Rodolphe Töpffer

Rodolphe Töpffer (31 January 1799 to 8 June 1846) was a Swiss teacher, author, painter, cartoonist and caricaturist, credited as the father of the comic strip and as the first comics artist in history. Educated in Paris, he worked as a schoolteacher at a boarding school, where he entertained his students with caricatures. His illustrated books, which he called graphic literature, are possibly the earliest European comics. In 1837 he published Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois, issued in the United States in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, with one to six captioned cartoon panels on each page, much like modern comics. He went on to publish several further picture stories and wrote theoretical essays on the form.