Tom Browne’s Willie and Tim. Indeed, the more prosperous publishers hired Browne to
create these front page characters for them, such as C. Arthur Pearson: Airy Alf and
Bouncing Billy appeared on number 1 of The Big Budget (19 June 1897), a huge penny
comic divided into three pull-out parts of eight pages each.
At this time all British comics were being published for an adult market: even
Harmsworth’s price of one halfpenny was a sum beyond the pocket of the average
working-class child. Thus all the early comic heroes are adult, and all the themes of
their adventures are adult—tramps stealing from shopkeepers and ending up in prison,
for example. The first comic paper to feature children as heroes was Larks, published as
a halfpenny comic by the proprietors of Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (one penny). The Balls
Pond Road Banditti was a gang of juvenile delinquents whose weekly adventures took
them around such landmarks of Victorian London as the British Museum and the
Albert Memorial. They were drawn on the front page by Gordon Fraser, an artist whose
name still graces a greetings card publisher. The Banditti can be considered the cartoon
ancestors of the Beano’s gang of destructive schoolboys, The Bash Street Kids. Although
obviously popular with young readers, it would be some years before British comics
became the sole property of children. Even then, the heroes of the strips remained
predominantly adult with just the occasional strip concerning itself with the antics of
schoolboys and schoolgirls.
The first coloured comics were simply printed in black ink on coloured paper. Chips,
for example, was almost always printed on pink paper, and despite a brief flirtation with
red ink on white paper, reverted in the final decade of its existence to its traditional form.
The first British comic to be printed in full colour was the special autumn issue of Comic
Cuts, published 12 September 1896. This brave failure, an enterprise of Alfred
Harmsworth in answer to the coloured comic supplements which were being published
as part of the New York Sunday newspapers, failed mainly because the printing costs
raised the price of a coloured edition from a halfpenny to one penny. However,
Harmsworth continued to experiment spasmodically with special coloured editions of his
several weekly comics, but it would be his business rivals, the relatively small firm of
Trapps and Holmes, who would publish the first regular weekly comic printed in full
colour. Called, appropriately, The Coloured Comic, it appeared on 21 May 1898 with the
usual tramp partnership on the front—Frog Faced Ferdinand and Watty Wool Whiskers
—but after about a year was reduced to being printed black on coloured paper, thus
continuing to justify its title, to the publishers at least!
Alfred Harmsworth was, however, the first to publish a really successful coloured
comic weekly, launching Puck, a twelve-page penny comic, on 30 July 1904, ‘To gladden
your eye on bright wings of colour and fancy’. But by the end of the year the comic had
completely changed in character, and with it the whole nature and concept of the British
comic. Puck begins as a weekly magazine for adults, modelled closely on the American
Sunday supplements. Even its name was stolen from the American humorous weekly,
while many of its characters in the comic strips are also stolen. There was The
Newlyweds, but by a British artist, not George McManus. There was Buster Brown
complete with dog and resolutions, redrawn as Scorcher Smith. Some weeks there was a
full-page cover cartoon; other weeks a decorative drawing of a lovely lady. But the key to
the comic was contained in ‘Puck Junior’, a section within the comic intended for the
TYPES AND GENRES 243