PANEL BY PANEL: Part One -- Newspaper Strips

CHAPTER ONE THE HARBINGERS

 

By stretching a long bow, many writers would have us believe that comic strips go back to the Bayeux Tapestry of twelfth century France; others would trace their origins back to the hieroglyphics in the tombs of ancient Egypt. While the examination of these ancient works may reveal some primary link with modem comics, such academic research is outside the scope of this book which only looks at comics that will conform to a formula in terms of their execution and their circulation.

  A detailed definition attempting to cover all possible types of comic strips would be far too cumbersome and, even then, may not satisfy the purist. Basically, the comics covered in this book must conform, at least in spirit, with the following definition.

  A comic strip consists of the following elements: (1) a narrative (humorous or serious) told by means of a sequence of pictures (called ‘panels’), (2) a continuing character or cast of characters, and (3) text or dialogue included within the pictures (customarily in the form of ‘speech balloons' issuing from the characters’ mouths). It is a narrative of words and pictures, both verbal and visual, in which neither words nor pictures are quite satisfactory by themselves.

 

  This definition does not cover all types of comics but it has sufficient substance to allow us to identify the medium which interests us. One such comic not covered by the definition is the ‘pantomime’ strip. The term pantomime is a misnomer as its correct title is sans parole - a comic without words. But popular usage has made the term pantomime acceptable just as we accept the term comic to describe many of the graphic stories that are anything but comical in intent. The pantomime strip is still a comic but a lesser comic because it does not meet the criteria of the definition relating to a combination of words and drawings.

  In terms of circulation, we are mainly interested in the period from which comics became part of the mass media and were available to a wide audience whether in newspapers or comic books, There is no doubt that artists such as Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gilray, and others paved the way for comics - but they did not produce comics in the form that we recognize and accept and, given the literacy level of the periods, they did not reach a wide audience.

  Comics in Australia were influenced, first, by the work coming out of England and, later, by the Sunday comic sections of US newspapers.

  England’s famous humour magazine, Punch, had started in 1841 and was followed by an imitator, Judy, in 1867. Four months after its first issue, Judy did something different - it published a full-page story told in pictures. It contained no formalized panels and had no speech balloons but it was a narrative and the possible starting point for the form of modern comics.  The comic was titled Some of the Mysteries of Loan and Discounts and featured Ally Sloper, the first genuine English comic hero. Over the next 30 years many comic papers were introduced (initially for adults and, later, for children) which included Funny Folks, Comic Cuts, Illustrated Chips, Jack and Jill and Jester. It would have been unusual if copies of these comics, and others, did not make their way to the far-off colonies of New South Wales and Victoria.

  The US Sunday newspaper comic sections resulted from circulation wars towards the close of the nineteenth century, particularly from the rivalry between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. In December 1897, the Journal published a comic strip that is considered to be the most important strip in the history of comics. Created by Rudolph Dirks, The Katzenjammer Kids took for its inspiration Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz - which had been published in Germany in 1865 and translated in the US in 1871. Not only did the comic have a cast of continuing characters but it soon developed the use of speech balloons to carry dialogue as an integral part of the comic, thus bringing together all of the popular essentials of the strip. Even if other comics can lay some claim to the instigation of the form, The Katzenjammer Kids popularized the medium which remains basically unchanged to the present day. Following this strip were many other significant US comics which included Happy Hooligan, Buster Brown, The Newlyweds, and The Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. From early Australian comic work we know that many of these sections reached this country.

  In Australia, artists had been experimenting with the comics form since the middle of the 19th century. The Melbourne Punch Almanack for 1859 carried a tale, The Great Moral History of Port Curtis, in Twelve Chapters - with each chapter/panel appearing on a separate page. The melodramatic story gave highlights of a journey by Mr Toodles, Jr and some panels contained speech balloons - but it was the text below the panels that carried the story.

 

  Commencing around the 1870s, Thomas Carrington started contributing negative (white outlines on a black background), four-panel comics to Melbourne Punch. While the layout of these comics was closer to the accepted comic format and there was often dialogue within the panels, again it was the text below the panels that gave the illustrations meaning. The comics contained no continuing characters or theme and were usually based on current affairs or topical preoccupations. Carrington’s ‘comics’, which continued for many years, were a variation on the silhouette drawings favoured by many artists in the late nineteenth century.

  From the 1880s onwards, The Bulletin started using the comic strip format as one of its regular features. Initially, they were a series of free drawings in the one panel, without speech balloons but, often, with text inside the panel. The legendary Livingston Hopkins (‘Hop’) and Phil May, along with T. E. Coles and others, experimented with the medium to the point where they were accomplished at drawing the pantomime strip and with formal panel divisions. Like Carrington, The Bulletin artists tended to favour current affairs as a theme but still found a place for simple comic humour.

  Commencing with its first issue in May 1907, The Lone Hand brought readers Norman Lindsay’s delightful comic strips featuring his bears, Billy Wattlegum and Tommy Topbough. Although the panels weren’t formalized and the dialogue was not enclosed in balloons, they were clearly identifiable as comic strips and represent the first systematic use of the medium by an Australian artist. As well as using koala bears as boxers, punters and politicians, Lindsay drew comics about other animals and children - often in the pantomime style. The remarkably talented Lindsay made his reputation in other areas of the arts and it is to be regretted that he did not engage deeper in the field of comics, particularly in the days of coloured comic sections.

  Coloured comics first appeared in The Comic Australian, two weeks after the magazine made its appearance on 7 October 1911. The weekly issues contained stories, jokes, poetry and, usually, had a minimum of four pages in colour. More importantly, it used comic strips on a regular basis, often three to four pages in each issue, and made extensive use of speech balloons.  With the odd exception, the strips were not particularly original in concept and The Katzenjammer Kids was a favoured derivative source. Not only did they borrow the facial characteristics of Hans, Fritz and The Captain but they took the theme of mischievous boys whose pranks were often cruel and violent. Hugh McCrae, who had drawn the magazine’s first comic, named his characters Jim and Jam while Nelle Rodd chose Jack and Jim for her Dirks’ imitations.

  The comics featured koala bears, kangaroos, farm life, surfing, bushrangers, con men and, always, plenty of action. Apart from McCrae and Rodd, Harry Julius was an early contributor of comics and cartoons were contributed by the young Jim Bancks. The Comic Australian ceased publication in June 1913.

