1890 - 1899 (Early Comics) Part 2
From 1884 to 1890, Ally Sloper was having it all his own way, and rightly so. Other publishers had not seen the 'light' yet and with the exception of Funny Folks and Scraps, all other publications were either story papers or newspapers. Other comic titles did start, like Rayner's Arry's Budget (1886 - 21 issues) and Ross's C.H.Ross's Variety Paper (1887 - 34 issues), but they didn't last very long. It's worth remembering at this stage, that comic-papers like these were aimed solely at adults and not children. The papers were very satirical in their content and not what children liked to be associated with. Children were still very much into story paper publications like Boys (and Girls) Own Paper; Boys Of England; Young Folks' Paper and Ching Ching's Own. The Education Act of 1870 that made education compulsory for all hadn't been established for too long, so story papers were the perfect reading material to improve their literally skills. Comics, for them, had not been invented yet. But from 1890, that was all about to change.

Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, the son of an English barrister, was born in Chapelizod, near Dublin, Ireland on the 15th July 1865. He was educated at Stamford Grammar School, Lincolnshire and then Henley House School, London (which was later attended by H.G. Wells). His interest in publishing had begun at the age of seven when he was given a printing set for his birthday, and despite his enthusiasm for sports and other pursuits, he continued with the editorship of his school magazine. After leaving school, Harmsworth found work editing a publication called Youth, an illustrated magazine for boys owned by James Henderson. In 1886 he was employed by Edward Iliffe to edit his magazine, Bicycling News.


The Tit-Bits magazine from George Newnes had started in 1881 and its content of snippets and jokes became extremely popular. This inspired Alfred and his brother Harold, to publish a similar type of magazine in 1888 called Answers to Correspondents On Every Subject Under The Sun. The first issue started at No.4, there were no numbers 1-3, and he told his readers that every question sent in would be answered by post. He explained that the answers of those questions of general interest would be published in the magazine. The name was shortened to Answers at the end of 1889. It got off to a rocky start, but its fortunes changed after it announced a competition which would earn the winner £1-a-week for life. It invited readers to guess the total amount of gold and silver in the Bank Of England on the 4th December 1889. Every entry had to have five supporting signatures and an amazing 700,000+ entries were received. The idea being that these five people would get to know about the paper, which meant that over three million people would know about Answers. The winner was a chap called Sapper Austin who worked at the Ordnance Survey Department in Southampton. He guessed it to within £2 of the correct amount. However, prize competitions based solely on guessing were declared illegal the following year. Harmsworth responded by donating 250 guineas to the Balaclava Heroes Fund supporting veterans of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Within 4 years, Answers was selling over a million copies a week and this success helped him finance a woman's magazine called, Forget-Me-Nots and the comic-papers, Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips.

Although Ally Soper's Half Holiday can lay claim to being the first real comic, it was with the introduction of Harmsworth's Comic Cuts (3006 issues) on the 17th May 1890 and Illustrated Chips (3003 issues) a few weeks later on the 26th July 1890 that the 'comic-boom' really started. These were the comics that set the benchmark of how comics were to look for the next half a century. But more importantly, these comics and their subsequent imitators were an outlet for the many talented artists and writers that were looking for work. The one overwhelming factor for the success of these two comic-papers was it's price. At just ½d (half-penny) it was half the price of most of the other publications of the time and the public lapped it up. However, newsagents were worried that if these halfpenny papers were successful then no one would buy the penny ones. Harmsworth retorted that if newsagents would not handle halfpenny papers he would appoint his own agents who would. Harmsworth's editorial from the very first issue of Comic Cuts goes some way to explaining how he proposed to make a success of such a low-cost paper and how he hoped "it would grow until it was as well-known as our excellent friends Scraps and Sloper". Notice how the term 'comic' still hadn't been coined, Comic Cuts was considered to be a paper and it wasn't until the following year that the colloquialism comic had become common usage.

In the editorial, Harmsworth asked the question, "How is it possible to produce a full-sized paper for just a ha'penny?" He answered it by saying, "Well it is possible to do it, but that is all". Now we know that his main hope for success was to sell so many copies that this would negate the need for an increase is price. He succeeded in this, but only by stealing the artwork from five-year old copies of Henderson's Scraps paper. Henderson soon realised what was going on and his former employee found himself faced with a copyright issue. By issue #3 Harmworth inserted an advertisement into Comic Cuts which read:

Wanted! Original sketches for Comic Cuts.
Handsome pay offered.
Professional artists only need apply.

