper, and the proud parent of comic
books.

By 1933, printer Harry Wildenberg must have watched newspa-
per comic strips roll off the presses at Eastern Color countless times.
As the huge 36" x 23" sheets of newsprint were folded once by the
press, a chaos of color, art, and words became a newspaper. But he
must have wondered what these sheets would become if folded
twice.

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