  In May the same year, the Perth Western Mail commenced running comic strips, initially unsigned, by May Gibbs. The early work was amateurish but as the months progressed, the distinctive Gibbs style could be seen emerging. With no central characters, Gibbs ranged through a variety of topics including The Pommy, Imagination and Reality, The Animal Ball, The Henpecked Husband, and Do We Resemble Animals? The comics finished in December but Gibbs was to make her mark on the medium in the following decade.

  While the establishment newspapers virtually ignored comic strips, one of the radical papers saw them as a medium to promote their philosophy. The International Socialist began its weekly publication in 1907 as an organ for the International Socialist Club of Sydney. The monotony of the text on its broadsheet pages was only relieved by an editorial cartoon, two columns wide on the front page.

  The paper’s main cartoonist was Zif Dunstan but a number of anti-war cartoons were contributed by the 17 years old Syd Nicholls. On 19 July 1913, Dunstan introduced a continuing comic strip character with The Adventures of William Mug. William Mug represented the socialists’ view of the average working man; an abused, down-trodden wretch who did not recognize the virtues of socialism. In the first panel of the introductory strip, Mug is shown in patched trousers pondering his financial problems as his wife complains about the lack of money while his son asks for new boots. Mug moves onto a Domain-like area where he is swayed by a Liberal speaker’s promises of ‘good times’ and is then converted by similar promises of ‘prosperity’ by a Labor speaker. In the final panel he hears the claims of the Socialist speaker (‘These evils must and will prevail under the present Capitalistic system. ’) and dismisses him with ‘Gam, yer red-ragger.’ The comic’s message was clear - there was little difference between Liberal and Labor and while Socialism had the answer the public was not intelligent enough to see it!

  The following week, William Mug was delighting in a ‘six bob a week’ increase granted by the Wages Board only to see the landlord increase his rent by five shillings and the cost of groceries, meat, milk, and clothing increase. When his wife says that the increase in wages has not assisted them, Mug responds with what was to become his regular lament, ‘There’s something wrong somewhere’. While applicable to Mug’s predicament, the thought belonged to the English rationalist-philosopher Richard Carlile, who had expressed the same view almost one hundred years before.

  The comic directed its barbs at politicians, big business, conscription, the Fair Rent Bill, royalty, the police and the judiciary, snobbish class values - and always the hero would proclaim, ‘There’s something wrong somewhere’. And often his small son, with his nose buried in a copy of the International Socialist, would chime in with, ‘Listen to this bit, Dad’. Obviously, the hope of socialism lay in the young.

  Although he failed to appear at various times or found himself re-located in a single panel cartoon, William Mug continued as a comic strip until 26 September 1914. After that date he found himself continuing to appear (in likeness if not always in name) in most Zif cartoons until June 1917 when both the comic and its creator disappeared from the pages of the paper. Shortly afterwards the International Socialist reverted to all text.

  By contemporary standards, the work of Zif Dunstan is stiff and crude but he was a pioneer in the development of the comic strip format in this country, From the beginning he used continuing characters, speech balloons, action lines, and progressed the narrative in a manner (no matter how unsubtle) that left no doubt as to the point of his statement, Many of the comic artists who followed him, though infinitely superior draftsmen, never achieved Dunstan’s basic understanding of the medium. Because of the singular point of view and the limited circulation of the International Socialist, Zif Dunstan’s contribution to the field has remained unrecognized. Very little is known about the man himself.

  As 1920 approached, Australia could look back on some brief forays into the field of comics but it could not look back on an established tradition in the field. Possibly the country’s isolation, a general lack of familiarity with the medium, and the intervention of World War I combined to retard the growth of comics. Also, with the introduction, in England, of such titles as Puck, Chuckles, Butterfly, Funny Wonder and Sparks, people automatically associated comics with something for children, The thought of being connected with what was considered a childish diversion might well have dissuaded many artists and editors from experimenting or testing the potential of such visual communication.

  In terms of ability, only Lindsay stood out as having the standard of draftsmanship and understanding of the medium comparable with the best work coming out of Europe and the US. There seems little doubt that Hopkins, May and others had the artistic skills to produce quality comics but they were either not interested in exploring the medium or were compromised by the ‘childish’ aspect.

All of these things were to change in the following decade.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

HERE COME THE COMICS

 

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, comic strips established themselves firmly in America and Europe. Along with the established strip The Katzenjammer Kids, US readers were able to follow and laugh at the exploits of Richard Outcault’s Buster Brown, Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, C. W. Kahles’ Hairbreadth Harry, ‘Bud’ Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and her Pals, George McManus’ Bringing up Father, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Frank King’s Gasoline Alley and many other strips. England had Herbert S. Foxwell’s Helpful Horace, Charles Folkard’s Teddy Tail, Austin Payne’s The Adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, and were about to be exposed to the long-running bear, Rupert. France, Germany, Sweden, Canada and Argentina were all publishing indigenous comics in local newspapers and magazines.

  Despite the growth and increasing acceptance of comic strips overseas, Australia had to wait until 1920 to experience its first regular strip to reach a wide audience. The legendary Smith’s Weekly had begun publication in March 1919 and the early issues gave no indication that this paper would become the showcase for a remarkable array of skilled cartoonists. Alek Sass, Cecil Hartt, Charlie Hallett and Stan Cross handled the bulk of the early cartoons - though there was nothing bulky about the volume of their output in the first year.

  On the recommendation of Errol Knox (later Sir Errol), Smith’s imported samples of various comic strips from the US, including, The Gumps. Drawn by Robert Sidney Smith, The Gumps was a continuing, domestic soap opera whose popularity in the US reached such heights that, in 1935, Smith was given a $1 million contract only to be killed in a car crash some hours later. As Smith’s policy was to print all Australian material, there was no intention of publishing the imported strips but, rather, to use them as a guide to a form of cartooning that was relatively new to the country. Only once in their 31 years of publication did Smith’s allow a foreign strip into their pages. This was in 1938 when Otto Soglow’s77ze Little King appeared for a brief period.

