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Home arrow The Pioneers

The Pioneers
Page 17 of 35

The Wonder
Cover, The Wonder (Amalgamated Press, 1901). Art/script: Anon.
His and the Amalgamated Press's flagship title was Comic Cuts, launched in 1890 (the first of the new publications to use the word 'comic' in its name), closely followed by Illustrated Chips (1890). These were based on knockabout humour in the established fashion, and followed the pattern set by Sloper quite closely. Chips was exceptional for the fact that it boasted one of the all-time great comics artists, Tom Browne. His continuing characters Weary Willie and Tired Tim became almost as famous as Sloper, and marked him out as a master of slapstick rendering.
Other publishers joined in with their own halfpenny titles, similarly based on paring back costs to the minimum. Harmsworth was not to be outdone. He responded with scores of others. His ruthlessness made him a fortune, on which he established a newspaper empire, becoming Lord Northcliffe in the process. Pre-1914 comics included Funny Cuts, Snap Shots, The Joker, The World's Comic, Larks! and The Funny Wonder (later The Wonder).
The trouble was that this glut in the halfpenny titles led to an overall crash in quality (the writer AA Milne later commented that Harmsworth's comics and story papers had 'killed the penny dreadful with the ha'penny dreadfuller'). Superficially, they continued to imitate Sloper: they were nearly always tabloids; they mixed strips, cartoons and prose. They also tended to star their own misfits, tramps and petty criminals: the aforementioned Weary Willie and Tired Tim (Chips), Nobbier and Jerry (Funny Cuts) and The Three Lodgers (Larks!). Their politics were also the same: satirical to a point, but no further. The publishers were out to make a financial killing, after all, and not to end up in jail.
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