The first professional to apply was Roland Hill, whose reply was swift enough for his work to make the cover of the fourth issue with 'Those Cheap Excursions'. Oliver Veal arrived in issue #10 whose style gave him a long career in comics. He proved to be a great influence on the young David Low, who matured into one of Fleet Street's greatest newspaper cartoonists with his Colonel Blimp character in the Evening Standard from 1934.

From issue #1, Harmsworth went on a publicity tour promoting Comic Cuts and was amazed at it's early success. He realised that other publishers were going to imitate his new paper, so he dropped a hint about it in issue #3, "Well, gentlemen, I have got a good start, and you will have to put in several thousands of pounds, much hard work, and a few other attributes of success before you get ahead of the first halfpenny illustrated." The first publisher to accept the challenge was Trapps, Holmes & Co. with their Funny Cuts on the 2nd July 1890. It was edited by Gordon Phillip Hood who filled his eight pages with all the American cartoons that Henderson and Harmsworth missed. Funny Cuts became the first comic-paper to run a full front-page strip every week, beginning with issue #16 (25th October 1890). Funny Cuts was a major success and ran for 30 years (1566 issues) before it was eventually bought out by Harmsworth himself (then Lord Northcliffe) in 1920, when it was incorporated into Funny Wonder.

Three weeks after Funny Cuts hit the shops, Henderson released Snap-Shots. This was yet another paper using jokes and strips pilfered from publications across the atlantic and ran for 20 years (1394 issues). Although it cost twice as much as Funny Cuts (1d), it did contain twice as many pages. Back in those inaugural months of the comic in 1890, the advent of these two challengers to Comic Cuts, prompted Harmsworth to quickly retaliate with the release of his Illustrated Chips 1890-1953. He experimented with the format and the first 6 issues were 16-pages long and half-tabloid. This didn't prove to be very popular, so he gave way to the more familiar 8-page full tabloid format from the 6th September 1890 and restarted the nunmbering from #1 again. Both Illustrated Chips and Comic Cuts ended on the same day, 12th September 1953 - some 63 years later!

OTHER COMICS FROM THE 1890's

Other comics that started life back in the 1890's were T. Murray Ford's Joker, priced at ½d, on the 18th July 1891 and consisted of the now familiar joke cartoons and miscellaneous strips. It's run lasted a comendable 6 years to the 28th October 1897 (330 issues). James Henderson released his Comic Pictorial Nuggets, priced at ½d, on the 7th May 1892 and it became just plain old Nuggets six months later. It reprinted jokes and strips from his own Scraps and Snap-Shots publications and in 1900 it introduced us to Julius Baker's Hooligan character. It ran on until the 10th March 1906 (695 issues) before it joined forces with the coloured comic Lot-O-Fun. Harmsworth decided to follow suit with the reprinting of his own material in the shape of the Wonder comic, priced at ½d, on the 30th July 1892. This was a single-folded sheet giving four pages of jokes and strips. It wasn't successful and got renamed to Funny Wonder and reformatted into an eight-page comic of the same content and still costing a ha'penny. It was another success and spawned its own characters as well as the reprinted material. In all its guises, the Wonder (a.k.a. The Jester) ran from 1892 to 1940 (2495 issues) and in 1912 produced G.M. Paynes' famous Constable Cuddlecock. 1893 saw the introduction of Gilbert Dalziel's Larks comic, priced at ½d, on the 1st May 1893. It consisted of jokes and the first regular character strip in the shape of The Balls Pond Banditti, with the occasional reprints. It lasted for 462 issues before it got incorporated into the Big Budget on the 10th March 1902.

1894 saw the introduction of The Champion Comic, priced at ½d, from T. Murray Ford and was mainly a jokes paper which did have large Boer-war drawings on the cover from 21st August to 1st September 1894. The comic lasted 106 issues before it got incorporated into The Joker. In 1895 Harmsworth released Comic Home Journal, priced at ½d, it had strips from the ever-present Frank Holland and Jack B. Yeats and ran for an impressive 9 years (488 issues) without increasing its price. In 1897 a relatively new publisher entered the fray. C. Arthur Pearson started with Big Budget (614 issues) on 19th June and introduced us to Airy Alf And Bouncing Billy. It billed itself as Three papers for one penny because in its early days it consisted of three 8-page sections called The Big Budget (a comic), The Comrade's Budget and The Story Budget which were both text fiction sections. That was an incredible 24 pages for just one penny and must have taken quite a while to actually read. On the 26th March 1898 the page count was reduced to 20 as the sections all combined to form just the one comic-paper. It incorporated a story paper entitled, The Boys' Leader on the 18th August 1905 and the strips started to gradually disappear until it became a fully fledged story paper. Its title changed to The Comet on the 27th March 1909 and lasted for just 14 issues.