  Stan Cross was selected to explore the possibilities of this new medium and on 31 July 1920 he ran a trial strip, The Man Who Waited. The following week Smith’s published the first episode of a strip that was to make Australian comic strip history. For the first 20 years of its life the comic was known as You & Me. Today the characters from this strip survive under the pen of Jim Russell and are known as The Potts. Initially, the strip only featured the characters who were to become known as Pott and Whalesteeth and was designed as a means of offering political comment. This aspect was short-lived and Cross was asked to continue the comic as a domestic humour strip in the vein of The Gumps. While Cross did convert it to a domestic humour strip, it never developed the soap opera line of the overseas strip. Mrs Pott was introduced in November and with her came the marital scraps and slanging matches that were to characterise the comic under Cross. John Pott, as he is now known, was originally called ‘Pot’. The name was derived from the rhyming slang which had gained wide popularity just after the end of World War I and in which ‘the old pot and pan’ translated to ‘the old man’. There was no formal title for the strip - instead, Cross would letter You & Me ox Me & You inside the panels, depending on the location of Pot and Whalesteeth within the strip.

  In terms of drinking, arguing, swearing and displays of bad temper, You & Me remains unique in Australian Comic history and pre-dated many aspects of the anti-social Andy Capp by almost 40 years. While the Pot household had a telephone and the newly introduced radio, it was obvious that the inhabitants were working class and lived under the somewhat spartan conditions of the period. Pleasures were few and far between - except for the escape into ‘alcoholic beverages’, as they were called. In an era when many women accepted the husband’s right to come home ‘under the weather’ (though, in the case of Mrs. Pot it was not always accepted silently!), Pot managed to avail himself of that right with regular frequency. More often than not, his drinking companion was the tall, thin, sharp-featured Whalesteeth - named in honour of the prominent display of teeth that overwhelmed his lantern-jaw. In the true tradition of mateship, when it came time for Cross to leave this strip he took this character with him where he survived in a new strip under another name.

  Recognized as one of the finest cartoonists this country has produced, Stanley George Cross was born in Los Angeles, California in 1888. His English parents had married in Australia and returned here to settle in Perth in 1892. Cross was a brilliant schoolboy scholar who left school at 16 and joined the Railways Department as a cadet clerk. After taking an art course at Perth Technical College, he resigned from his job to spend a year in London studying at the St Martins School and other studios and during which time some of his cartoons were accepted by Punch. On returning to Perth he contributed freelance drawings to the Western Mail and Sunday Times until Robert Clyde Packer induced him to join the staff of a new newspaper, Smith’s Weekly.

 

 

 

  Over the next 20 years Cross established his reputation as a remarkably skilled draftsman, particularly in the area of the single-panel cartoon. One of his cartoons (‘For gorsake stop laughing

- this is serious!’) published in 1933 has been hailed as the most famous in the history of Australian comic art. While pursuing excellence in this traditional area he did not ignore the comic strip and, in 1928, he added another strip to Smith’s line-up. Smith’s Vaudevillians came on stage that year and introduced the mis-matched pair of Rhubarb, a sailor who wanders through the strip in a continual alcoholic fog, and Norman, a fop who didn’t mind playing the straight-man to tottering partner. This strip also passed to Jim Russell when Cross departed late in 1939.

  The strip that was to become known as Oigle first appeared in Smith's in September 1925. As was so often the case with Smith’s, the strip was originally untitled and remained so until the late ’30s. But once the artist, Joe Jonsson, introduced a cheeky little boy with such an outrageous name, everyone called the strip Oigle. In later years,

Oigle was to survive the death of Smith’s Weekly when he emerged as a character in Jonsson’s Uncle Joe’s Horse Radish.

  Smith's carried other strips including Ask Bill. He Knows Everything by Hartt and an untitled ‘digger’ strip by Frank Dunne but it is possible that their use of comics might have remained limited had it not been for the publication of a coloured comic section by the Sydney Sunday Sun. The success of this comic section and the resultant popularity of a red-headed urchin proved a catalyst in changing the appearance of our newspapers, particularly those that were published weekly. The daily newspapers would not be affected to any degree for another 15 years.

  On 9 October 1921 Associated Newspapers Ltd introduced a Sunbeams Page. Under the guidance of Ethel Turner, this page was a collection of stories, poetry, drawings and letters from the children who read the paper and it gave no hint of what was in store for this particular section. On 13 November the section blossomed into colour and introduced four comic strips to the readers. The first broadsheet page was the work of David Souter and was devoted to the activities of Weary Willie and the Count de Main in a strip called//? the Days Work while the second page contained an anonymously drawn eight-panel strip, Billy Bimbo. The back page was shared by Us Fellers, by Bancks, and a strip by Will Donald with the extended title of Ebineesor Crump, Booney Bunch, and Squasher the Dog on Australian Defence!

  Souter’s characters were an ill-assorted pair on appearance but most compatible in their outlook of avoiding a day’s work. The following week Bancks drew In the Day’s Work while it was Souter’s turn to come up with a lengthy, all-descriptive title - Sharkbait Sam & How Beautiful Chrysallis Grubb Won his Heart! Chrysallis was an attractive, well-to-do, modern miss of the period while Sam was a none-too-bright beach lair, intent on impressing the girls. Souter drew whichever of the strips took his fancy and, on a number of occasions, had the characters of both strips appearing in the same comic, creating the first example of a‘crossover’ in this country. On 19February 1922 Souter became, possibly, the first Australian comic strip artist to break the confinement of the panel borders when he had Sharkbait Sam, in the second deck of panels, dive from a surfboard to rescue Willie who was floundering in the waves in the deck below.

  Aged 59 at the time of his entry into the comic strip field, Souter had established a reputation as an outstanding cartoonist. His very fluid and flexible line was ideally suited to his lively, farcical strips. More importantly, even though much of his strip humour has not stood the test of time, he appeared to have a natural understanding of the medium and his technique was comparable with many of the more celebrated comic strip artists from overseas. Had he persisted or started earlier, Souter could have gained a reputation for his comic strip work that would have equalled his standing in other areas of art. Unfortunately, Souter’s excursion into comics was brief, lasting only five months.

  The thrust of Donald’s strip was to comment on current affairs, with the last part of the title changing each week. On Australian Defence, Ebineesor observed:

  ‘Yer know, Booney, this ’ere Orstralian Defence is too slow in its operation. If we want to defend ourselves emphatically against the Hordes of Hasia, what the citizens want is a great shock that will make every one of them turn theirselves into a training machine and drill theirselves twenty-eight hours a day, and ask no tea money for overtime.’

  Ebineesor is an old, bearded codger with a red bulbous nose and with the assistance of Booney, a boy scout, he plans to blow-up ‘Fort Dennyson’ with a cannon-bomb (a giant-size fire cracker). In the best tradition of comics, it is Ebineesor who is blown-up, soaked to the skin and left swearing-off involving himself in matters of defence.

