ter.ri.to.ri.al.i.ty n. The behavior of a male animal that defines and defends its territory.
cu.ra.to.ri.al.i.ty™ n. The behavior of a curator that defines and defends his collection and its history.

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, comic characters proliferated on the colorful newspaper comic pages while a fledgling literary genre took shape and silent films introduced the magic of motion pictures to a wide-eyed generation. As America grew by leaps and bounds, comic characters carried the nation from storm-filled skies to cloudless blue heavens… and one particular medium provided not just vital information to citizens across the country, but entertainment as well.

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EXTRA! EXTRA!: 1895-1927
The name of this gallery should give you a clue that if there is any one medium taking center stage in this era, it's newspaper. During this period, comic characters found their home in the brightly colored pages of the newspaper supplements. Americans read about the adventures of everyone from Krazy Kat and Skeezix to Little Nemo and Happy Hooligan, often illustrated in lavish color and with breathtaking line work and detail. The marketing and merchandising success of the Brownies and Richard F. Outcault's creations – The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown – established a pattern that would be replicated for decades to come.

But I'm not going to discuss the myriad comic characters in this room who gain fame in all those newspaper strips or the posters that proclaim the arrival of silent films or the sheet music that immortalizes everything from Barney Google to the Titanic. And if you think I'm going to wax eloquent about the aforementioned Richard Outcault-created double act (triple act really, when you consider Pore Li'l Mose), guess again. We won't be talking about them, either.

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No, I think there's a part of this gallery that often gets overlooked in our admittedly strong focus on the comic character and its history, and that's one wall devoted to the evolution of an entire literary genre – science fiction. Nestled between Coca-Cola and Brown Bread ads and the political cartoons of Joseph Keppler and Victor Gillam, we feature a case that illustrates through first-edition novels, periodicals and magazines how some of the most imaginative minds of the 19th and early 20th centuries crafted fanciful adventure tales laced with intriguing speculation about Man's relationship with nature and technology. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the first modern science fiction novel, and Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Under the Moons of Mars (1912), the architects of science fiction are represented through some of their greatest works, not to mention a few that are not nearly as well-known, but just as significant.

The term "science fiction" wouldn't even be coined by editor Hugo Gernsback until 1929, so the scientific romances, speculative fiction, and "scientifiction" of authors like Shelley, Verne, Wells and Burroughs lacked the label that would later define their work, for good or ill, for decades yet to come. But the essence of science fiction was already there – a literary genre that blended fantasy, adventure and social commentary, capturing the imagination of American readers both young and old.

There are also a few special gems in this exhibit. One of the most striking and prescient items is a 1927 magazine titled All About Television, with a family gathered around a good-sized TV set watching football. It's an image right out of our present-day perceptions of television and its role in our everyday lives, and there it is captured on the printed page two decades before the medium would really begin to make its way into American homes.

For comic book fans, another item of particular interest is a September 1919 issue of Electrical Experimenter featuring a space-suited fellow holding aloft a train engine at a steep angle with a headline proclaiming that, no doubt thanks to the difference in gravity, "You Too Can Do This On 'Eros'." Anyone who recalls the image of the Last Son of Krypton lifting an inclined car on the cover of Action Comics #1 might want to pause and consider whether or not a very young Jerry Siegel and/or Joe Shuster saw this magazine and stored that cover image away in their creative memory. Stranger things have happened.

Upon leaving this gallery, you might also miss a small tribute to one of the real-world historical figures that we consider as honorary "characters" in their own right. Charles Lindbergh's historic transatlantic flight not only served as a watershed moment in American and world history, but presaged a new movement in pop culture that led directly to the debut of two towering icons in our unfolding story. But let's save all that for...

Next time: Set your temporal coordinates for 1928-1945 and prepare for the arrival of a maverick mouse and a not-so-mild-mannered Man of Tomorrow!