Flashback to 1912: Lot-O'-Fun

Here's a British comic that was on sale 97 years ago this very week: Lot-O'-Fun No.353, cover dated 14th December 1912 (published a few days earlier). Click on the images to see them larger.

Lot-O'-Fun was published by James Henderson & Sons Ltd as one of Henderson's competitors to the popular Amalgamated Press comics. However, AP would take it over in 1920. Overall, the comic ran for 1,196 issues from 1906 to 1929.

The cover strip at the period we're looking at is Dreamy Daniel, illustrated by George Davey. Tramp characters were a popular theme in comics of the time and Dreamy Daniel was one of the most successful. The strip had been running since issue No.1 and in 1908 the Music Hall actor Harry Rogerson brought the character to life on the stage. (Source: http://lambiek.net/artists/d/davey_george.htm )



The comic is the usual format of the day: eight tabloid pages, half comic strips, half text stories. The tone of the stories are clearly aimed at a more literate reader than today's children's comics. There are even gags about smoking and drunkards, which would suggest the comic is for adults, yet most of the strips are full of basic (and often childish) slapstick sequences and the text stories feature the traditional themes of boarding schools and footballers. I think it's fair to say Lot-O'-Fun was for all ages, at a time before "concerned parents" and the media became paranoid about the content of comics.


It's good to see a female lead character in a strip of this vintage. Topsy of the Tea Shop may only be a waitress (or perhaps she's the proprietor, it's not clear) but she turns the tables on three male pranksters.


Running alongside the Topsy strip in the centre pages, this untitled Christmas-theme strip has another Lot-O'-Fun character fall in the water. Falling in the water appears to be a popular thing to depict in this publication, as it happens three times in one issue, - making the comic a sort of You've Been Framed for Edwardians.


Paul Push - He Gets the Sack Every Week sounds a bit like a Viz strip ahead of its time. This trouble-prone character finds fate conspires against him every issue, as it does here. I'm not sure if this "mistaking acting as a real crime" scenario was brand new in 1912 but the same plot has certainly been used countless times since in various media.


The back page features another character named Paul. This time it's Patriotic Paul, who would be promoted to the front cover star of the comic during the 1914-18 war. Here, he doesn't get much of a chance to be patriotic but he still manages to clout a bloke on the head with a piece of piping in true British comic tradition. The artwork is by H. O'Neill (signed "H.O.") but what caught my attention was the surreal line in panel three: "I now live in a little world of my own, all made of golden syrup". I think it's a fair bet that sentence has never been used anywhere else in the history of literature.


At the foot of the page, Joey, the Handy Lad sorts out "an uncouth person" who tries to steal his milk. If soaking the tramp wasn't enough punishment, Joey "whistles lustily for reinforcements" in the form of a bloke with "a good stout cudgel", - no doubt to bash the bad 'uns head in with the same force Patriotic Paul used on the hunter in the previous strip. Justice was harsh and swift in British comics, even 65 years before Judge Dredd appeared on the scene.

Lot-O'-Fun (or Lot-O-Falling-In-Water if you prefer) eventually merged into Crackers comic in 1929.

Flashback: Comic Life (1916)

I recently bought several old British comics from eBay but unfortunately some of them are far more brittle than expected. I thought I'd scan a few pages from them here to preserve them online before they literally crumble to dust as these could be the only surviving copies in the world of such rare items.


The last 92 years have not been kind to these four 1916 issues of Comic Life. The typical eBay seller's excuse of "not bad for their age" is irrelevant, as I have mid-19th Century copies of Illustrated London News still in almost-new condition. Papers don't become tatty, creased, or damaged by themselves. It's how they're looked after that does that. These tattered, brittle, yellowed old comics will not survive much longer, and indeed one fell in half after I scanned it, but the magic of Photoshop has at least restored the look of the comics to a less-tanned state for our viewing pleasure here. (Incidentally, the bright yellow inks on these Comic Life covers isn't due to Photoshop over-saturation. The yellow colour was very vibrant on the actual comics.)


Comic Life, published by James Henderson & Sons Ltd, was launched in 1898 under the original name of Pictorial Comic Life. It simplified its title to Comic Life with issue 79 in 1899. Originally printed on pink paper, the comic acquired a full colour cover in 1909, becoming one of the earliest colour comics. The interiors switched to black and white, and the back page was printed with a red spot colour. Amalgamated Press acquired the title in 1920 and Comic Life was merged into My Favourite in 1922 after a total of 1,465 issues.


The unusual thing about these issues from 1916 is the format. Back then the norm was for comics to be tabloid, but presumably due to wartime paper restrictions or financial cutbacks these issues are 3/4 tabloid, - a unique square format! (Only for this particular year I believe.)

