The Early Development of the Comic Strip in the UK (Part 2 of 2) by Roger Sabin & Michael Connerty

Michael Connerty

That’s an interesting point about the relative depth and complexity of the Sloper world. No individual strip during these years seems to have had the same kind of impact, and I don’t think there was any merchandising associated with these characters as you say there was with Sloper. Also true that conventions around tone, repetition and non-continuity were quite quickly established in the new comics, and this did occasionally make for material that could be a bit…rubbish (let’s be honest!). You’ve got to expect that from any mass entertainment industry cranking out product at that kind of rate. Of course there’s so much good stuff at the same time, and it’s probably worth mentioning some of the star artists of the period.

Tom Browne tends to be universally cited as the most important figure during the 1890s, and, no doubt about it, he was very great, very influential, and very prolific. In fact, he was that prolific that overwork was conceivably a contributory factor in his early death at the age of thirty-nine. At the height of his fame he was doing five front page strips per week as well as other bits and pieces inside these comics. His most important series was titled Weary Willie and Tired Tim (originally “Weary Waddles and Tired Timmy”), and first appeared on the front cover of Illustrated Chips in 1896. It was immediately and massively successful. A good number of imitators- including Browne himself- produced similar strips based on down-at-heel double acts, and the figure of the tramp, already a staple of music hall and humour periodicals, became ubiquitous in the comics of this era. Browne’s chirpy tone and dynamic panel compositions characterised further series like Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy, Don Quixote de Tintogs, and Squashington Flats. You can see his influence in the work of someone like G.M. Payne, who created Curly Kelly for Merry and Bright (below)- very much in the Tom Browne mould.

Cover of Merry and Bright, including "Curly Kelly" by G.M. Payne, 5 July 1913

Tom Wilkinson was another great artist, and the strips were often very smart, and wonderfully drawn. His double act were Lucky Lucas and Neglected Jim- I like this one in which Lucas gets caught up in the works of a printing machine at Comic Cuts, emerging with next week’s strip printed all over him. He also drew a long-running series for Puck called Professor Radium that was one of a number of strips that can be viewed as early examples of science fiction in the comics. Jack B. Yeats also contributed a series focused on the intrusion of gadgetry and technology into everyday life called Dr. Patent’s Academy, also to Puck, and another about a weird automaton called The Whodidit, for Comic Cuts. Yeats is an interesting example in that he initially contributed to humour periodicals, producing work in the more heavily-worked style associated with Punch and so on, then began contributing to Harmsworth’s comics from the early ‘90s early on, evolving a stripped back, spontaneous approach more suited to the strip format. He had a lengthy career- over 25 years- as a comic strip artist, something that he appears to have subsequently swept under the carpet as a he pursued a career in the more elevated world of fine art. The fact that he was reasonably successful in this subterfuge is pretty amazing when you consider that he had produced a couple of dozen recurring characters, consumed by mass readerships in the hundreds of thousands every week.

Tom Wilkinson, “The Amazing Adventures of Lucky Luke and Neglected Jim”, Comic Cuts, May 28 1904

There were a lot of other comics knocking around at this stage, all offering similar fare- Illustrated Chips, Smiles, Comic Life, The Butterfly, The World’s Comic, Larks, and so on. One worthy of special mention is Puck- not to be confused with the American humour periodical of the same name. This was yet another Harmsworth publication which began appearing in colour from 1904 (black and white was the norm throughout the 1890s). It also included a supplement- Puck Jr.- that was an early attempt to explicitly target the very young reader. At the same time Puck was the first to overtly promote itself as a product for women, by, for example, featuring cover art that was clearly influenced by the look of women’s magazines such as Harmsworth’s own Woman’s World, first published in 1903.  

Prior to Puck Jr. there was nothing particularly ‘adult’ about the content of the strips in any of the comics- the vast majority dealt in knockabout physical slapstick, punning dialogue and humorous japes. In the 1890s, the single panel gag cartoons were much more likely to contain references to romance or excessive drinking, but the strips were definitely family-friendly. The cast of characters were, in general, drawn from the contemporary urban scene- shopkeepers, street performers, policemen, burglars, tradesmen, housemaids, and, it goes without saying, rascally kids. There was little by way of full-blown fantasy, and the streets in which the action takes place, by and large, reflected the quotidian world of the comics’ readers. Exceptions to this included series like Comic Cuts Colony by Frank Wilkinson (and later Julius Baker), set in an African jungle, and Jack Yeats’s Roly Poly’s Round the World Tour, in which the protagonist enjoys serial adventures in various far flung parts of the Empire.

