Part of American Culture.

The growth of an American middle class with leisure time and money to spend, starting in the late nineteenth century, culminated in the development of a commercial popular culture in the early twentieth century that was unparalleled in its inventiveness and success. By 1940 these media included radio shows, pulp magazines, and comic books, as well as the forerunner of the comic book, comic strips, which had existed since the 1890s.

Continuing Success.

As in radio the comic strips of the 1940s were largely a continuation of the successes of the previous decade. While there were many humor strips that gave the funnies their name — among them Al Capp's L'il Abner and Crockett Johnson's Barnaby — both decades saw a proliferation of narrative strips with continuing characters. Two types dominated: adventure strips such as Milton Caniff 's Terry and the Pirates and...