Preserving British Comics: A Call to Arms!

Preserving British Comics – A Call to Arms!

Julia Round and Chris Murray

For half a century, British comics dominated children’s entertainment in the United Kingdom. They were diverse, exciting, irreverent, innovative, and worked on by some of the top talent in Europe. Their taut storytelling, dynamic layouts, and dramatic content are just memories to many old readers today – and in fact even these are fading. Memories from within the industry are equally precarious, as we have sadly lost a number of important creators over the past few years.  

In our introduction to this blog series, Billy and I reflected on the sad state of the British comics industry today, where just three print titles have survived. But due to a lack of archives, in fact this whole area of our cultural heritage is in very real danger of being completely lost. The comics themselves were low budget productions; printed on cheap paper and seldom properly stored, many copies are literally falling apart. Some public libraries have special collections, and the British Library has the collected runs of many titles, but even these are often incomplete. Ephemera such as free gifts and promotional materials, as well as supporting documents (publicity materials, sales ledgers, scripts, press releases) and any surviving pieces of original art are predominantly in the hands of private collectors. But as these owners age, their collections look set to be broken up and sold off in pieces, as was the fate of Denis Gifford’s legendary collection. Other collections have since been offered for sale, but so far a number of funding bids from UK scholars to obtain and preserve these have not seen any success. 

British comics represent a unique contribution to the culture of the UK. They are a way of understanding and interrogating our history, but they also represent a thriving creative economy, one with national and international reach. An international research strategy is urgently required to catalogue and map existing collections and archives, and to develop the resources required to ensure that comics, original comic art, and the ephemera that surrounds the comics (free gifts, advertising, information on fan clubs, and so on) is not lost. So much of that long history is at risk of disappearing, and not enough is being done to preserve the work being done right now. Although institutions such as the Cartoon Museum in London are doing important work with permanent gallery displays and public events, there are vast numbers of comics and research materials that are unseen, inaccessible, and in danger of being lost and forgotten.  

We hope that the ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series has not only been informative, but also a celebration of the rich history of British comics. As we move forward, we urge fans and scholars to consider the importance of creating and sustaining new and existing comics archives and resources that can be accessed by researchers and the public alike. We not only need to look to the past, but also to our present – how are we collecting and preserving the work of current creators? 

There can be no effective single strategy to protect and preserve this cultural history. Instead, this is a call for all fans and academics working in this field to do whatever we can to promote it and attract funding. We need to find new ways of understanding and experiencing the rich diversity of British comics, and to work together to preserve materials that can inform and inspire future generations of readers and comics creators.