In 1898, Pearson became the first publishers to produce a comic that featured a living personality in strip form. Dan Leno (1860-1904) was a music hall comedian and the comic that was released on the 26th February 1898 was entitled, Dan Leno's Comic Journal, priced ½d and lasting for 93 issues, which coincided with Dan suffering from a serious mental illness and ultimately dieing in 1901. On the 14th May 1898, James Henderson released his Pictorial Comic-Life which got renamed to Comic Life on the 30th December 1899. It began life as an adult paper and gradually changed to a juvinile paper until 1918 when a change in editorial policy reduced the age level of readership to the nursery group. It was sold to Amalgamated Press on the 13th March 1920 and lasted until 21st January 1928 (1543 issues) when it changed it's style and name to My Favourite (351 issues).

On the 21st May 1898, Trapps, Holmes & Co. released the first regular British comic that was printed in colour. It was unashamedly called The Coloured Comic, and it was priced at an incredible ½d (ha'penny). There had been one-off coloured specials of other comics previously but The Coloured Comic was printed with a coloured front page for its first 72 issues. After which, it was printed using blue ink only on white paper and later still, it resorted to black ink on pink paper and still, cheekily, called itself The Coloured Comic. It got renamed to Smiles on the 5th May 1906 after a run of 415 issues.

REGULAR CHARACTERS

As already mentioned, all these comic titles developed from papers which contained jokes and before/after strips into comics with regular characters. On the 1st May 1893, issue #1 of the Larks comic produced the first regular character strip, after Ally Sloper of course, in the shape of George Gordon Fraser's The Balls Pond Banditti. This motley crew (below), mainly consisting of shop assistants, banded together to form the young lad's mason's club. Their leader was Ticko Scuppins (clothing store), with Gorger Pain (doctor's youth), Piggy Waffles (grocer lad), Lurcher Geeson (butcher's boy), Sweppy Titmarsh (rag shop) and Bocco (the bloodhound). Although they only lasted for a year, the strip set the trend of regular characters appearing in comic-papers, which others soon followed.


Issue #184 of Comic Cuts (18/11/1893) produced the very popular Chubblock Homes, a cartoon burlesque of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. It started as a three-picture strip at first by the great Jack B. Yeats who developed it into the first continuing serial strip. During 1894 it transferred into the front page of Funny Wonder. The Great Detective, as he was often billed, hunted everything from gamps to lost hearts. He was ably assisted by Shirk the Dog Detective, who was a parody of Dirk the Dog Detective from Illustrated Chips. The following year produced another regular strip called, Comic Cuts Colony, which was Frank Williamson's depiction of goings-on in darkest Africa.

In the issue of Illustrated Chips dated 16th May 1896 (#298) Tom Browne introduced his famous tramps, Weary Waddles & Tired Timmy (later to become Weary Willie And Tired Tim), in a one-off strip entitled Innocents On The River. The story was such a hit that they returned 5-weeks later and, from issue #310, they filled the front page every week right up to the very last issue. An incredible run of some 67 years. Browne got the idea for these characters after he had spotted two 'down-and-outs' on the Thames Embankment in London. In 1898 the British film company Bamforth (later famous for the saucy seaside postcards, of which Tom contributed) produced a short-film entitled Weary Willie based on our hero. It has Willie trying to obtain sole use of a park bench by driving its four occupants away with his objectionable behaviour. Even Scott of the Antarctic had a pony named 'Weary Willie', who unfortunately succumbed to the ill-fated expedition. Percy Cocking took over the story from Tom in 1909 and continued right up to the final issue in 1953, where he had Willie and Tim retire in the mansion of Murgatroyd Mump, the millionaire mouse-trap maker.

