Comic Cuts
Comic Cuts was a British comic magazine. It was published from 1890 to 1953, and was created by Alfred Harmsworth. In its early days, it inspired other publishers to produce rival comic magazines. Comic Cuts held the record for the most issues of a British weekly comic for 46 years, until The Dandy overtook it in 1999.
Creation
Brothers Alfred and Harold Harmsworth first came to prominence with 1888's Answers, a cut-and-paste Tit-Bits rip-off of letter responses, witticisms and tips often swiped from American magazines. Alfred's gifted promotional ideas pushed the circulation up and the brothers felt a similar approach would work with cartoons. The new title was hoped to boost AnswersPublishing history
1890 to 1899
Comic Cuts thus initially has a very literal title as the first few editions were simply compilations of gag cartoons often consisting of just a single frame and jokes from the likes of Life and Harper's gathered together. The first issue was dated 17 May 1890, and was reputedly pulled together by editor Houghton Townley in four days. The 8-page first issue impressively sold 118,864 of its 120,000 print run, and circulation soon reached 300,000, some 120,000 more than Answers. An early editorial in the eleventh issue claimed prime minister William Gladstone was among the readership; something to be taken with a considerable pinch of salt given the claims that often made in Harmsworth titles. The sales were despite protests from newsagents, some of whom disliked the small profit margin the halfpenny price gave them. At this stage the comic was aimed firmly at adults, particularly the growing number of literate working class who couldn't afford a penny newspaper. Small sections were included for children, but the overall tone was aimed at the growing number of newly-literate adults.The title's instant success saw Harmsworth's rivals scramble to produce their own comics, with Henderson producing Scraps and Snap-Shots. However, Alfred Harmsworth had anticipated this and initiated another commercial masterstrokes, establishing an ethos that would last in the British comics for nearly a century. Reasoning that competition was inevitable, he initiated a sister title as a rival so the Harmsworths would profit further from the newly discovered public appetite for comics while crowding out rivals. The result was Illustrated Chips, which - after an abortive run as a text heavy tabloid revealed the public simply wanted more of the same as Cuts - went on to be a huge success in its own right. The pair soon reached combined sales of half a million a week. Harmsworth identified this self-competition as part of his 'Schemo Magnifico', a secretive guide to publishing success he had written himself.
Within a few issues, demand for contents saw Comic Cuts carry an announcement requesting that "clever artists" submit their work for inclusion. While a sign of the title's rapid growth in popularity and profitability, there have also been suggestions that the reused American material clashed with the reprint rights of rival publisher James Henderson & Sons. As it was the stagnant economy meant Victorian London was full of struggling writers and artists, and the gradual switch to original material only ate into a small portion of Comic Cuts
On 14 February 1891 Comic Cuts had carried its first full-page cartoon strip, and in the same edition the text story "The Legend of Ivy Towers" by James Woods, became the title's first serial feature. Browne early meanwhile contributed "Popular Songs Illustrated", beginning on 5 August 1891, and within a year nearly all of the comic was original material - albeit that some material was more original than others; British-drawn rip-offs of American material was a common occurrence, particularly for one-frame cartoons. Private correspondence between Alfred and his brother Harold revealed that by the end of 1892 the comic had a circulation of 430,000 and another two years later saw it steady at 425,000 despite a growing amount of competition. Figures given to the Advertiser's Protection Society suggested it reached half a million in the 1900s. As the issues were frequently passed between friends, colleagues and family members, and the comic's fictional editor Clarence C. Cutts would proclaim the title had a million readers. The early Comic Cuts was no stranger to boastful editorials, with the title proclaiming itself the original comic ; however, a wry claim to be "the poor man's Punch" drew legal notices from the esteemed satirical magazine's publisher. Nevertheless, the comic regularly took sideswipes at failed imitators. In addition to Cutts, the title also had a feature reputedly written by office boy Sebastian Ginger, which was crammed with spelling 'errors'.
From 3 March 1894 Comic Cuts began a series of proto-pinups under the heading "Our Sweethearts", featuring realistically drawn beautiful women - albeit in line with Victorian wiles by being fashionably but very fully dressed. It was succeeded by a similar series called "Dancing Girls of All Nations", featuring exotic beauties in national costume. While chaste and artistic, the images were clearly intended more for titillation than education. Less salaciously, the 20 June 1896 edition depicted a smiling Queen Victoria reading Comic Cuts as part of a series of famous personalities doing so, titled "Famous Comics Posters"; under the grandmother of Europe the text read 'What would the nation do without the Queen? Worse - what would the Queen do without COMIC CUTS?'. Comic Cuts also instigated a regular tradition of the double-size "Christmas number", typically featuring snow on the masthead, holiday-related content and seasonal greetings from the editor.
