A British comic is a periodical published in the United Kingdom that contains comic strips. It is generally referred to as a comic or a comic magazine, and historically as a comic paper.
British comics are usually comics anthologies which are typically aimed at children, and are published weekly, although some are also published on a fortnightly or monthly schedule. The two most popular British comics, The Beano and The Dandy, were released by DC Thomson in the 1930s. By 1950 the weekly circulation of both reached two million.Armstrong, Stephen. "Was Pixar's Inside Out inspired by The Beano?" The Telegraph. 27 July 2015 Explaining the enormous popularity of comics in British popular culture during this period, Anita O’Brien, director curator at London's Cartoon Museum, states: "When comics like The Beano and Dandy were invented back in the 1930s – and through really to the 1950s and 60s – these comics were almost the only entertainment available to children."
In 1954, Tiger comics introduced Roy of the Rovers, the hugely popular football based strip recounting the life of Roy Race and the team he played for, Melchester Rovers. The stock media phrase "real 'Roy of the Rovers' stuff" is often used by football writers, commentators and fans when describing displays of great skill, or surprising results that go against the odds, in reference to the dramatic storylines that were the strip's trademark.Tomlinson, Alan; Young, Christopher (2000), "Golden Boys and Golden Memories: Fiction, Ideology, and Reality in Roy of the Rovers and the Death of the Hero", in Jones, Dudley; Watkins, Tony, A Necessary Fantasy?: the Heroic Figure in Children's Popular Culture: Vol 18, Garland Publishing. pp. 190–191 Other comics such as Eagle, Valiant, Warrior, Viz and 2000 AD also flourished. Some comics, such as Judge Dredd and other 2000 AD titles, have been published in a tabloid form. Underground comics and "small press" titles have also appeared in the UK, notably Oz and Escape Magazine. While the bestselling comics in the UK have historically been native products, American comic books and Japanese manga are also popular.
Overview
The description comics derived from the names of popular titles such as Comic Cuts, and from the fact that in the beginning all the titles presented only comical (i.e. humorous) content.
British comics typically differ from the American comic book. Although historically they shared the same format size, based on a sheet of 30 x 22 inch imperial paper, folded, British comics have moved away from this size, adopting a standard magazine size. Until that point, the British comic was also usually printed on newsprint, with black or a dark red used as the dark colour and the four colour process used on the cover. The Beano and The Dandy both switched to an all-colour format in 1993.
Originally aimed at the semi-literate working class (in that it replaced the text-based stories of the story papers with picture-based stories, which were less challenging for a poorly educated readership), the comic gradually came to be seen as childish (in part because, due to gradual improvements in public education, children were eventually the only remaining market for a format designed to be unchallenging for the reader). Hence by the mid 20th Century it was being marketed exclusively towards children.
Historically, strips were of one or two pages in length, with a single issue of a comic containing upwards of a dozen separate strips, featuring different characters. In more recent times, strips have become longer and have tended to continue over a number of issues and periods of time.
Whilst some comics contained only strips, other publications such as Jackie have had a slightly different focus, providing their girl readers with articles about, and photographs of, pop stars and television/film actors, plus more general articles about teenage life, whilst throwing in a few comic strips for good measure. For boys there were, historically, similar publications based upon soccer, such as Shoot!, which featured non-fiction picture articles about popular footballers, league clubs, and general football news, accompanied by a limited range of football-based comic strips.
In British comics history, there are some extremely long-running publications such as The Beano and The Dandy published by D. C. Thomson & Co., a newspaper company based in Dundee. The Dandy began in 1937 and The Beano in 1938. The Beano is still going today while The Dandy ceased print publication in 2012. The Boys' Own Paper, another long-running publication which was aimed at boys in a slightly older age group, lasted from 1879 to 1967.
There has been a continuous tradition, since the 1950s, of black and white comics, published in a smaller page size format, many of them war titles such as Air Ace, inspiring youngsters with tales of the exploits of the army, navy and Royal Air Force, mainly in the two world wars. There have also been some romance titles and some westerns in this format.
On 19 March 2012, the British postal service, the Royal Mail, released a set of stamps depicting characters and series from British comics. The collection featured The Beano, The Dandy, Eagle, The Topper, Roy of the Rovers, Bunty, Buster, Valiant, Twinkle and 2000 AD.
History
19th century
In the 19th century, story papers (containing illustrated text stories), known as "penny dreadfuls" from their cover price, served as entertainment for British children. Full of close-printed text with few illustrations, they were essentially no different from a book, except that they were somewhat shorter and that typically the story was serialised over many weekly issues in order to maintain sales.