Humourous tramp characters were as prolific in comics of the early 20th Century as naughty schoolkids are in modern comics. The covers of these four consecutive issues of Comic Life feature Tall Thomas and Butterball, billed as Our Fat Tramps. Obesity seems to have been hilarious back then too, as the strip alongside it starred Fatty the Acrobat. Tall Thomas and Butterball was drawn by H.O'Neill, but I'm unsure as to who drew the other strip.


Like most comics of the time, Comic Life had 8 pages, 4 of which featured text stories. The densely packed small text certainly gave the reader value for money, and the stories of detectives, war, mystery and adventure would of course remain the ingredients of British adventure comics of later years.


The cenrespread of the comic (below) featured a busy mixture of short strips and cartoons, again pretty much like every other comic of the time. The strips have a basic premise. For example, Peter's Pets uses animals to help him win situations. It's a concept that was later revived for Percy's Pets in Smash! in 1966. Alongside it, P.C. Neverwait was one of many comical coppers to have graced British comics over the decades.



The most bizarre strip in the comic appears to be Pyjama Percy and Balmy Bill. These stories are dreamlike and the situations are quite surreal. However, unlike Little Nemo in Slumberland Pyjama Percy doesn't wake up at the end. In this example below, bees grow to giant size and Percy and Bill ride them to Berlin to force the Kaiser to sign peace terms, all nicely drawn by Pip Martin.


On the back page in red and black, George Davey evoked the period with his artwork for Burglar Bertie. In the first example below the comic convention of leaving a pie on the windowsill to cool was mocked as a cook leaves a blancmange on the windowsill to cool. (That a fully-formed blancmange - or "blonkmonge" as Bertie calls it, - would already be cooled is ignored for the purposes of comedy.)


Sometimes Burglar Bertie got away with his deeds, but it seems that more often than not his schemes would backfire on him. Sharing the back page was Our Red Lions, a group of Scouts who, in this instance, capture a couple of German soldiers, which was something they did regularly during World War 1 apparently.


I hope you've enjoyed this peek into the past. It's a tragedy that artists were not allowed to sign their work on these old strips and that comics and cartoonists of this era are becoming forgotten. Sadly the scarcity of such comics means that many artists and their work has already been lost forever. Over the coming months I'll be sharing more examples of pre-WW2 comics here, including pages from Illustrated Chips, Funny Wonder, and The Jester.

Flashback to 1909: SCRAPS

Scraps was published by James Henderson and Sons from 1883 to 1910. This issue is dated January 23rd 1909, and I bought it from Denis Gifford over 30 years ago. As you can see from some of the photos here the edges of the pages are very fragile but the paper itself is still supple. It hasn't deteriorated much since I bought it as I've kept it in a box but clearly it had been manhandled a bit over the decades.

Strictly speaking it's not a comic, but it does feature several complete comic strips which make it worthy of inclusion in the history of British comics. (Its rival Comic Cuts actually nicked some cartoons from Scraps for its first issues, so there's that connection too.) Let's take a look at some of the pages. 

Quite a bumper format compared to the 8 pagers such as Comic Cuts and Chips, this issue of Scraps had 20 pages including its salmon-pink covers.  Inside, the paper opened onto a title page containing various cartoons and short strips. 

The contents (of this issue at least) were 40% cartoons/strips and 60% text stories/anecdotes/features etc. Here are a few more of the cartoon/strip pages. Click on them to see them larger...

Much of the humour seems stilted, incomprehensible, or in places perhaps just unfunny to modern tastes. Such is the changing nature of social satire/comedy. Some of the cartoons are almost certainly reprints from overseas but I think most of them display enough of British culture for them to be definitely home grown. 

Some pieces are signed, others not. I've found some information on a couple of the artists:
Edgar A. Holloway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Alfred_Holloway

E.G. Lutz, American artist: http://alphabettenthletter.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/creator-eg-lutz.html

On the back page, an advert for Beecham's Pills, a laxative. Advertisements in papers of a century ago were often focused on the digestive system and cures for constipation. These days strips feature fart jokes so the pills must have worked.

The Funny Folks of 1875

  
So here we are, at the furthest point back in time that this blog has ever ventured. The dawn of time. Well, the dawn of British comics to be more precise, which is the dawn of time for a blog about British comics I guess.

