British Newspaper Strips: A Contextual Historyby Adam Twycross
This book explores the history and development of the British daily newspaper strip. It considers such strips within their political, commercial and societal contexts and fills in a crucial section of publishing history that has been largely overlooked by both comics and newspaper studies to date.
Learned of this book too late to include in the August Hey Kids! Comics! listing, so here it is as a special.
While Paul’s book, reviewed here on downthetubes, is an excellent guide to newspaper strips published down the decades, Adam’s work explores more of the history and development of the British daily newspaper strip. Usefully, Adam puts the strips in context, his research not only looking at the strips themselves, but how they were presented, and contemporary events that in some cases, helped shape their content.
He also notes how strips were syndicated abroad, such as the Daily Mirror’s “Garth”, giving them international reach and appeal.
Beginning with an examination of the role of the image within British publishing in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the book moves on to explore the arrival and development of the first daily strips.
The 1880s marked a pivotal moment in the development of the popular press, with the arrival of the New Journalism paving the way for the mass-market populism of the century that followed. Although the New Journalism brought with it a greater emphasis on attractive layouts and a prioritisation of the visual, illustration was already firmly embedded within Victorian print culture, where it ranged from the cultural respectability of Punch’s comic journalism to the sensationalism of the Illustrated Police News. Around the middle of the 1880s, this tradition began to blend with the new populist ethos, in which brevity, accessibility and an appealing visual style were becoming central to the offerings of titles such as Tit-Bits and the Pall Mall Gazette…
During the 1890s, the new populist frameworks that had been established during the previous decade became more stable and widespread. In 1892 The Elector’s Picture Book collected together more than 300 of F.C Gould’s cartoons, foreshadowing how both newspaper cartoons and comic strips of the following century would establish secondary markets through reprinted collections. Following the establishment of Answers in 1888, the 1890s also saw Alfred Harmsworth come to prominence within British publishing, initially through the establishment of a raft of successful periodicals and then, from 1894, through an extension into newspapers. This chapter examines Harmsworth’s reworking, with Kennedy Jones, of the ailing Evening News, which included the widespread adoption of illustration and which helped to further entrench cartoons and entertainment as integral aspects of the evening newspaper market…
Following the huge success of the Daily Mail, in 1904 Alfred Harmsworth and Kennedy Jones launched a second morning daily newspaper, the Daily Mirror, in 1904. This was designed explicitly as a female-oriented newspaper, but failed to find a market; this chapter will examine the Mirror’s swift rebirth as a picture paper, and how a focus on the visual allowed the paper to create an ecosystem within which cartoons could transfer from the evening newspaper market into the morning dailies, and the arrival of William Kerridge Haselden as the first staff cartoonist of a British morning newspaper. It was through Haselden’s work that the daily newspaper strip came into being, with the artist having adopted a multipanel format by 1907, the same year that the first annual collection of his Mirror work appeared under the title Daily Mirror Reflections…
This chapter discusses the continuing reciprocity that bound newspapers and their strips to wider popular cultural processes. Starting by examining the swift extension of popular newspaper’s promotional and communicative strategies into the realm of the picture postcard, the use of W.K. Haselden’s Daily Mirror work in Alfred Harmsworth’s Soap Trust campaign of 1906 is first considered. The chapter then considers how Haselden’s characters of Big and Little Willie and Joy Flapperton became absorbed into the wider vernacular of the British war experience during the 1914–1918 war as the characters were extended into a variety of new media and popular cultural contexts…
Although the Daily Mirror had flourished during the First World War, as the 1920s progressed the paper began to be weighed down by the influence of its proprietor, Lord Rothermere, whose right-wing political influence began to be felt in the comic strips of W.K. Haselden and the juvenile series Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. This chapter initially examines these examples in detail, focusing on how Haselden’s strips engaged with the general election of 1924 and contemporary debates surrounding female participation in the democratic process, as well as how the characters of Otto Petrovitch Wtzkoffski and his dig Popski in Pip, Squeak and Wilfred allowed the series to reflect strongly anti-socialist sentiments…
