episodes usually in the form of cartooned comparisons or contrasts. Indeed, in Bell’s
first full-page Gallery of Comicalities can be found a captionless two-picture strip
entitled ‘Before and After the Election’, reprinted from an issue of Life in London of 1830.
Bell’s weekly and its reprints represent the mainstream of popular journalism, but at
the same time the wealthier end of the market purchased caricature prints, plain or hand
coloured, and issued by the print houses in limited editions.
The original idea of using the lithographic printing system to issue a regular cartoon
magazine rather than single sheets of pictures seems to have been born in Scotland.
Number one of Glasgow Looking Glass, dated 23 July 1825, was issued and most
probably illustrated by John Watson of the Lithographic Press Office, 189 George Street:
‘Price Common Impression, One Shilling, Best Ditto, 1s 6d’. It even included an eight-
picture serial strip entitled ‘History of a Coat, Part l’. This monthly was followed by
Northern Looking Glass, a four-page pictorial drawn by William Heath, who later went to
London to draw The Looking Glass for Thomas McLean, the famous print publisher of 26
Haymarket. Heath drew the first seven issues (January-July 1830), after which Robert
Seymour was given the credit. The Looking Glass was ‘designed and drawn on stone’.
The father of what most students of the comic would recognise as true British comic
art was c.J.Grant. He drew cartoons in the Thomas Hood style of pictorial pun, but with
a common touch: for example, the phrase ‘Making a Deep Impression’ is illustrated by a
slapstick scene showing a top-hatted toff flopping into a puddle of mud. ‘Every Man to His
Post’ shows a bottle-brandishing drunk clutching a horse hitching post. William
Makepeace Thackeray, writing about Grant, saw his drawings as ‘outrageous
caricatures’ with ‘squinting eyes, wooden legs, and pimpled noses forming the chief
points of fun’. They were beneath that great literary gentleman, but that was, and is, their
point. In Grant’s lively London line can be seen the start of an art appealing to, and
belonging to, the working and lower class. Grant’s ‘pimpled noses’ are archetypes for
Ally Sloper’s.
Grant described himself as ‘A.A.E.’ which stood for ‘Author, Artist, Editor’ on the
byline of a fortnightly broadside which he drew from 1 January 1834. Every Body’s
Album and Caricature Magazine, published by the lithographic printer J. Kendrick of 54
Leicester Square, London, had a good run and in its welter of caricatural contents can
be found a comic strip with speech balloons, ‘Adventures of the Buggins’s’, a short serial
strip that ran from number 36 to number 37 (July 1835).
The first comic paper to match all the features of the modern comic (low price, regular
weekly publication, mass circulation via newsagents, editorial and artistic content) was
called Funny Folks (12 December 1874). Like the other essential of the comic, the
regularly appearing character, the first comic evolved by accident. James Henderson,
publisher of The Weekly Budget, a family magazine, designed The Funny Folks Budget as
a pull-out supplement to his Grand Christmas Number. It was to be an all-cartoon
section and was advertised as a special one-off edition. However, so striking was it in its
large tabloid format, and so intriguing to the readers of The Weekly Budget readers, that
it was immediately turned into a separate publication in its own right. Curiously,
although it laid down a formula clung to by British comics for the next seventy-five
years (eight pages, four of cartoons and four of text, in tabloid newspaper size), Funny
Folks never developed a continuing hero. The few strips it ran were, like the cartoons
240 POPULAR LITERATURE: COMICS, DIME NOVELS, PULPS AND PENNY DREADFULS