These serial stories could run to hundreds of instalments if they were popular. And to pad out a successful series, writers would insert quite extraneous material such as the geography of the country in which the action was occurring, so that the story would extend into more issues. Plagiarism was rife, with magazines profiting from competitors' successes under a few cosmetic name changes. Apart from action and historical stories, there was also a fashion for horror and the supernatural, with epics like Varney the Vampire running for years. Horror, in particular, contributed to the epithet "penny dreadful". Stories featuring criminals such as 'Spring-Heeled Jack', pirates, highwaymen (especially Dick Turpin), and detectives (including Sexton Blake) dominated decades of the Victorian and early 20th-century weeklies.
Comic strips—stories told primarily in strip cartoon form, rather than as a written narrative with illustrations—emerged only slowly. Scottish-born newspaper proprietor James Henderson began publishing Funny Folks in 1874. Writer Denis Gifford considered Funny Folks to be the first British comic,James Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History, Reaktion Books, 2011, p. though at first it tackled topical and political subjects along the same lines as Punch. The magazine was heavily illustrated, with cartoons by John Proctor, known as Puck, among others,John Adcock, "Funny Folks", Yesterday's Papers, 29 September 2009. Retrieved 22 November 2020 and benefitted from innovations in the use of cheap paper and photographic printing.Kimit Muston, "It's Just a Joke", The Public "I", November 2020. Retrieved 22 November 2020Nicholas Hiley, "Comic Periodicals", Gale.com. Retrieved 22 November 2020 Ally Sloper's Half Holiday (1884) is regarded as the first comic strip magazine to feature a recurring character (Ally Sloper). This strip cost one penny and was designed for adults. Ally, the recurring character, was a working-class fellow who got up to various forms of mischief and often suffered for it.
In 1890 two more comic magazines debuted before the British public, Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, both published by Amalgamated Press. These magazines notoriously reprinted British and American material, previously published in newspapers and magazines, without permission. The success of these comics was such that Amalgamated's owner, Alfred Harmsworth, was able to launch the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail newspapers on the profits.Sabin, p21
Comics were also published as accompaniments to women's magazines at the end of the century. Jungle Jinks, which held the honor of being the longest running British comic until 1954, first appeared in 1898 as a supplement to Home Chat; drawn by Mabel F. Taylor, it was the first anthropomorphic animal British comic.
20th century
Over the next thirty years or so, comic publishers saw the juvenile market as the most profitable, and thus geared their publications accordingly, so that by 1914 most comics were standalone booklets aimed at eight- to twelve-year-olds.
The interwar period is notable mainly for the publication of annuals by Eagle Press, and also the emergence of D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd. D. C. Thomson launched both The Beano and The Dandy in the late 1930s, which thrived during the Second World War. Their successful mix of irreverence and slapstick led to many similar titles, notably Buster, Topper and Beezer. However, the originators of this format have outlasted all rivals, and The Beano is still published today.
In the early 1950s, "lurid American 'crime' and 'horror comics' reached Britain", prompting what in retrospect has been characterised as a moral panic. Copies of Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, which arrived as ballast in ships from the United States, were first only available in the "environs of the great ports of Liverpool, Manchester, Belfast and London", but by "using blocks made from imported American matrices", British versions of Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror were printed in London and Leicester (by companies like the Arnold Book Company) and sold in "small back-street newsagents." The ensuing outcry was heard in Parliament, and at the urging of the Most Reverend Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Major Gwilym Lloyd George, the Home Secretary and Minister of Welsh Affairs, and the National Union of Teachers, Parliament passed the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955. The act prohibited "any book, magazine or other like work which is of a kind likely to fall into the hands of children or young persons and consists wholly or mainly of stories told in pictures (with or without the addition of written matter), being stories portraying (a) the commission of crimes; or (b) acts of violence or cruelty; or (c) incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature; in such a way that the work as a whole would tend to corrupt a child or young person into whose hands it might fall." Although the act had a sunset clause, in 1969 the Act was made permanent, and continues to be in force today, represented, for example, in the Royal Mail prohibition against mailing horror comics and the matrices used to print them.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the most popular comic for older age-group boys was Eagle published by Hulton Press. Eagle was published in a more expensive format, and was a gravure-printed weekly, with regular sales of nearly one million. (This format was used originally by Mickey Mouse Weekly during the 1930s.) Eagle's success saw a number of comics launched in a similar format — TV Century 21, Look and Learn and TV Comic being notable examples. Comics published in this format were known in the trade as "slicks." At the end of the 1960s, these comics moved away from gravure printing, preferring offset litho due to cost considerations arising from decreasing readership.