  Ebineesor and Company lasted three months and then made spasmodic appearances between Donald’s other comics which included Bungalow Bill and Billabong Bert, Oh! Henry, Gullible Gerty and Cocky Me Boy. It wasn’t until June 1923 that Donald found an acceptable comic formula when he produced Fashionplate Fanny, which was to run until 1931 when it fell victim of the Depression. Fanny appears to have been designed as a genteel, female counterpart of the young ruffian who was careering through the pages of Us Fellers.

  Us Fellers was the vehicle that introduced Australia’s best-known and best-loved comic strip character, Ginger Meggs. The original concept of the strip was to feature a small girl called Gladsome Gladys whose charm and winning ways would, in the final panel, extricate the ‘fellers’ from their predicament. The theme was narrow and restrictive and soon lost its appeal for Bancks who decided to concentrate on developing one of the supporting characters. Although there was a googly bowler in the first strip with the name of Ginger, he did not begin to play a prominent part in the comic until December 1921 and did not get into full stride until the following year. When Mrs Meggs arrived in February and Minnie Peters put in an appearance in March, Gladsome Gladys vanished from the strip and the comic was on its way to becoming a favourite with the Sydney readers. By November 1922 Us Fellers was appearing in the Melbourne Sun and soon moved to other States.

  The first Sunbeams/Ginger Meggs Annual appeared in 1924 and continued to appear for the next 35 years. In 1929 Ginge, as he was affectionately known, began appearing in the London Referee and the same year, under the title of Ginger, began to appear in such US papers as the Boston Post, the Dallas News, the New York Mirror, and the St Louis Democrat. In France he was seen as Pierrot while in South America he was known as El Pibe Arellana (‘The Little Boy Arellana’). Obviously, whatever the difficulties of translation, the presentation and basic philosophy of Ginger Meggs had a wide appeal.

  Born at Enmore, NSW in 1889, James Charles Bancks was the son of an Irish railway worker. On leaving school at the age of 14, Bancks took a position as a clerk/office-boy/lift driver with a finance company but found the work sheer drudgery. Deciding to become an artist, Bancks eventually had some of his work accepted by The Comic Australian in 1913. When further work was accepted by The Arrow in 1914 he was encouraged to submit work to The Bulletin which not only accepted it but offered him a position as an artist at £8 per week.

Bancks accepted the job immediately and remained primarily with The Bulletin until 1922. Throughout this period he was studying art under Dattilo Rubbo and Julian Ashton and supplying freelance cartoons to the Sunday Sun. Aware that the Sunbeams comic section was imminent the editor, Monty Grover, suggested that Bancks draw a strip and that it should relate the adventures of Gladsome Gladys. Bancks followed the editor’s suggestion but, fortunately, beguiling little girls of irresistible charm were not Bancks’ cup of tea.

  Under Bancks’ pen, Ginge became the lovable, eternal schoolboy with all the shortcomings inherent in the young. Drawing on his own boyhood, Bancks was able to capture all the character, warmth and charm of a typical Australian boy. Ginge’s homespun philosophy and observations on life were a delight and represented an aspect of the strip that was never duplicated by his many imitators. For Ginge, life was meant for playing sport, going to the pictures, attending birthday parties or picnics, and for gobbling down ice cream, cakes and fruit. He viewed school, homework and helping around the house as diabolical plots intended to deprive him of the real pleasures of life.

  Ginge’s father, John Meggs, was a reflection of Bancks’ own father whom he described as being ‘magnificently inefficient’. Again, the plump Sarah Meggs of the perennial yellow dress with red polka dots was a reflection of Bancks’ mother. According to Bancks she was ‘a powerful and purposeful woman’ and, like Mrs Meggs, the stabilizing force of the family.

  Minnie Peters always wore a red-striped gingham dress and carried an anachronistic hand-muff. Her main purpose in life seemed to be to get Ginge to attend Sunday School and have him become a gentleman. Unless Ginge could see some advantage flowing from it, Minnie was wasting her time.

  Ginge lived with the ever-present fear that he would encounter Tiger Kelly who would give Ginge an unmerciful hiding. And he ran foul of Tiger Kelly quite regularly. Tiger represented the bullies of our childhood and though Ginge bested him on occasions it was usually With the assistance of some outside source. Where Tiger was older and much bigger than Ginge, Eddie Coogan was the same size. Coogan (a rival for Min’s affections) and Ginge sometimes traded blows but they spent more time calling one another names such as ‘microbe’, ‘wart’ and ‘lop-eared toad’.

  Ginge’s companions were his young brother, Dudley, his monkey, Tony, his mate Benny along with Raggsy, Ocker Stevens and Cuthbert Fitzcloon. As well as containing a myriad of background characters generating movement, the strip played host to many prominent figures including ‘Smithy’ (Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith) and ‘The Don’ (Sir Donald Bradman). Although the strip soon became popularly known as Ginger Meggs, the title Us Fellers was retained until 1939.

  While Us Fellers soon became the feature attraction in Sunbeams, by the middle of 1922 the balance of the pages were filled by a series of one-shot titles or short-lived strips. There were comics by Arthur Mailey, Syd Miller, Harry J. Weston, Percy Lindsay, Olive Fisher, Lance Driffield, Garnet Agnew, Len Reynolds, Harry Julius, Muriel Feldwick, Jack Waring, George Little, Joe Jonsson, Jack Baird and many others. The new medium appears to have attracted most of Sydney’s cartoonists both established and aspiring. But it was Us Fellers and, to a lesser degree, Fashionplate Fanny that were to be the paper’s main attractions until the early ’thirties.

  By late 1922 the appeal of comics and the success of the Sunbeams section could not be ignored and other Sydney papers slowly introduced strips. The Sunday Times relied heavily on imported strips

- Mutt and Jeff, Hairbreadth Harry, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn by Clare Victor Dwiggins (‘Dwig’), and In the Land of Wonderful Dreams by Winsor McCay. The reprints of McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland that appeared in the Sunday Times in 1924 had originally been published in 1911 and gave credence to the claim of local artists that they were being disadvantaged by cheap, dated syndicated material. For the first few years the only recognizable local strip was The Crazy Crew of the Catfish drawn by Harry Julius. With its crew of the Captain, Auntie, Dick Dead-Eye and Jim the Cabin Boy, the strip was one of a number of imitations of The Katzenjammer Kids that emerged in this country. Another strip, Charlie & The Kids, capitalized on the popularity of Charlie Chaplin and is thought to have been the work of George Little.

