Welcome to Super I.T.C.H.’s first Post-Apocalyptic blog! (For those who weren’t paying attention, the world ended yesterday. But don’t worry, if you missed it, you’ll get a second chance when the world ends again next year!)

Those of us not Raptured to safety yesterday, are now to endure Hellish Torment (from Heaven). So, let’s begin our torture, by presenting the 1682 broadsheet comic “A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot” by Francis Barlow. This was one of numerous Popish Plot broadsheet comics published at the time, part of an anti-Catholic conspiracy to falsely accuse the Catholic Church of plotting to kill the British king. The pictures here were scanned from the book History of the Comic Strip, Volume I: The Early Comic Strip — Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c1450 to 1825, by David Kunzle. (An outstanding book, and, for our period of Hell on Earth, filled with plenty of horrific imagery from propaganda sheets, depicting the atrocities committed by one’s enemies!)

The Horrid Hellish Popish Plot is particularly appropriate for Day One of an American Protestant Pentecostal Evangelical post-Revelations-based Apocalypse, in that American Pentecostals are typically taught that the Catholic Church is the “Whore of Babylon” in Revelations — representing a church that has betrayed the faithful, selling out its values to the service of the earthly authority of a European Anti-Christ. Has to be. Because the “Whore of Babylon” couldn’t possibly be such American Protestant Evangelical Pentecostal churches themselves, many of which have closely aligned themselves to the service of the earthly American Republican Party, helping it to gain control of the greatest military power on the planet. That interpretation just wouldn’t make sense. Would it?

This work is sometimes cited as an example of the evolution of the word balloon within sequential multi-panel comic strips. Which it is (a step in the evolution). It does not qualify as a “Pre-YK Talkie”, however, because the words being spoken within the banners (rather than balloons) that are emerging from people’s mouths, are actually inconsequential to the telling of the story — they could be eliminated without affecting it. Therefore it does not qualify as a “comic strip” by those who insist comic strips began with Yellow Kid. (It does meet my personal definition of a comic strip — but, my purpose in Pre-YK Talkies is to find instances prior to Yellow Kid, which match the definition of a comic strip held up by those who would deny the legitimacy (and even existence) of such pre-YK strips.)

Click on the pictures above and below, to view larger versions.

Doug Wheeler

PreYKStrips