Recently, I had a chance to get two 1922 issues of Britain's pioneering comics magazine
Comic Cuts from ebay (for an amazingly low price of app. 1 pounds each!).
Comic Cuts, the first magazine to use the word "comic" in its title, was started by Alfred Harmswoth in 1890, and priced at 1/2 penny, half the price of similar magazines like
Funny Folks, kicked off the boom of comics magazines in Britain. Above scan is of the cover of no. 1653 (dated Jan. 14th, 1922), featuring 'The Side-Splitting Adventures of Jolly Tom, the Merry Menagerie Man' by British comics artist Percy Cocking (1881-1964) who had been drawing the exploits of Tom in
Comic Cuts since 1910. I find his art quite pleasing and high-calibre 'though the title character's twin nemesises are clearly modeled on Katzenjammer Kids. The back cover of this issue includes another strip by Cocking:
This strip is highly innovative in its utilization of the depiction of each flat as if a panel within the panels. Cocking's Mulberry Flattites had debutted in
Comic Cuts in 1906. Cocking, a staffer for Harmsworth's Amalgamated Press (today's Fleetway), is better known as the artist who took over the hugely popular series 'Weary Willie and Tired Tim' created by the highly influential Tom Browne in 1896 for
Illustrated Chips and continued it for more than four decades till the magazine folded in 1953.
Recently, when received an old issue of Mickey Mouse Weekly which I had bought off ebay, I was delighted to see that the kind seller had also enclosed an incomplete and hence unsellable copy of a pre-war issue (no. 1234, dated Oct. 9th, 1937) of The Rainbow, the pioneer British comics magazine for children, as a surprise bonus! The cover feature on The Rainbow is Tiger Tim, but I intend to cover that character in the next post in this blog, so here are scans of other strips from the copy I received. The above scan is from page 2 (the reverse of the front cover) and the below one from page 9:
Judging by the contents notice on the cover, I gather that two more adventure continuity strips were featured in the four central pages missing from the copy I received, 'Chums of the Sea' and 'Secret of the Storm Castle', in addition to 'Full Speed Ahead'. And below is the back cover:
I could find no info anywhere on these strips, so if anyone knows anything about them, please let us know.
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