  In February 1925, the Sunday Times introduced a new section which featured all Australian artists. Smiler was a schoolboy strip by Julius that followed the English technique of using text below the panels in addition to speech balloons; Betty and Bill, a comic for younger children by Ruth Vickery, used the same technique. In August the section was given the title Pranks and while Betty and Bill survived the change new strips were added - The Strange Adventures of Percy the Pom (later called Percy Plantaganet) by Wynne W. Davies, Fish and Chips by Norman McMurray, and The Two Rogues by L. de Koningh. Like all comic sections of the period, Pranks was restricted to three colours and included riddles, jokes, drawings and short stories. From as early as 1923 the Sunday Times had shown some enterprise in printing extra copies of their comic sections and selling them on the newsstands for a penny-halfpenny. By the time Pranks came along the price had increased to tuppence.

  Pranks was not an appealing section as it lacked characters who had the attraction of Us Fellers, Fatty Finn or Bib and Bub. Therefore, it was not surprising that the paper changed its section, again, in May 1929. This time they produced a winner with a half-broadsheet section in full colour. The entire centrespread was devoted to a family strip, The Daggs, drawn by Alex Gurney. The Daggs’ son, Chippy, soon became the star of the strip and in November the name of the comic was changed to Daggsy and the parents were reduced to the role of spear-carriers. Daggsy entered the scene by picking up Sixpence (T dunno but if that kid ain’t gom an’ dropped Sixpence - I’m a pink eyed Chinaman’.); getting a hiding from the owner for not returning it; getting a hiding from the teacher and being sent home for ‘larrikinism’; and getting, yet another, hiding from his mother for being sent home. In the final panel he ruminated: ‘Gosh, while Mum was belting me - th’ Zack goes an rolls outa the lining of me pants. Three lickin’s for Sixpence. Gee, I’m glad I didn’t go an’ pick up two bob.’

  Gurney had a remarkable way of capturing the idiom of the period and was quite daring in his use of it in strips. Prior to commencing The Daggs, he had drawn a Stiffy & Mo comic for Beckett’s Budget. Possibly the first Australian comic to be based on live characters, the strip abounded in colloquialisms and rhyming slang. It was one thing to use ‘Cheese n’ Rice’, and the Chinese version of ‘Cheeta Cli’ for

Jesus Christ in a journal like Beckett’s Budget that had something of an unsavoury reputation - it was another thing to use ‘Cheeta Cli’ in Daggsy. But Gurney did it.

  Gurney soon gave Daggsy a personality that was comparable with Ginger Meggs and Fatty Finn and added Spadger Williams and Tubby Woodruff as his mates. He also added a talking parrot whose glib and sometimes sarcastic comments added to the humour of the strip. In drawing Daggsy, Gurney used a variation on the ‘poker chip’ eyes favoured by Percy Crosby and Harold Gray by giving his character pyramid-shaped eyes.

  The companion features to Daggsy were Googles and Roving Peter, the latter was drawn by Noel Cook but was replaced after four months by Molly the Mermaid. Norman McMurray introduced Googles as a toddler but quickly aged him to the point where he was attending school and becoming involved in the same pranks and activities as other ‘kid’ strips of the period. With Molly the Mermaid, Ruth Vickery moved closer to the world of May Gibbs by involving Molly (who eventually lost her tail in favour of legs) with the Australian bush creatures. She even added the hand-lettered, doggerel verse executed in a manner that was favoured by Gibbs.

  These strips had a short life as the Sunday Times, after 35 years of publication, became one of the many papers to fall victim to the Depression when it ceased publication in June 1930.

  Following a series of experimental black and white strips by Syd Nicholls (Doug) and Frank Jessup (The Man Who Waited), the Sydney Sunday News published a comic section in January 1923, which featured Pup’s Progress by Aub Aria and Marmaduke by Jessup. With his comic the 39-year-old Jessup established a theme of whimsical fantasy that was to characterize all of his later comic work. A young child and an elderly gentleman would literally float through a series of adventures in the outback or some imaginary country - always being transported through the air by a car or a boat with a propeller on the front. Aided by his Uncle Bill of the Bogan River, Marmaduke spent most of his time chasing or escaping from the Walrus, a villain with a long, droopy moustache. Pup’s Progress was an animal strip that represented some of the earliest work by Aria. Another strip in the section was The Australian Clancy Kids drawn by the American cartoonist Percy Crosby, better-known for his Skippy strip. By adding the ‘Australian’ the publishers were, clearly, trying to present the strip as a home-grown product.

  On 16 September the Sunday News started producing their comic section in three colours and introduced two new strips, Fat and his Friends by Nicholls and Baby Bear and Curley Hair by Cyril Samuels. Nicholls’ strip was specifically designed to compete with Us Fellers which was just starting to hit its stride. A corpulent, almost bald, nasty schoolboy after the style of Billy Bunter, Fat was usually the butt of his friends’ jokes. In fact, he had very few real friends in the early days of the strip. Those early strips exhibited much of the cruelty practised by children and reflected a school system that believed in corporal punishment. On 10 August 1924 the title of the strip was changed to Fatty Finn, heralding a change in the strip’s direction and the role of the main character. Over the next few years, Fatty gradually lost weight as well as gaining a boy scout uniform, a dog (‘Pal’), a goat (‘Hector’), and permanent supporting characters including Headlights Hogan, Lollylegs, Bruiser (the counterpart of Tiger Kelly), and Mr Claffey the policeman. Fatty adopted a more heroic role and the comic moved closer to the standard ‘kid’ strip with a distinct Australian flavour.

  Fatty’s popularity was such that a film called The Kid Stakes, featuring Fatty and Hector, was made in 1927. Today, this film is considered something of a classic and the director, Tal Ordell, showed unusual skill in translating the then new medium of comics into live action films. The film also contained a segment showing Nicholls at his drawing board, creating his characters. Further popularity followed and three coloured Fatty Finn Annuals were published during 1928-30.

