Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Flyer for The Boys' Leader (1903)

Inserted with the issue of The Comic Home Journal that I showed in my previous post was this tabloid-sized single sheet advertising a new publication, The Boys' Leader No.1. 

The advert featured the full cover of the new paper on one side, and on the other it contained an extract from the story Winning His Spurs and showed the cover of Funny Pips.
Seems that Funny Pips was an 8 page publication, given free with The Boys' Leader. I'm guessing that the Leader concentrated on prose stories whilst Funny Pips featured humour strips, - or perhaps they both contained a mixture of strips and text stories? Information on these old titles it hard to find so if anyone knows more, please let me know by commenting below. 
What I found interesting about Funny Pips is that the strip features Sunny Jim. Some of you may remember him as the mascot for Force wheat flakes, first introduced as a breakfast cereal in 1901. This makes Sunny Jim one of the earliest uses of a licensed character in a British comic. (I had a Sunny Jim glove puppet when I was a child.)

The Boys' Leader ran for ten years, ending in 1913. 


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