The A to Z of British Newspaper Strips

Because newspapers are more likely to have an adult audience, the comic strips that appear in their pages are also more likely to be aimed at an older age group, whether that's adventure strips with smarter and more complex plots (Modesty Blaise, Jeff Hawke, etc.), satirical strips taking on politics (If, Maggie's Farm, No.10, etc.), or strips that put the 'strip' in strips (Jane, George and Lynne, Ben & Katie, etc.). They tend to be taken a little more seriously, have sometimes been collected in book form, and (thanks to syndication) might be well known beyond these shores, while the vast majority of strips in comics are lost to history.

It is surprising therefore that so little research has been put into cataloguing their existence. The story of British newspaper strips has previously been covered only in limited depth by Denis Gifford, who wrote Stap Me! The British Newspaper Strip back in 1971, and Denis continued to be deeply interested in collecting examples of newspaper strips for the next three decades. But, with Mark Bryant an admirable exception, nobody has made any effort beyond a few half-hearted lists that can be found on the internet, all woefully inadequate.

Paul Hudson should be congratulated for tackling a subject that not even I have been mad enough to contemplate. Comic strips have been a feature of newspapers since before the First World War, with the 16 episodes of W. K. Haselden's 'Mr Simkins on his Holidays' appearing in 1908, and the book covers a broad cross-section of newspapers and magazines from the last century, from Haselden's 'Big and Little Willie' — about the Kaiser and his son — dating from 1914 to strips still running.

Along the way you'll find the famous — since we were a Daily Mirror household I grew up on Andy Capp, Garth and The Perishers — to more obscure strips like The Big Yin, co-written by Billy Connolly in the 1970s, and Summer of Love by Pete Milligan & Brendan McCarthy in the short-lived News on Sunday. For every Rupert that you've heard of there's a Rex Ascot or a Rick Martin for you to discover.

This is not an encyclopedia, so don't expect to discover the dates a strip ran or the number of episodes. Information is usually brief, listing artist and writer where known, where and roughly when a strip appeared, and a short description, occasionally a longer description, the aforementioned Rupert getting two pages. All but a small handful are illustrated with an example or two, in colour if that was how they appeared.

It has been fifty years since the last book celebrating homegrown newspaper strips. Hopefully it won't be another fifty years before the next... but in the meantime Paul Hudson's A to Z is an enjoyable, alphabetical romp through a century of strips that don't deserve to be forgotten. Some you'll recall with half-remembered nostalgia, but, if you're like me, you'll spend half the book wishing that there were collections of many, many more of these strips than there are.*

The A to Z of British Newspaper Strips by Paul Hudson
Book Palace Books ISBN 978-191354824-7, July 2022, 316pp, £55.00. Available via Amazon.

* I've done my bit, reprinting London Is Stranger Than Fiction by Peter Jackson a few years ago. It's still available.