  By the late 1920s Fatty Finn had become, perhaps, the most visually pleasing strip in the country. Nicholls’ fine draftsmanship and experimentation with long sweeping panels and tall, column-like frames were complemented by vibrant colouring. On 10 June 1928 a new dimension was added when Nicholls introduced an adventure theme by involving Fatty in fanciful tales of pirates, cannibals, and highwaymen. While Fatty was drawn in the traditional cartoon style the other characters were depicted in a realistic manner akin to a combination of animation and live-action films. In fact, Nicholls was pioneering the adventure-continuity strip that was unheard of in this part of the world. The editor was not impressed with this departure from traditional humour and Nicholls reverted to the accepted style of comic. But the adventure theme was still ticking away in his mind and he introduced another adventure sequence in June 1929. After further discouragement from the editor, Nicholls resolved to develop a separate comic in which he could indulge his attraction towards this new approach to the medium and began work on Middy Malone.

  Sydney Wentworth Nicholls was born at Frederick Henry Bay, Tasmania in 1896 with the surname of Jordan. He adopted his stepfather’s name when his mother remarried in 1907. Nicholls attended a wide variety of schools in NSW and New Zealand before taking his first job with the printing firm of W. E. Smith in 1910. At the same time he began seven years study under Norman Carter and Dattilo Rubbo at the Royal Art Society. His first published work appeared in the International Socialist when he was 16 and by the time he was 18 he was having cartoons accepted by The Bulletin.

  Politically committed, Nicholls contributed cartoons to Direct Action, the organ for the International Workers of the World. In 1914, one of these cartoons (‘Long Live The War! Hip, Hip, ’Ooray! Fill ’Em up Again!’) was instrumental in the paper’s editor, Tom Barker, being sentenced to 12 months in jail for publishing material prejudicial to recruitment. Understandably, the young artist experienced problems in selling his cartoons to the establishment press and drifted into designing art titles and posters for motion pictures. Over the next five years he was responsible for the titles and poster for The Sentimental Bloke, the various films of ‘Snowy’ Baker, and in 1920 visited the US to study art-title designs for motion pictures.

  He joined the Evening News as senior artist where the managing editor, Errol Knox, asked him to produce a strip to compete with Us Fellers. During his time at the News, Nicholls employed and encouraged Aub Aria and was responsible for the publication of May Gibbs’ Bib and Bub.

  Bib and Bub first appeared in the Sunday News in August 1924 after Nicholls had convinced Knox of the strip’s unique qualities. Apart from a brief spell in 1932 the comic survived a number of newspaper mergers and ran continuously until 1967 and was the most successful of any strip (local or imported) aimed at very juvenile readers. May Gibbs adopted the European comic strip format of no speech balloons and text below each panel. For many years the doggerel verse text was hand-lettered by Gibbs but, in time, this gave way to typesetting.

  Bib and Bub was adapted from Gumnut Babies in which Gibbs, in her unique style, immortalized the Australian bush, its creatures and the faery lore of the continent.

  Cecilia May Gibbs was born in Surrey, England in 1876. She came to Australia aboard the Hesperus in 1881 and her family eventually settled near Harvey, Western Australia. Gibbs began drawing as a small child and was advised and encouraged by her father who was a gifted amateur artist. She soon developed her love for the Australian bush and its animals and often invented stories about them to entertain younger children. After completing her education she went to London around 1896 with her mother - the first of many such trips. Gibbs spent eight years studying at the Cope and Nichol School, Chelsea Polytechnic and the Henry Blackburn School of Black and White Art. The poverty, cruelty and richness of London made a deep impression on her causing her to write and illustrate her first book, About Us, which was published in Bavaria in 1912.

  When she returned to Australia she settled in Sydney and by 1914 was earning money doing quick sketches of soldiers departing for World War I. In 1916 Angus and Robertson published her best-known book, Gumnut Babies. This was followed by Gum Blossom Babies (1916), Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918), Little Ragged Blossom (1920), Little Obelia (1921), and a host of others over the years.

  From 1926 until 1931, Gibbs had the unique distinction of having two comics running at the same time, in opposition papers, when she drew Tiggy Touchwood for the Sunday Sun under the signature ‘Sam Cottman’. Her clean, crisp line drawings and soft watercolours were accurate and instructive and she never lost sight of the fact that she was drawing for the very young. While her artwork and themes generally tended to be charming and gentle, the lingering impressions of her London visits made her quite capable of producing some rather frightening characters and situations like those involving The Banksia Men.

  When she died in November 1969, May Gibbs had no children of her own but she had won the love of generations of children with her books, illustrations and comics. She was awarded an MBE for her services to children’s literature and left her estate to UNICEF, The Spastic Centre and Crippled Children.

  As Melbourne had no Sunday newspapers, Us Fellers made its first appearance, in black and white, in a Saturday edition of the Sun-News Pictorial in October 1922. On 24 June 1924 the strip appeared in colour in the Tuesday edition, Fashionplate Fanny appeared in colour in the Thursday edition while Billo and Co appeared in black and white in the Saturday edition. Three comic sections a week! It was almost as if they were trying to make up for lost time in catching up with their Sydney rivals.

  Billo and Co drawn by R. Shaw, was derivative of Ginger Meggs. Apart from his checked cap, Billo look suspiciously like Ginge right down to the waistcoat. But the strip lacked the charm and humour of Bancks’ creation and disappeared in March 1925.

  During the 1923-5 period the Evening Sun appeared in Melbourne. It ran a Sunbeams section that reprinted many of the one-shot strips by Miller, Jonsson, Fisher, Waring, etc. that had originally appeared in the Sydney Sunday Sun. Keith Murdoch (later Sir Keith) had been able to place Jimmy Bancks under contract and he drew political cartoons from the first issue, while continuing to draw Us Fellers and sending it back to Sydney. A great admirer of Bancks’ talent, Murdoch asked him to create another comic strip which resulted in The Blimps. It first appeared in August 1923 on a three-days-a-week schedule and when it went to five days in October it became our first daily newspaper strip. The strip title proclaimed ‘The Blimps - By Bancks, Creator of Ginger Meggs’. Not only did this indicate the popularity of Ginger Meggs but it showed that the name of the character was far more identifiable than the actual name of the strip, Us Fellers. The Blimps was a condensed version of Ginger Meggs. Betty and Benjamin Blimp were the parents; Bingo Blimp was the dog; while the son, Basil Blimp, was really Ginge with blonde hair and a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit. Many of the jokes were either truncated version of those used on Us Fellers or, in some cases, later extended and used in the Sunday comic. The Blimps passed into history in April 1925 when the Evening Sun folded and the Sunbeams section transferred to the morning paper, the Sun-News Pictorial. Bancks also transferred his services to that paper where on 1 June he created the Mr Melbourne Day by Day panel-cum-comic. It was carried on for many years by Len Reynolds and Harry Mitchell.