This chapter focusses on Norman Pett’s Jane, arguing that the series has been remembered in a deeply inauthentic way and that the widespread belief that the series’ primary function was to provide an erotic spectacle for a largely male readership is not supported by the detail of its history. Noting that the Bartholomew-era Mirror was read by a majority-female audience, the chapter first discusses how Jane, as well as other Mirror strips such as Love Me Forever, worked in tandem with the paper’s wider editorial content to reflect a positive and affirmatory vision of contemporary womanhood. The role of the Mirror’s strips in the construction of a demotic and strongly anti-Nazi address during the lead-up to World War Two is then considered before the chapter examines in detail the development of Jane during the war years…
Bartholomew’s revolution at the Daily Mirror had made the paper pre-eminent in the field of newspaper strips and led to a huge boost in readership, with the paper overtaking the Daily Express in 1949 to become the country’s best-selling title, with a readership of over 4,000,000. As wartime paper rationing eased, other popular newspapers sought to replicate key aspects of the Bartholomew style, leading to a boom in newspaper strips and a particular increase in the prevalence of continuity adventure series. Simultaneously, the Mirror sought to exploit its market-leading position by leveraging its comic strips into secondary markets through international syndication. Within the domestic market, the Daily Mirror’s strips had established the acceptability of nudity and violence in a way that was not replicated in overseas markets, however…
The general election of 1945 was a significant turning point for British politics that brought the Labour Party to power and ushered in the era of the welfare state. It also marked a significant moment in the political development of the Daily Mirror, which for the first time in the Bartholomew era adopted a clearly identifiable political position. Although not endorsing Labour explicitly, the paper nevertheless articulated broad support for the policies and principles that the party represented, whilst the primacy of the visual within the Mirror’s authorial system allowed both cartoons and comic strips to become central to the paper’s electoral messaging. By the time of the general elections of 1950 and 1951, other popular newspapers had begun to emulate the Daily Mirror’s use of comic strips, and their use as a political messaging tool had become more widely adopted…
Between 1959 and 1961, Cecil King leveraged the Daily Mirror’s success to acquire both the Amalgamated Press and Odhams Press, before uniting the sprawling publishing empire that resulted into the International Publishing Corporation, or IPC, in December 1962. As a result, he and his long-time collaborator Hugh Cudlipp, had in just four years graduated from running the Daily Mirror to being the senior figures in the most extensive newspaper and periodicals publishing business in the world. Although this allowed Cecil King, who was a nephew of Alfred Harmsworth and Lord Rothermere, to realise his ambitions of becoming a figure of importance and influence, it also created a company with significant structural weaknesses. One such weakness was IPC’s absorption of the loss-making Daily Herald, a Labour-supporting newspaper that had, in the postwar period, struggled to compete with the buoyant Daily Mirror…
During the early 1960s, Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp’s belief that popular journalism’s traditional working-class audiences were being replaced by a newly sophisticated, and largely classless, readership significantly influenced the newspaper strip output of the IPC’s newspapers. This chapter will first discuss how strips such as Keeping Up With the Joneses in the Daily Mirror were designed to appeal to this new style of reader, and how the paper continued to gradually remove long-running continuity series as its strip output began to coalesce increasingly around comedy and the paper as a whole moved further upmarket. The arrival of Modesty Blaise in the Evening Standard will then be considered, with the chapter arguing that the series was able to both update some of the key themes that had previously underpinned the narrative structure of Jane during the Second World War, whilst simultaneously incorporating contemporary themes and ideas to create a series that was well attuned to its cultural moment…
This chapter will consider the failure of IPC’s Sun, a broadsheet newspaper that was launched by Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp in 1964 as a successor to the Daily Herald, and the impact of its subsequent sale to Rupert Murdoch in 1969. Murdoch, whose father had been a successful newspaper proprietor and had known key figures in British journalism since the days of Alfred Harmsworth, was sceptical of Cudlipp and King’s grasp of the cultural moment, and used Harry Guy Bartholomew’s old Daily Mirror style as the template for his new-look, and newly tabloid, Sun. This chapter will examine how the Murdoch Sun’s launch strip, Scarth, reflected this appropriative strategy as it adopted aspects of antecedent strips including Jane and Garth, whilst simultaneously utilising a highly contemporary visual mode and reflecting the freewheeling ethos and style of its parent publication…
As John Freeman notes in his downthetubes review:
Adam Twycross is a Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, UK and has taught extensively in the fields of animation, comics studies, VFX and computer games. His research focuses on newspaper strips, comics for non-juvenile audiences and the lost histories of British comics creators. British Newspaper Strips is his first book.
As mentioned above, this 252-page book is an academic work, and the cover price reflects a low print run, but for newspaper strip aficionados, you may well want to track it down.