In 1897, Pearson's The Big Budget introduced us to Tom Browne's Airy Alf And Bouncing Billy who started life as devotees of the Victorian craze for cycling, but later abandoned their boneshakers and turned tramp like Weary Willie And Tired Tim. They also became very patriotic during the Boer war.


THE EARLY COMIC ARTISTS

Tom Browne - The man who established the British comic style for the next 50 years, was born in Nottingham in 1870. He started his working life, aged 12, as a milliners errand boy and later became an apprentice ltihographic printer, where he was paid one shilling (5p) a week. He left here in 1891 and, in order to make ends meet, he would moonlight by freelancing cartoons for the London comics. His first work appeared in James Henderson's Scraps when he was 18 years old (1888) and was entitled He Knew How To Do It. He was paid 30 shillings (£1.50) for it which equated to six months wages for one nights work! As soon as his apprenticeship was done, Tom moved down to Blackheath in London and became a major influence in the ha'penny comic revolution.

Tom modelled his work on Phil May who simplified his sketching to its bare essentials. He would strip away all the overloaded cross-hatching that was so beloved by the Victorian periodicals such as Punch, and produce just clear lines. This was perfect for the cut-priced publications with their low-quality newsprint paper, ill-etched blocks and cheap, near grey, ink.

All of Tom's early work were one-off sequences, but gradually the idea of series characters crept in. His first was Squashington Flats in Comic Cuts (1895), followed by the double-act that made his name and fame, Weary Willie and Tired Tim (1896).

These World Famous Tramps shot the circulation of Illustrated Chips up to 600,000 copies a week and Tom became very much, a man in demand. He created a pair of cyclists in the guise of Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy for The Big Budget (1897) and drew the front cover of Dan Leno's Comic Journal. For six months Tom drew five front pages of six panels each, every week. It earned him £150 pound a week but it seriously exhausted him and by 1900 Tom left comics to do other things.

He did paintings, posters and he was responsible for many of the famous Bamforths saucy seaside postcards from the early Edwardian age. He was also a very keen cyclist, as were many people from the late Vicorian age, and he made several bicycle trips around the world where his drawn adventures appeared in newspapers, including the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1906. This hobby was most probably the reason while Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy were always seen on this mode of transport in their early adventures. Sadly, in 1910, Browne underwent an internal operation and tragicly died soon afterwards at the early age of just 39.

A brief overview of his work is given here:-

Comic Cuts - Squashington Flats (1895), Billy Buster The Steam Engine (1896), Don Quixote de Tintogs (1898)
Illustrated Chips - Weary Willie & Tired Tim (1896), The Rajah (1897), Little Willy And Tiny Tim (1898)
Big Budget - Airy Alf & Bouncing Billy(1897), Wackington School(1897)
Comic Home Journal - Lanky Larry & Bloated Bill (1897)
Dan Leno's Comic Journal - Dan Leno (1898)
Halfpenny Comic - Mr Stanley Deadstone & Co. (1898)
Funny Wonder - Plumduff Island (1899)


Jack Butler Yeats - the son of an Irish portrait painter John Butler Yeats and younger brother of the famous poet William Butler Yeats, was born in London on 29th August 1871. He spent his boyhood years from the age of eight to sixteen in Sligo, Ireland with his maternal grandparents. In 1887 he returned to London to live with his parents at Earls Court and studied at a number of different art schools, including the Westminster School of Art. The following year he established himself as an illustrator for publications such as Boys Own Paper, Judy, Paddock Life and Vegetarian (yes they did exist back in the 19th Century). As a writer, he also contributed articles to the Punch magazine under the pseudonym of W. Bird. In 1894 he began recording his observations and ideas in a sketch book rather than in a diary. Yeats is now much better known for his water-colour and oil paintings rather than his comic work, but the fact remains that he was still drawing for the comics until he was 44. After which time he decided to embrace the career that was to bring him fame and fortune. After living in Devon for 14 years and illustrating many of his sea-themed paintings, he returned to County Wicklow in Ireland and later moved to Dublin where he produced most of his more famous and exhibited work. There have been many books written about Jack, and the National Gallery Of Ireland still have many of his paintings on display. He died on the 28th March 1957, aged 85.

