The Daily Mirror had the finest crop of daily comic strips in any newspaper in the 1950s, dedicating not only a full page to them but with others dotted around the paper. My thanks to John Adcock of Yesterday's Papers for this. The Mirror was far and away the best newspaper for strips in the early 1950s. It's a shame that no modern newspaper in the UK can compete with these old papers for quality and quantity of strips—let's not forget that this is just one day's worth of strips—or realise that in the world of the hungry-for-content newspaper web pages they have an astonishing backlog of material that they in many cases own outright.
Update: John Adcock has posted a set of Daily Mirror strips for 11 September 1953 at his Yesterday's Papers blog.(* Daily Mirror © MGM Ltd.)
Fantastic stuff Steve. I grew up with the Mirror in the Sixties and it had plenty of strips then too, but nowhere near the amount it had in the Fifties. What a great selection of material, - with highly professional creators at the top of their game, masters of serial storytelling.
ReplyDeleteIt always bemuses me to read "comics aren't for kids anymore" articles in modern papers. Those same papers had the adult comics of their day, fifty years ago, - and they let them all slip away one by one, more or less. Such a shame.
Hi Lew,
ReplyDeleteGoing back even further, comics rarely were for kids. Although you had the 'children's corner' in some papers, the first comic to be produced aimed wholly at young kids was The Rainbow in 1914, forty years after the appearance of Funny Folks. Newspapers took over the role of adult humour papers by printing jokes and strips... and then, as you say, letting them slip away.