The Pioneers
The Pioneers |
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Page 18 of 35 The panache of their progenitor was missing. In contrast with most of the new titles, Sloper looked almost classy. Corners were cut in a number of ways: the paper quality was terrible, the printing cut-price, the ink cheap and the page-sizes reduced. Inevitably, the writers and artists also suffered, to the point where The World's Comic felt it was necessary to reassure readers that: 'We are no "sweaters". Everybody who draws and writes [for us]... is well paid for his work.' Nobody involved in the industry would have believed this for a minute. An additional price saving device was to pirate material from America. At first, the British comics stole from publications like Life and Judge (in the same way that the satirical magazines had before them); later, they did the same from Sunday newspaper strips. Snap Shots was the most famous culprit, and was composed entirely of American material. Whatever the morality of this policy, it did allow British audiences to get to know American characters like the Katzenjammer Kids (see below) -themselves direct descendants of the aforementioned Max and Moritz. It also opened the doors to greater artistic influence from America, though the significance of this pre-1914 is open to debate. Inevitably, perhaps, the new comics attracted criticism. They were increasingly seen not just as harmless railway literature, but as something more sinister. Middle-class paternalists now attacked this new form of working-class entertainment with as much vigour as they had previously reserved for the penny dreadfuls (despite Harmsworth's desire that they should be viewed in a different light). They were said to be a 'threat to literacy' on two, contradictory, levels. First, any publication based on pictures was deemed to be automatically inferior to prose material: reading was associated with an 'improving' ethic, whereas strips and cartoons had the opposite effect. Secondly, it was argued that the close print in the new comics was bad for the eyesight. Comics, it seems, could not win either way. |