As Denis Gifford's book The Complete Catalogue of British Comics tells us, the earliest regular 'comic' (a collection of strips and jokes) was a fortnightly publication in 1825 entitled The Glasgow Looking Glass which, as its title suggests, originated in Glasgow. (I recall that this fact was also confirmed by collector John McShane years ago, - or perhaps he was the one to inform Denis, I'm not sure.)  Yes, British comics originated from Scotland, and of course comics from North of the border have led the way in the UK for the last 75 years as well. 

1st Ally Sloper (1867) from 'Victorian Comics'

The first regular British comic character was Ally Sloper, who first appeared in the satirical paper Judy on 14th August 1867. (See the scan above from Denis Gifford's book Victorian Comics.) Written by C.H. Ross and drawn by his wife Marie Duval, Ally Sloper became a recurring character and a collection of his strips and cartoons was published in the 216 page paperback book Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson in 1873.   

The first publication to set the standard that British comics would follow for decades was Funny Folks, with issue 1 published by James Henderson in 1874. This was an 8 page tabloid with a 50/50 split of text and cartoons/strips, - the format that comics such as Comic Cuts, Illustrated Chips, and others would imitate for years. Funny Folks ran for 20 years, but the issues I have in my collection are all early editions from 1875 which I'm showing here.

Bear in mind that in the 19th Century such publications were aimed at adults, not children. Subsequently their content is a mixture of political comment, satire, and social observation. The covers of Funny Folks were filled with a large cartoon by John Proctor reflecting on the news of the day, very much like the political/social comment cartoons in newspapers of today.

Inside, page 2 led off with 'Mrs.Grundy' opining on current events. As we can see from this example, complaining about England giving overseas aid, little has changed in 137 years. In places it reads like an editorial from the Daily Mail.

Considering that Funny Folks is regarded as an early comic, the actual comic strip content was minimal. (Some issues featured no strips at all.) There were plenty of well illustrated cartoons though, such as this one of society's lost souls waiting for the pub to open. (Again, little has changed.)

Some comic strips were reprinted from overseas publications and translated into English, such as The New Hat in issue 11, from a German paper...

Some strips were more richly rendered than others. Here's The Serenade from the back page of issue 11 (February 20th 1875) with cross hatching aplenty...

A week later, and the back cover of issue 12 (Feb 27th 1875) has a different artist and another technique (the large headed caricature)...

Comics have always featured humour based on a series of unfortunate events (a tradition still upheld in some Viz strips) and an early example was A Nice Long Day In Town in Funny Folks No.22 (May 8th 1875)...

Jokes about punching the wife just aren't acceptable today (and never seemed right to my mind even when Andy Capp was doing it) so this cartoon from issue 24 (May 22nd 1875) appears jarring in a modern context. Notice also the typical advertisements of the time for iron tonic, hats, and, er, a pamphlet on "Lady-Helps". (It's about advice on domestic services. What were you thinking?)

 
Funny Folks No.25 (May 29th 1875) was full of cartoons and comment pertaining to the Irish Derby. Proctor's cover cartoon couldn't resist a comment about home rule which was also in the news at the time, complete with a stereotypical caricature of an Irishman that would naturally be frowned upon today.

Of all the cartoons inside that issue, this one caught my eye. A loosely drawn and, in places, surreal full page illustration by Montbard of The Derby Night-Mare...

 
Pympkins's Public Dinner from Funny Folks No.27 (June 12th 1875) is an amusing nine-panel strip which actually features speech balloons. Nicely illustrated too.

 
Funny Folks was definitely inspirational for other publishers, as Ally Sloper's Half Holiday (1884) virtually copied the format with Sloper spinning off from the pages of Judy into his own title. As I mentioned earlier, Comic Cuts (1890) and others followed that format too. The combination of cartoons, social/political comment/satire and a few short strips gradually evolved over the decades into the comics we know today. 

These days, the closest equivalent to Funny Folks would be Private Eye, perhaps raising the question that as Funny Folks has always been considered a comic, should Private Eye be redefined as one too? I imagine the majority of its readers, and its editor, would say not, but in essence Private Eye is more deserving of the name 'comic' than some childrens' activity magazines listed as such on the stands today.

For more information on the early comics I'd recommend Victorian Comics by Denis Gifford. It doesn't feature any artwork from Funny Folks but it has plenty of full page covers from The Big Budget, Illustrated Chips, Funny Wonder and other titles of the era. It was published in 1976 but copies still turn up today. (I bought the one above in superb condition from eBay recently.)

This week in 1916: SPARKS No.126

Here's a comic that the kids of 1916 were reading, exactly 100 years ago this week. Sparks was published by James Henderson and Sons Ltd. and ran from 1914 to 1917. Like most comics of the time, it consisted of 8 tabloid pages, although by the time this issue appeared the format had become shorter, almost square in shape.  