There were other important publishers during the 1890s and early 1900s, though Harmsworth did dominate. Arthur Pearson published The Big Budget, which was a key title. It had more pages than other weeklies and was stuffed with serialized fiction. There were great strip artists contributing. Ralph Hodgson was the art editor- and, as “Yorick”, was a fine cartoonist himself.  He got people like Tom Browne, Frank Holland, Jack Yeats and other established artists on board from the get-go (apparently they weren’t contractually tied to specific titles). He stopped doing the strips himself around 1907, drifted away from comics, and ultimately became a moderately successful poet.

Roger Sabin 

That's a great survey. I think you've mentioned all my favourites from that later period. From the earlier time, I'd pick Charles Ross and Marie Duval, who I've already highlighted and who I've been working on for years, and also Archibald Chasemore, who had a gift for physical gestures and facial expressions, as well for depicting clothes (in his other life he designed costumes for the theatre). I guess we sound like fans of these folks - and we are! - but it's important to reiterate that a proportion of their work was vastly racist/sexist/and every other kind of '-ist, as befitting its times (you mentioned the ‘Comic Cuts Colony’ - and there's a reason we're not reproducing an image from that!). 

What you're seeing in that shift from the 1880s and 90s into the 20th century is a change in the profile of cartoonists. In the earlier period, it’s possible to generalise and say that most were middle class gents with training in illustration and painting. Later on, with the Harmsworth/Pearson/etc. boom, they tend not to have much art education, and come from lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds. With this comes a shift in the 'aura' of cartooning from a bohemian pastime to a workaday pursuit. Most names continued to be male, but women were in there, too, hustling away. We know this because there are scattered mentions in memoirs and press reports, and even illustrations of hopefuls queuing to show work to editors. (Women cartoonists' signatures are less visible, or disguised, partly because the profession was seen as less-than-respectable. There's a lot of work for historians to do in uncovering their output.)

These cartoonists could be pretty promiscuous in terms of who they worked for - their work can turn up in several titles at once, as your survey makes clear, but also on book covers, on advertising, in theatre designs, in event programmes; basically anything to make a shilling. They had to be great artists, but they also had to be funny - to have an 'adequate grasp of the ridiculous', as Lemmy used to say. That was not always a natural combination (then as now). It's pretty obvious that one of the reasons the less polished creators like Duval and Ross could 'get away with it' was because they were great comedians.

And if you could hit that funny/skilled sweet-spot, then you could make good money. That went for Yeats, as you imply, but also for Browne and W.F. Thomas (for many years the Half-Holiday cover artist). They lived comfortable lives, and Browne was a minor celebrity. There is some evidence of bidding wars pushing up fees - Funny Cuts carried a weekly advert boasting that it paid better than its rivals. But mostly the work in comics was drudgery, undertaken by a body of pauperised freelancers, feeding the readers' insatiable habit for 'fun' every week. Reg Carter's 1908 strip from the Half-Holiday gets it about right, about a struggling cartoonist whose life revolves around poverty, booze, sex, and fights with his editor. Not much has changed, I'm sure.

Reg Carter, 'A Day in the Life of a Comic Artist', Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, 23 May, 1908.

Professor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Adult Comics (Routledge 'Major Works') and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (Phaidon), and he is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive (www.marieduval.org). He is Series Editor for the booklist Palgrave Studies in Comics, and 'The Sabin Award' is presented annually at the 'International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference'.

Dr Michael Connerty teaches film and animation history at the National Film School (Dun Laogahire Institute of Art, Design and Technology) in Dublin. He recently completed his PhD at Central Saint Martins, UAL, where his focus was on early British comics, particularly the work of Jack B. Yeats. His writing on comics history has been published in the International Journal of Comic Art and in the collection Comics Memory: Archives and Styles edited by Maaheen Ahmed and Benoit Crucifix (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).