  When Pup’s Progress finished late in 1924, Aria (who preferred to be called George, rather than his given name of Aubrey) commenced drawing another comic for a new magazine, The Australian Woman’s Mirror. The strip carried no official title but was always referred to as The Aria Kids. It ran across the bottom of the children’s section, Piccaninnies’ Pages, and followed the humorous exploits of a small boy, Bertie. As well as other children, Bertie’s friends included a troublesome cat, Belinda, and a talking bull terrier, Blub. Aria’s style was modelled on that of Syd Nicholls and there was a distinct Fatty Finn look about the comic. The Aria Kids had a large following and ran until 1937 when it was replaced by a series of strips which included Tiger Darrell and Les Such’s Nick and Trix. In 1936, the Woman’s Mirror introduced Australian readers to The Phantom and, commencing in 1937, they reprinted the character annually in comic books until wartime restrictions curtailed their production in 1942.

  While Fatty Finn and Bib and Bub were entrenched in their line-up, the Sunday News decided to alter their comic section. In August 1926, in a large, single frame containing dozens of the characters and animals that had frequented the strip and a self-caricature of himself, Jessup advised the readers that Marmaduke had been discontinued ‘owing to changes in the paper’. One change was that the outer pages of the comic section had gone to full colour in June; another was that Jessup’s strip was to be replaced by a Harry Julius strip, Mr Gink - He Didn’t Think! Basically a domestic comic, the dull-witted Hercules Gink took things on face value. On reading a book(on the superiority of males he would try to institute the principles in his own household and the resultant mayhem would see him exchanging the book for one on the subject of first aid; or a patently transparent ‘Gold Mine’ story by two con men would see Gink willing to hand over £,100 for the privilege of managing the mine. Mr Gink’s stay was short but humorous and in January 1928 he finally gave way to a US strip, Somebody’s Typist. While imported strips had previously appeared in the local papers this was, perhaps, the first time one had replaced an Australian comic and was a sign of things to come.

  In September 1926, William Edwin Pigeon (‘Wep’) had his first comic published. At the time The Trifling Triplets appeared in the Sunday News, Wep was only 17 years old. Another of the many ‘kid’ strips, the comic only ran for nine months and gave no hint that Wep would go on to become an outstanding artist and cartoonist and a multiple winner of the Archibald Prize for portrait painting.

  The Trifling Triplets were replaced by Win Fry’s The Coo Coos which only lasted until September 1927 before being replaced by Harry Eyre’s Micko and his Monk. Like Ginger Meggs’ pet, Micko’s monkey said nothing but dressed in long trousers, jacket, frilled collar and standing almost as high as Micko, the monkey played the role of a surrogate child companion.

  Two other artists of note worked on the Sunday News comic section. Unk White devised the very imaginative Freckles which made its first appearance in October 1928. Freckles was a small boy who became involved with Big Bill Bunkum’s Circus and after being shipwrecked played out a series of adventures (some imaginary) on an island populated by one native and a large litter of cats! With such a background it is not surprising that Freckles was one of the most amusing comics of the period. The strip’s appearance was enhanced by the use of large panels (using eight panels per broadsheet page instead of the usual 12), an original approach to colouring, White’s vivid imagination, and the use of the largest onomatopoeia lettering that had been used in this country. When Freckles’ cow bellowed, ‘MOO!’ the message was large, loud and clear. Unlike many who were to contribute to the medium, White seemed to have an immediate understanding of the fundamental components of a good comic strip.

  Commencing in April 1929, Will Mahony contributed Nautical Nonsense - a humorous look at life in the navy and drawn in a daily strip format. Although his work was derivative of J. Millar Watt at that time, Mahony’s efforts displayed a competence that was to see him work as a newspaper illustrator and editorial cartoonist over the next 33 years.

  The final comic introduced to the Sunday News line-up was Sylvia Seventeen - a modern-miss strip which was introduced in August and was drawn by Nicholls. The comic disappeared in January 1930 when the Sunday News was merged with the Guardian and the final strip was drawn by an up-coming cartoonist, Jim Russell.

  While accepting the popularity and the need for a weekly comic, for reasons which remain unexplained, Australian newspapers were slow to adopt daily strips. Bancks had created the short-lived Blimps and his Mr Melbourne was to develop into a daily strip in the years ahead, but major newspapers appeared to have no interest in such comics. It took the struggling Daily Telegraph Pictorial to produce the first daily strip of any longevity and it was, probably, introduced only as one of the paper’s many ploys to boost its sagging circulation. Casual Connie made her debut on 19 December 1927 and was drawn by Jack Quayle. As the comic also appeared in the Sunday edition of the paper, it became the first Australian strip to run seven days a week and may have been the first such strip in the world to do so.

  Initially, Connie took the form of a gag-a-day strip centred around the activities of her parents and her boyfriends, Aub and Porgy. The jokes reflected the importance that the younger people placed on surfing, sports cars and attending dances and picture shows and seems to indicate that little has changed in the last 50 years. With none of the inherent problems of a syndicated strip, Quayle had the advantage of using a short deadline. When required, this allowed the strip an air of instant topicality and was used to advantage at the time of major horse races. Quayle was later able to exploit this device with another strip, Perce the Punter. In November 1928, a new element was added when the comic switched to continuity for a period. In following Aub’s problems stemming from betting and becoming involved with a con man, the strip could lay some claims to being our first daily continuity strip. Casual Connie reverted to daily gags in 1929 and continued in that vein until it finished in March 1932.

  Jack Quayle was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1899. He sold freelance cartoons to The Bulletin and Fairplay, a sports paper, before joining the Daily Telegraph to create Casual Connie as well as daily panels Little Mike and Uncle Brightness. After freelancing for a short period Keith Murdoch asked him to join the Adelaide News as an editorial cartoonist in 1934 and while on that paper created another strip, Dora. Except for the name change, Dora was Casual Connie. After 12 years he came to Sydney to join the staff of the Truth and Daily Mirror, where he created Perce the Punter. In 1960 he joined the Daily Telegraph where Perce continued his punting for another two years.