The cover strip, clearly inspired by Chips' Weary Willie and Tired Tim, was The Funny Adventures of Lemon and Dash. Like Willie and Tim, they were two wandering tramps getting into amusing situations every issue. The artwork was by Louis Briault (1885 to 1944), who also drew for comics such as The Funny Wonder, Comic Cuts, and Comic Life.

Like most comics of the day, Sparks carried a 50/50 split of prose stories and comic strips. The centre pages featured numerous short strips and gag cartoons crammed across the spread. Here are just some of them. as always, click on the pages to enlarge them.

One of the text stories, The Arch Rogue, featured Superman's catchphrase over 20 years before the Man of Steel even appeared. Up, up, and away!

On the back page, another mixture of strips and cartoons. Daniel Dauber was drawn by Walter Booth, who had a long career in comics throughout the first half of the 20th Century. I'm afraid I don't know the identities of the other artists, who are sadly all anonymous.

Coming from Panini UK...

On sale in newsagents next Thursday, 8th November, is Marvel Legends No.5, beginning a new Captain America story arc. Here's the info from Panini...

Marvel Legends Vol. 4 005. On sale 8th November!

76 action-packed pages featuring Marvel’s ‘Big 3’ – Iron Man, Captain America and Thor! £4.50!

Steve Rogers reclaims the mantle of the Sentinel of Liberty. But does the world still want Captain America?!

Plus, The Search for Tony Stark continues, as ironheart and the Armour Squad try to track down Tony Stark and get more than they bargained for! And can Doctor Doom survive his battle against the Wrecking Crew and a host of supervillains?!

Also, our latest Asgardian epic, The Death of the Mighty Thor, continues! The War of the Reamls rages and all the while the doom of the gods approaches!

By Robbie Thompson, Chris Samnee, Brian Michael Bendis, Stefano Caselli, Alex Maleev, Jason Aaron Walt Simonson, Daniel Acuña, Chris Burnham, Becky Cloonan, Olivier Coipel, Russell Dauterman, Michael Del Mundo, James Harren, Andrew MacLean, Das Pastoras, Jill Thompson!

Includes material reprinted from Captain America #695, Invincible Iron Man #598 and the Mighty Thor #700!

Also out next Thursday....

Astonishing Spider-Man Vol.7 014. On sale 8th November! 

76 pages packed with arachnid-action! Only £4.50!

Venomverse begins! Venom finds himself drafted into a war to save the symbiotes from a deadly new foe!

Plus, can Spidey and Deadpool survive Murderworld?! The killiest theme park EVER!

Also, it’s a new school year for Anna May Parker. So why is her dad Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man – also at Midtown High?!

By Jody Houser, Nathan Stockman, Elliot Kalan, Todd Nauck, Cullen Bunn, Iban Coello.

Includes material reprinted from Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #16, Spider-Man/Deadpool #22, and Venomverse #1.

Meanwhile, in the shops TODAY we have...

AVENGERS UNIVERSE #12. On sale 1st November. £4.50!

100 pages of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! Three great stories!

A new epic adventure begins as the Avengers join forces with the Champions! Don’t miss the earth-shattering ‘Worlds Collide’ by Mark Waid, Jesus Saiz, Humberto Ramos, Javier Pina and Paco Diaz!

The Human Torch has inherited the legacy of the Fantastic Four – but he doesn’t want it! Meanwhile, Doctor Voodoo attempts to rebuild Avengers Mansion, with shocking results! By Jim Zub and Sean Izaakse!

A classic piece of Avengers history! The original Avengers step aside and welcome the second generation: Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch! By Stan Lee and Jack Kirby!

Featuring material first published in Avengers #672-673, Champions #13, Uncanny Avengers #28 and Avengers (vol 1) #16.

WOLVERINE & DEADPOOL #11. On sale 1st November. £4.50!

100 pages of claw-popping action! Three awesome adventures!

A new story begins! Deadpool meets Old Man Logan and tries to give him a helping hand – but a team-up with Deadpool can look an awful lot like a fight to the death! By Declan Shalvey and Mike Henderson!

Wolverine and her family are being hunted by the Orphans of X – and they now have a weapon that can kill mutants with healing factors! By Tom Taylor and Juann Cabal!

Old Man Logan has found his former love Mariko Yashida, but the deadly Gorgon wants to make it a very brief reunion! By Ed Brisson and Ibraim Roberson!

Featuring material first published in Deadpool vs Old Man Logan #1-3, All-New Wolverine #28 and Old Man Logan #35.

Check out regular updates and info on...

https://www.facebook.com/MarvelCollectorsEditions/