with the modernised style of the Disney Studio. Also working on the pages produced in
England for Mickey Mouse Weekly was Reg Perrott, a young comics artist who favoured
adventure strips and serials. His historical adventure, ‘Road to Rome’ is a masterpiece in
line and wash, followed by his first full-colour serial, the western ‘White Cloud’. Moving
to the Amalgamated Press comic Happy Days, Perrott drew another great colour serial,
‘Sons of the Sword’, in which cinemascopic panels were used for the first time. Perrott’s
early death, not long after his demobilisation from the Royal Air Force, robbed British
comics of their finest adventure strip artist.
As the 1930s closed, a new publisher entered the comic market, and immediately
became the most successful of them all. This was the Scottish publisher, D. c.Thomson
of Dundee. Thomson had been issuing very successful boys’ story-papers (Adventure,
Wizard, etc.) since the 1920s and now entered comics for the first time with The Dandy
(3 December 1937), produced in their story-paper format: twenty-eight pages, half-
tabloid size, with a full-colour front page. It was an instant success, and its two leading
strip stars, Korky the Cat on the cover and Desperate Dan the tough cowboy inside, are
still running today. Their original artists, James Crichton and Dudley D.Watkins (1907–
1969), are both long dead, but their characters and drawing styles live on. Watkins was
only eighteen when he was hired as a staff artist by Thomson, who lured him to Dundee
from his native Nottingham, and he would stay with the Scots firm all his life, dying in mid-
strip at his drawing-board. Towards the end of his career he became the only Thomson
artist allowed to sign his artwork.
The Beano, a companion comic to The Dandy, was introduced on 30 July 1939, and
included stories told purely in pictures—Thomson’s had discarded the traditional British
style of printed captions underneath every panel (trade term: ‘the libretto’). (The
Amalgamated Press continued to support their strips with libretti until well after the
Second World War). Today the captionless strip is standard, improving the visual drama
of the strip but removing much of the traditional reading matter of the comic.
D.C.Thomson were also the first to use the American term ‘comics’ to describe their
strips (‘All Your Favourite Comics Inside!’), while the Amalgamated Press clung to the
word ‘comic’ (for example, The Knock-Out Comic) as descriptive of the whole publication.
Finally they too bent to Americanisation with the publication of their Cowboy Comics in
May 1950. The Beano, like its partner, continues to be published to this day, and is
Britain’s top-selling comic. Of its original heroes, only Lord Snooty and his Pals—
another Dudley Watkins creation—survive. Dropped by the comic in 1992, Snooty was
swiftly snapped up by the Sunday Times comic supplement.
The Amalgamated Press quickly produced rivals to the Scottish comics, similar in
format but differing in character. Radio Fun (15 October 1938) depicted famous BBC
stars in clever caricature adventures by Roy Wilson and others, and was modelled on
the successful pioneer comic in this genre, Film Fun, which had been running since 17
January 1920. Knockout (4 March 1939) also featured famous heroes, but fictional ones,
adapting the story-paper characters Sexton Blake, a detective whose origins go back to
the 1890s, and Billy Bunter, the fat schoolboy who first appeared in The Magnet in 1908.
The look of the comic, however, was designed by Hugh McNeill (1910–1979), a brilliant
and highly personal humorous artist. His slightly zany, very funny characters, Our
Ernie, Mrs Entwhisle’s Little Lad, and Deed-a-Day Danny, were the real stars of the comic.
246 POPULAR LITERATURE: COMICS, DIME NOVELS, PULPS AND PENNY DREADFULS