the Empire, thanks to British editions published by Chambers of London and
Edinburgh.
The Buster Brown books, enormously popular despite their huge awkward oblong
format, began at Christmas 1903 with Buster Brown and his Resolutions, probably the
most popular of the series, leading to a total of thirty-five books in all, some of which
were not by Outcault. (Buster was father to Scotland’s Oor Wullie by Dudley D.Watkins
(Sunday Post Fun Section from 1936) and grandfather to England’s Dennis the Menace
(Beano from 1951).)
The cardboard-covered comic book containing reprints of Sunday strips became well
and truly established when William R. Hearst entered the field on 23 November 1902. At
the top of his New York Journal supplement appeared this startling announcement: ‘The
popular characters of the comic supplement have been published in book form. Your
newsdealer can get them for you. They are the best comic-books that have ever been
published.’ A historic moment, and the first use of the term ‘comic book’. Out came no
fewer than five books, all priced at fifty cents. They were Happy Hooligan, Fred Opper’s
tramp in a tin-can hat; The Katzenjammer Kids by Rudolph Dirks; The Tigers by James
Swinnerton, the first in the funny animals field; Alphonse and Gaston and their Friend
Leon, the funny Frenchmen, another Opper creation; and On and Off Mount Ararat, a
Noah’s Ark with animals, also by Swinnerton. But these hard-to-handle landscape-
format books were child’s play compared to the first Mutt and Jeff comic book.
Published by Ball and Co. in 1910, this featured one strip per page and measured 5
inches high by 15½ inches wide!
‘Mutt and Jeff’ is frequently credited with being the first daily newspaper strip, but in
fact it was preceded by several others, including ‘A.Piker Clerk’ by Clare Briggs (1904)
and A.D.Condo’s ‘The Outbursts of Everett True’ (1905). Harry Conway Fisher, better
known as ‘Bud’, began his series as a tipster strip, having his hero, Augustus Mutt,
forever losing his shirt on sure things. Jeff, shortened from Jefferson, was an escapee
from the lunatic asylum who teamed up with the lanky gambler some time into the
series. Bud Fisher was the first cartoonist to personally copyright his creation, and thus
was able to move from newspaper to newspaper without copyright prosecution, finally
becoming the richest cartoonist in the world with such spin-offs as the longest run of any
cinema animated-cartoon series (via the Fox Film Corporation). He even gave up drawing
the strip, although his signature was ably forged by a string of assistants including Al
Smith, who finally took it over in recent times.
The main publishers of cardboard comic books became Cupples and Leon of New York.
They added ‘Mutt and Jeff’ to their chain, which by the 1920s included George
McManus’s ‘Bringing Up Father’ (one of the first American strips to be reprinted in
England by the Daily Sketch), Harold Gray’s ‘Little Orphan Annie’ (later to inspire
‘Belinda Blue-Eyes’ in the Daily Mirror) and Sidney Smith’s family saga, ‘The Gumps’
(models for another Daily Mirror strip, ‘The Ruggles’). These and many other square
comic books were quickly established as the popular format, selling at twenty-five cents
and containing reprints of forty-six newspaper strips apiece. These, being daily strips,
did not come in colour, which helped keep the price down, but it would be the addition
of full colour that would see the end of Cupples and Leon comic books and establish the
format that remains supreme to this day.
252 POPULAR LITERATURE: COMICS, DIME NOVELS, PULPS AND PENNY DREADFULS