Meanwhile, the features in Comic Cuts and its ilk were becoming more sophisticated as the medium grew, moving away from single panel cartoons and towards more ambitious sequential strips - referred to in contemporary industrial vernacular as 'sets' - and recurring characters. One example of this was Chubblock Homes, drawn by Jack B. Yeats. Initially debuting as a three-frame set in Comic Cuts #184, the Sherlock Holmes pastiche soon grew to an early ongoing serial. The following year the popular character was transferred to give a boost to the Harmsworths' latest venture, The Funny Wonder. Less forward-looking was 1894's "Comic Cuts Colony", a single-frame work by Frank Wilkinson; Britain was casually racist for all of the 19th and much of the 20th century, and Comic Cuts was to dip into such crass picaninny tropes for cheap laughs on several occasions.
In 1895 Tom Browne's "Squashington Flats" joined as a regular feature. Following the antics of the denizens of said neighbourhood, the latter was an immediate hit with readers, and by now Browne was being well paid for his many contributions to Harmsworth titles. On 12 September 1896, the comic published a 12-page 'Special Art Number of the World Famed Halfpenny Comic Paper', which broke new ground in the industry by featuring full colour on the front, back and centre; blue ink on a further two and another two featuring green - in return for this one-off, the price of Comic Cuts #331 was doubled to a full penny. However, the printing process was fraught and the issue was beset by production problems; a more refined process was tried again for the same year's Christmas number on 5 December, with more success.
The following year Frank Holland's amoral burglar character Chokee Bill arrived after stints on Illustrated Chips and The Comic Home Journal, claiming the front page of Cuts from 27 February 1897 until 1900. Browne meanwhile channelled his love of Cervantes' Don Quixote into the humorous "Don Quixote de Tintogs" in 1898, and devised "Robinson Crusoe Esq." the following year. While both his punishing schedule and growing profile saw Browne largely work elsewhere before his early death in 1910, his style would be the gold standard for the British comic industry until well into the thirties.
1900 to 1919
In 1901 the Harmsworths set up Amalgamated Press to consolidate their myriad publishing interests. However comics were going out of fashion as an adult past-time, with Cuts and its contemporaries adjusting to aim squarely at children at the start of the century. This led to many contributors, not wanting to be associated with juvenile fiction, to stop signing their work, or using pen names. Harmsworth's comics would shed much of their adult readership when the company extended their halfpenny model to newspapers with the launch of The Daily Mail. However, the successful reconfiguring of Puck as a comic aimed at children showed a huge audience that didn't clash with that of newspapers. Comic Cuts and the rest followed suit, something which has been decried by some purists of Victorian comics but which possibly played a major role in the medium surviving in Britain beyond nursery titles. In this form, Comic Cuts soon settled on four alternating pages of comic strips and four of text features, the majority ongoing features week to week. New arrivals in this period included "The Mackabeentosh Family", "Lucky Lucas and Happy Harry" and "Fun Aboard the Mary Ann". Percy Cocking made the first of many contributions with "Mulberry Flats" in 1906, a similar conceit to "Squashington Flats". In 1908, "Our Merry Mannikins" began, running for seven years. The comic was now firmly entrenched in British popular culture - it was mentioned in G. K. Chesterton's books Heretic and Alarms and Discursions, and in a line of Cyril Tawney's song "Chicken on a Raft" — "He's looking at me Comic Cuts again".Despite the move towards younger readers, Cuts and Chips remained successful and a new crop of artists arrived, many of them heavily influenced by Browne. In 1907 G. M. Payne, set to be an AP regular over the next 30 years, debuted the popular "Gertie the Regimental Pet", and Julius Stafford-Baker introduced "Sammy Salt the Submariner"; Baker would also draw a revival of Comic Cuts Colony in 1910; neither concept nor content were any improvement, however. Yeats meanwhile devised "The Whodidit" in 1909, the same year the comic published its thousandth edition. The next year saw Cocking debut hapless on-licence criminal "Tom the Ticket-of-Leave Man", who swiftly became a reader favourite and was firmly ensconced on the front cover. Another long-running strip to debut was Alex Akerbladh's "Waddles the Waiter" in 1912; the same year saw Bertie Brown devise "Pansy Pancake" and Joe Hardman] introduce "Chuckles the Clown".
World War I broke out in 1914, and the comic took on a topical tone with cartoons often making fun of the Central Powers, though serious war-themed material was confined to text stories. Wartime runs on paper also saw the price double then triple to 1½ pence. In 1917 Tom the Ticket-of-Leave Man escaped the attentions of PC Fairyfoot to become "Jolly Tom the Merry Menagerie Man". However, his respite was short lived as the following year Cocking introduced Jackie and Sammy, the Terrible Twins - heavily influenced by American newspaper strip "The Katzenjammer Kids" - as his mischievous nephews.