The particular gem I've found is a strip called "Bunty and the Car" by H. O. Batho, about a spoiled young flapper who gets given a car for her birthday - a few sample strips below.
It strikes me as rather ahead of its time formally - where most strips in the 20s were either stagey, with the characters seen full-figure against a backdrop, entering and exiting stage left and right, and exchanging quips like music hall comedians - or illustrative, like children's books, this strip is graphic, almost clear line, and cinematic - it places its characters in a 3d environment and moves around them to get the best composition, and isn't afraid to draw characters and objects half-off-panel rather than dead centre. The figure drawing and body language are naturalistic and the characters don't mug outrageously at the punchlines, but react rather more naturally. For 1925 in British comics it seems very sophisticated, and I wonder how it could have escaped notice.
Batho gets a mention in Clark's Dictionary, which says he drew for Pip & Squeak, the Daily Mirror's children's supplement, in the early 20s. From other sources I've been able to figure out he was a Yorkshireman, he assisted his brother-in-law J. F. Horrabin on his strip "Dot and Carrie" in the Star from 1922, and he died in 1932, aged only 43. I've gathered everything I've got on the UK Comics Wiki. Anyone know anything more about him and/or his work?
As Batho was English, and the strip fills a gap in the Belfast Telegraph between a run of Mutt and Jeff and a run of Winnie Winkle, both reprinted American strips, I suspect this was a strip the paper bought in from elsewhere. Anybody have any idea where from? Bunty tends to call her car "the bus", so I suspect the original title may have been "Bunty and the Bus", but that's speculation on my part.
