The modern comic strip started out

The modern comic strip started out as ammunition in a newspaper war between giants of the American press in the late nineteenth century. The first full-color comic strip appeared January 1894 in the New York World, ownedby Joseph Pulitzer. The first regular weekly full-color comic supplement, similar to today's Sunday funnies, appeared two years later, in William Randolph Hearst's rival New York paper, the Morning Journal
Both were immensely popular, and publishers realized that supplementing the news with comic relief boosted the sale of papers. The Morning Journal started another feature in 1896, the "Yellow Kid," the first continuous comic character in the United States, whose creator, Richard Outcault, had been lured away from the World by the ambitious Hearst. The "Yellow Kid" was in many ways a pioneer. Its comic dialogue was the strictly urban farce that came to characterize later strips, and it introduced the speech ballon inside the strip, usually placed above the characters' heads
The first strip to incorporate all the elements of later comics was Rudolph Dirks's"Katzenjammer Kids," based on Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz, a European satire of the nineteenth century. The "Kids" strip, first published in 1897, served as the prototype for future American strips. It contained not only speech balloons, but a continuous cast of characters, and was divided into small regular panels that did awaywith the larger panoramic scenes of most earlier comics
Newspaper syndication played a major role in spreading the popularity of comic strips throughout the country. Though weekly colored comics came first, daily black-and-white strips were not far behind. The first appeared in the Chicago American in 1904. It was followed by many imitators, and by 1915 black-and-white comic strips had become a staple of daily newspapers around the country.