Racing Back to the Starting Line

Just over a month ago, I posted a picture Jack Kirby had drawn of Ally Sloper, whom I described as “probably the first recurring comics character”.

Wrong.


Sloper first appeared in Judy in 1867. Poking around the Early Comics Archive maintained by Andy Konky Kru at BugPowder, it is possible to identify several earlier candidates. I was aware of Richard Doyle’s Brown, Jones and Robinson, but had somehow got it into my head that it was only published as a book (like Töpffer’s M Vieuxbois). But no, it was a series published in Punch in 1850 and then collected in 1854.

The Early Comics Archive also has several adventures of one Mr Briggs, by John Leech, dating from 1850 and 1851, more of Leech’s Tom Noddy from 1855, and four stories of Mr Peter Piper by John Tenniel from 1853.

Was any of these the first recurring comics character? I’m not confident enough to say. Anyway, this is reducing art history to the level of the Guiness Book of Records. Appreciate them for what they are. Tenniel’s art on Peter Piper is particularly enjoyable, mixing looser, more cartoony shapes than his Alice illustrations or caricatures with the same meticulous rendering.


But staying at that low level for a moment, John Leech was, of course, responsible for one unchallengeable first: the first time the word “cartoon” was used to denote a humorous picture, rather than a preparatory drawing for a painting, fresco or tapestry. He even labelled it “Cartoon No 1”.

There’s a bit of a shaggy dog story here. It starts when Parliament burnt down in 1834. There was no Guy Fawkes to blame this time. A dry summer had turned the tally sticks – medieval wooden tax returns – stored in the basement into perfect kindling. A stray spark set it all burning.

As the new Palace of Westminster was being built (the one still used by Parliament today), paintings and frescos were commissioned to decorate it. The cartoons – in the old sense of preparatory drawings – were put on display. The magazine Punch thought that there were better uses for the government’s money than spending it on art for the rulers. At the time, the humorous drawings that appeared in Punch were called “cuts”, short for “woodcuts”, from the printing technique. A full page was given over to “the Big Cut”, the principal satirical picture of the issue, and John Leech was the artist designated to draw it. This is what he came up with for the issue dated 15 July 1843.


There were five more numbered “cartoons” in this sequence, and by the end of it, Punch’s staff had renamed “the Big Cut” as “the Cartoon”. The name soon spread to the other humorous cuts, though the earlier term was still common enough in 1890 for Alfred Harmsworth to name one of his new ha’penny picture-story papers Comic Cuts.

The Cartoon – with the definite article and a capital “C” – was a fixture of Punch for the next 150 years. Among Leech’s successors on the Cartoon was that same John Tenniel who drew Mr Peter Piper. When I first read Punch in the 1970s, the Cartoon was the responsibility of Trog, who also drew the comic strip Flook in the Daily Mail and a weekly political cartoon in The Observer. Trog was the pen name of jazz musician Wally Fawkes.

So at least one Fawkes prospered from the destruction of Parliament.


You may now groan.


Panels
Ally Sloper “Some of the Mysteries of Loan and Discount” by Charles Ross and Marie Duval, Judy, 1867, reprinted in Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson, 1873, and taken here from the Early Comics Archive, which reproduces the full strip and many more.

“How Mr Peter Piper Was Induced to Join in a Bear-hunt” by John Tenniel, 1853, taken from the Early Comics Archive, which reproduces the full strip.

John Leech “Cartoon No 1”, Punch, 15 July 1843, reprinted in William Hewison The Cartoon Connection: The Art of Pictorial Humour, Elm Tree Books, 1977

Self-portrait with Flook by Wally “Trog” Fawkes, from the Camden New Journal report of his retirement

Where I'm Coming From

My first memories of comics date from around 1970. I must have read nursery comics before then – or had them read to me – but, like many Brits, I find The Beano lurking at the start of my memory lane. My favourite strip was The Bash Street Kids, by the remarkable Leo Baxendale, but my favourite artist was Robert Nixon, who had taken over Roger the Dodger from Ken Reid.



I would later follow Nixon over to IPC (or Fleetway, or whatever the company was called that week), and strips like Kid Kong for the likes of Shiver and Shake and Whizzer and Chips.

Adventure comics at the time were dominated by television adaptations. The finest in my young days was Countdown, later renamed TV Action, and I was particularly taken by the artwork of Gerry Haylock on UFO and Doctor Who.



It wasn’t until a dying TV21 was swallowed by Valiant that I encountered the original characters now associated with 1970s British comics, like The Steel Claw, Kelly’s Eye, or my favourite, Janus Stark.



By the time 2000AD started up, I felt that I was too old for comics, so it was with guilty pleasure that I picked up the occasional issue. A few years later, and more secure in my tastes, I bought up a complete run to date from a younger boy.

But I hadn’t given up comics completely in the meantime. The hardbound volumes of Astérix were much more respectable than the British weeklies, and Albert Uderzo’s artwork appealed to me enormously (as did René Goscinny’s writing, although at the time I tended to attribute all virtue to the artist). I soon ran out of the English translations, and started struggling through my older brother’s copies of the French editions, whose British distributor used to enclose notes explaining all the French puns and cultural references.



And there were also newspaper strips. My father preferred the Daily Mirror, my mother the Daily Express or Daily Mail, so I was exposed to a range of strips from Andy Capp to Garth to Fred Bassett.



There were also the political cartoonists: Keith Waite, Cummings and Mac in those three papers, and, best of all, Trog (Wally Fawkes) in The Observer and Punch.



(The original of that portrait of British Prime Minister Ted Heath would have been in colour, but I have scanned it from the 1977 black and white collection, The World of Trog.)

What of American comic books and superheroes? To tell the truth, I wasn’t impressed. To be sure, I hadn’t seen them at their best, but in the weekly editions put out by Marvel UK. What had been intended as a single issue in America would have been chopped nonsensically into three or four parts to be read separately. In addition, the colour would be missing, and the artwork blown up to about half as big again as the intended size (and possibly “bodged” to fit a different shape of page), leaving it looking empty and crude.



It wasn’t until I missed a bus in 1981, and bought a US comic on a whim to pass the time, that I engaged with the real thing. The comic was Justice League of America 195, the first part of a JSA/JLA team-up by Gerry Conway and George Perez. I was instantly taken with the idea of Earth-2 and its 60-something Superman.

After a few months trying to cope with the seemingly random distribution of US comics to British newsagents, someone told me about specialist comic shops. So, during the 1980s, I was able to eat up Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns, Warrior, with its remarkable starting line-up of Marvelman, V for Vendetta and Laser Eraser & Pressbutton, Eddie Campbell’s Alec, Love & Rockets, Levitz and Giffen’s Legion of Super-Heroes, American Flagg, Escape, Watchmen … in short, I had joined the mainstream of English-language comics culture; where I am still paddling a quarter of a century later.