Comic Books :)

Comic Cuts with some Illustrated Chips (1890)

It was on May 17, 1890 when an artist by the name of Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, introduced a brand new generation of comic books that would forever change the way we look at comics. All though it actually wasn't the first comic, which goes to Ally Soper's Half Holiday, it was Harmsworth's Comic Cuts (3006 issues) and Illustrated Chips (3003 issues) a few weeks later on the 26th July 1890 that started the whole "comic-boom" in Britain. These were the comics that set the benchmark of how comics were to look for the next half a century. But more importantly, these comics and their subsequent imitators were an outlet for the many talented artists and writers that were looking for work.

The one overwhelming factor for the success of these two comic-papers was it's price. At just ½d (half-penny) it was half the price of most of the other publications of the time. However, newsagents were worried that if these half penny papers were successful then no one would buy the penny ones. Harmsworth retorted that if newsagents would not handle halfpenny papers he would appoint his own agents who would. Harmsworth's editorial from the very first issue of Comic Cuts goes some way to explaining how he proposed to make a success of such a low-cost paper and how he hoped "it would grow until it was as well-known as our excellent friends Scraps and Sloper". Notice how the term "comic" still hadn't been coined, Comic Cuts was considered to be a paper and it wasn't until the following year that the colloquialism comic had become common usage.

Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips changed the way we look at entertainment through images of cartoon animation that laid a pathway for other future cartoonist to follow.

Sources:

www.comicsuk.uk/History/Historywhole.asp

-Paul Miller