younger members of the family. This quickly took over the entire twelve-page comic
(except for some of the serialised fiction pages). Johnny Jones and the Casey Court Kids
(guest stars from Harmsworth’s well-established Chips) took over the front page, and by
Christmas 1904 the whole pictorial content of Puck was geared to children.
And so the first comic weekly designed for children was evolved. It became such a
success that almost all comic papers published in Great Britain from then on have been
designed for the juvenile market. The special appeal remained for adults— they bought
the comic for their children, children still seldom being able to afford the necessary
penny. Thus a new style of comic was born, one which appealed to the adult eye as a
well-drawn, well-designed, well-printed paper which would have nothing objectionable in
its contents for children to see, a style of comic quite separate from the halfpenny
knockabouts of Chips and its companions, which would remain working class, despite
the lowering of the age of its readership, for their entire lives.
James Henderson, Harmsworth’s old employer and now business rival, was the next
publisher to attempt a coloured comic. Taking inspiration from Harmsworth’s methods,
he succeeded in printing a full colour comic at half Puck’s price— one halfpenny! This
was Lot-O-Fun, which started on 17 March 1906 and ran for a total of 1,196 weekly
issues, most of them featuring George Davey’s clever fantasy strip ‘Dreamy Daniel’, about
a tramp whose weekly dreams took him to the wild west with Buffalo Bill, and on
adventures with many other contemporary heroes, real and imaginary. Lot-0-Fun finally
closed when Harmsworth, now trading as the Amalgamated Press, bought Henderson
out and killed off all his publications, one by one. This shameful practice would be
repeated throughout the history of British comics, first with the disappearance of the
Trapps and Holmes comics, then with the independent Target Comics of Bath in the
1930s, the J.B.Allen Comet and Sun in the 1940s, and the Hulton Press comics, Eagle
and Girl, in the 1950s.
British comics were now separated into two distinct classes, the ‘penny blacks’ and
the ‘tuppenny coloureds’. The ‘black’ comics, distinguished by being printed on different
coloured newsprint, were aimed at the working-class market—the child at the council
school, while the coloureds concentrated on the younger child of middle-class families.
The age-range of the comics was considerable. Chick’s Own (25 September 1920) catered
specifically for the very young child just learning to read. All its words were hyphenated
into syllables. Next came The Rainbow (14 February 1914) for the school beginners aged
five to seven, followed by Sparkler (20 October 1934) for the 8-year-olds and upwards.
Of the many titles covering these age groups Rainbow is the most important, and was the
most successful, being the pioneer ‘nursery comic’, as the group came to be called. It was
also the first British comic to sell one million copies every week, including one copy
which was delivered to Buckingham Palace tucked in the King’s Times! This enabled the
editor to emblazon his comic with the headline, ‘The Paper for Home and Palace!’
The front page stars of Rainbow were the Bruin Boys, a gang of anthropomorphic
animals who lived at Mrs Bruin’s Boarding School, and the star of the gang was Tiger
Tim. Tim and his chums had been created as early as 1904 for The Daily Mirror, then
transferred to The Monthly Playbox (November 1904), the first coloured comic
supplement to a magazine, the sumptuous shilling monthly The World and His Wife.
This section continued to be given away until May 1910, when it transferred to a
244 POPULAR LITERATURE: COMICS, DIME NOVELS, PULPS AND PENNY DREADFULS