Evolution of the British Comic

The comic strip has been catalogued from cave painting to Crumb, from Biblia Pauperum to God Nose Comix, from the Bayeux Tapestry to ‘Bristow’, yet the comic paper, that cartoon carrier of pictorial narrative sequences, remains almost virgin territory for the chronicler of the popular arts.

In tracing the historic descent of the familiar children’s comic of today, one thing becomes clear. There was no first comic, no ‘number one’. Comic papers evolved, emerging from broadsides and broadsheets, chapbooks and almanacs, prints and plates. To unearth an origin we can fix certain essentials that hold good for today’s comics, then search for a prototype.

A comic paper must be printed, be primarily pictorial, and, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, ‘have it as its express aim to excite mirth’. A comic must be cheap, for its life depends on wide circulation, and must be, in the librarians’ term, a ‘serial’, a continuing publication enjoying regular readership.