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Home arrow The Pioneers

The Pioneers
Page 14 of 35

Comic Cuts
Cover, Comic Cuts (Amalgamated Press, 1912). Art/script: 'Tom. the Tichet-of-Leave Man' by Percy Cocking. The first title to use the word 'comic' in its name. Below left A popular Comic Cuts strip from 1923, starring the 'Colony Nigs' (political correctness was never the title's strong point). Art/script: Anon.
The changes that the character went through make it difficult to pin his success down to any one cartoonist. He was created by Charles Ross and drawn by a number of artists over time, among them Marie Duval (Ross's wife, and the first woman comics artist), WF Thomas and William G Baxter (arguably the most talented of them all). However, there is little evidence that they, or any of the other writers and artists on the comic, reaped the benefits of his fame. In time-honoured fashion, the publishers managed to exploit the staff, in this case by keeping pay rates down by reprinting old material, and by inviting contributions from readers and amateur cartoonists (a ploy, incidentally, which was also used by Viz in the 1990s).
Though there was more to the comic than Sloper, it was his presence every week that guaranteed a massive readership. The artwork was in the tradition of other humour magazines, with lots of detailed, heavily shaded drawings, invariably with text underneath. Similarly, there were huge chunks of densely set prose, including stories, and bogus 'reports' (it should be remembered that the working class was fairly literate by this point in history due to the various education acts). The new attraction, however, was the fact that readers could develop a relationship with the lead character over time -something which would be imitated by nearly every comic that followed.
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