A brief overview of his comic work is given here:-

Comic Cuts - Chubblock Homes (1893), The Whodidit (1909)
Comic Home Journal - Mary Jane's Sittywations (1895)
Funny Wonder - Chubblock Homes (1894), Ephraim Broadbeamer (1898)
Halfpenny Comic - The Jovial Old Farmer (1898), Sligo Slimpen & Fatty Freelance (1903)
Jester - Carlo (1912)
Big Budget Signor McCoy (1897), Little Boy Pink (1898), Kiroskewero (1901)
Jester And Wonder - Skilly The Convict (1904), Fandango The Hoss (1905), Jester Theatre Royal (1907)
Puck - Mary Jane's Situations (1904), Dr Up-ToDayte's Academy (1904), Sandab The Sailor (1904), The Little Stowaways (1907)
Butterfly - Jimmy Jog The Juggler (1914), Eggbert & Philbert (1915)


Frank Holland was one of the original Harmsworth artists who answered Alfred Harmsworth call asking for Professional artists. Frank was responsible for giving the comic its first ever anti-hero. Chokee Bill was a burglar, and along with his half-pint henchman, Area Sneaker, he usually managed to get away with his ill-gotten gains instead of being collared in the final frame. Chokee Bill started in Illustrated Chips and later transferred to the front cover of Comic Cuts. Frank was also responsible for the unfortunately named Willie and Wally Wanks who were better known as Those Terrible Twins in the Halfpenny Comic. These two, much like Wilhelm Busch's 'Max und Moritz', played pranks and tricks on just about everyone, including Transvaal's King Kruger, six weeks after the start of the Boer War, read it here. Apart from his actual work, not too much is known about Frank Holland.

A brief overview of his work is given here:-

Illustrated Chips - Chokee Bill The Burglar (1895)
Comic Home Journal - Chokee Bill (1895)
Comic Cuts - Chokee Bill & Area Sneaker (1897)
Halfpenny Comic - Those Terrible Twins (1898)
Funny Wonder - Spudkins & Balmpot (1898)
Dan Leno's Comic Journal - The Leno Kids (1899)
Big Budget - Jimmer Squirm & Spooky Sprat (1900)
Gleam - Walter The Crocodile (1901)
Jester & Wonder - Ching-Ching (1904)


As the end of the nineteenth-century approached, more and more comic papers were becoming a mixture of comic strip and serial text stories. The ratio was usually 50-50 with pages 1,4,5 & 8 being dedicated to strips and jokes while the remaining pages contained serial text stories. In the 16-page comics this format was simply repeated. The format remained this way right up to the introduction of D.C. Thomson's Dandy in 1937.

Throughout the 1890's, Alfred Harmsworth continued to expand his publishing empire and in 1894 he invested £25,000 in the ailing Evening News and succeeded in turning its fortunes around. Two years later he financed and launched his ground-breaking Daily Mail newspaper, which completely revolutionized the way newspapers were to be throughout the UK. In 1903 he started a newspaper solely for ladies called the Daily Mirror. It proved to be very unpopular, so he decided to relax the lady-only content, add more pictures to the pages, make it a unisex publication and reduce its price to ½d - it proved to be another master-stroke. In 1905 he reached the pinnacle of his publishing career after he bought the failing Times for £320,000. He quickly turned around its fortunes and it went from selling a loss-making 38,000 copies a day to a profit-making 278,000 a day. This led to his peerage and the title of Viscount Northcliffe, the youngest ever Lord. Upsettingly, like Edward Lloyd before him, Northcliffe tried very hard to forget and ignore the building blocks that paved the way to his phenomenal publishing empire, namely his comics and story papers.

He became very outspoken, via his newspapers, by advocating conscription and criticizing Lord Kitchener for starving the army in France of high-explosive shells. It transpired that Kitchener had ordered Boer-war shrapnel instead of the necessary high explosive bomb type. Thousands of Allied soldiers were killed as a consequence. This outburst on Kitchener, the national hero, almost proved to be the undoing of his publishing empire, as circulation of the Daily Mail dropped by 1,000,000 copies a day. Northcliffe continued his attacks on Lord Kitchener and when he heard he had been killed at sea in 1916 he remarked: "The British Empire has just had the greatest stroke of luck in its history."

His wife, bore him no children but his mistress gave birth to three! Northcliffe's health deteriorated rapidly in 1921. He was suffering from streptococcus, an infection of the bloodstream, that damages the valves of the heart and causes kidney malfunction. Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, died on the 14th August 1922. In his will he left three months' salary to each of his six thousand employees, a sum of £533,000.