  The ’twenties had seen the emergence of the mass media and for artists like Cross, Bancks and Nicholls it had been a decade that had seen a change in the direction of the original thrust of their artistic aspirations. All had seen themselves as traditional cartoonists following in the footsteps of Hopkins, May, Dyson and company but all had been side-tracked by a fascinating new medium which appealed to both young and old - the comic strip. For all cartoonists, the introduction of comics had provided additional outlets for their talents, over and above the traditional single-panel cartoon. Some came to grips with the medium while others never found out what it was all about. While the odd imported comic appeared, generally, they were free from outside influences and forces and the only competition they encountered was that provided by their fellow artists. That would change in the next decade.

 

CHAPTER THREE

THE DREADED SINDY KATE

As a result of being purchased by Associated Newspapers, the Sunday Guardian was merged with the Sunday Sun in October 1931 and Fatty Finn took his place alongside his old rival, Us Fellers. Also transferred from the Guardian was Bib and Bub and Cyril Samuels’ Oozy Woozy and the Kids which, together with Ginge and Fatty, gave the Sun the most impressive group of locally drawn comics.

  The transfer of May Gibbs’ work caused some problems as her Tiggy Touchwood was already running in the Sun. Both strips appeared for a period until April 1932 when Bib and Bub was dropped in favour of Noel Cook’s Peter. Tiggy Touchwood, a sow with magical powers, continued for a year until Bib and Bub returned to claim its rightful place and absorb the character of Tiggy into their strip.

  Still fascinated by the adventure theme, Syd Nicholls went to the US in 1931 with the hope of selling his newly developed Middy Malone, a story of pirates and adventure on the high seas. He left behind a backlog of Fatty Finn strips, many of which were re-scaled by Aria to suit the reduced half-page format. At one stage, Middy Malone was sold for $500 per week with the idea of using it as a weekly advertising strip, but the syndicate dropped the idea when it feared a law suit from the sponsors of a new radio programme using a pirate theme. Nicholls stayed in the US for a year and during that time had to take various jobs to supplement his income. One job was the ghosting of Ad Carter’s Just Kids comic, which ran from 1923 until Carter’s death in 1957.

  Nicholls returned to Australia in August 1932, somewhat embittered by his experience and his inability to break into the US syndication field and began his long agitation against the use of syndicated material in local publications. Fatty Finn made his last appearance in the Sunday Sun on 18 June 1933 after Nicholls had been sacked by the editor, Eric Baume, for no apparent reason. A colleague advised Nicholls not to be too concerned as he would be made an offer for his strip within a week. And he was. The offer, from Frank Packer, was to use the comic in the newly launched Australian Women’s Weekly. The only drawback was that Nicholls was offered one-quarter of the salary he had been receiving. The overtones of conspiracy did little to change Nicholls’ already poor opinion of newspaper proprietors. He started his Fatty Finn’s Weekly in 1934 and when the comic faded moved back into the field of designing motion picture advertisements, where he stayed until the end of the decade.

  Late in 1931, Jimmy Bancks added another character to his range of creations when he produced Napoleon Noodle in daily strip format for the Sunday Sun. Noodle was a short, balding man who was always putting his foot in his mouth and who invariably, found himself the butt of the punchlines. Like many local humour strips both before and after, Napoleon Noodle exhibited the underlying theme in Australian cartoon humour which the critic/cartoonist Vane Lindesay has aptly described as ‘You can’t win’. Bancks had an affection for the character and in one of the rare examples of cross-overs in our comic history, used Noodle in a number of Us Fellers strips. Always looking for avenues to display his graphic humour, Bancks created a new strip in 1933 but the life of Benno the Bear . . . Koko the Cat. . . and Pip the Pup was nowhere as long as its name.

  Early in 1933 the Melbourne Argus joined the newspapers who added Australian comics to their features with the short-lived Adventures of Timothy Tibbs by Harry Hanniford and Betty Patterson’s koala bear strip, The Softfurs. April saw the introduction of M. D. Kinnear’s weekly strip, Wishbone Wisdom, which became the paper’s first strip to run any reasonable time. The comic followed the adventures of Johnny and his magic wishbone which allowed him to talk to the bush animals as well as performing other feats. It was a simple, well-drawn comic aimed at children older than the group catered for by May Gibbs.

  In another attempt to boost their sagging sales the Daily Telegraph introduced a small, half-tabloid, black and white comic supplement in August 1933. The main feature was Bobby and Betty, another strip which must receive consideration as one of our first adventure strips. The story followed the travels of two orphan children as they tried to locate their uncle, a ship’s captain, and then joining him in adventures all around the world. Drawn by Noel Cook, Bobby and Betty clung to the out-dated method of placing minuscule text below each frame though, as the strip progressed, speech balloons were introduced. Despite the old-fashioned format, the strip was well-drawn with great attention being paid to detail and showed a remarkable improvement on the standard of Cook’s work in Peter. The storylines were interesting but, like most strips of the genre, failed to break away from the stereotype image of children who virtually did no wrong. Only Ginger Meggs, it seemed, had the desire to be normal and act in accord with his instincts. Bobby and Betty continued to appear until the Daily Telegraph became part of Consolidated Press and, in later years, was reprinted in comic books.

  The companion feature to Cook’s strip was Harry Campbell’s The Adventures of Brian with the Fairy Folk, which perpetuated the tradition of extended titles. As the name implies, it was aimed at a very juvenile audience and Campbell was far more comfortable as an illustrator than he was in handling this type of strip.

  Wep’s In and Out of Society entered the pages of The Australian Women’s Weekly in September 1933 and brought with it reflections of the image the magazine was trying to promote; the emancipated woman. A dressmaker’s nightmare, the leading lady dominated the strip and most of Wep’s gentle humour saw the male on the receiving end. In and Out of Society continued to run into the ’70s though it was no longer drawn by Wep. In its final months the magazine saw fit to run the same strip issue after issue with only the dialogue being altered. Perhaps this was a comment aimed at those who read comics? Perhaps it was a swing towards the trend that the idea was far more important than the execution? Perhaps it was a device to avoid having to pay an artist? Whatever the reasons, it was a poor reward for Wep whose work on the comic had made it a household name.

  The Melbourne Herald opened its pages to local comics in October 1933. Back in 1923 they had started to use Crosby’s The Clancy Kids and had printed a few experimental strips by Leon Heron on an irregular basis. But there had been no real attempt to capitalize on the emerging form. On 3 October 1933, Mr Foozle made the first of his three times a week appearances. The comic was drawn by Arthur Mailey and reprinted from Associated Newspapers in Sydney. Mailey was an outstanding cricketer who had successfully turned his hand to humour and cartooning but only dabbled in the field of comics. Then on 7 October Ben Bowyang arrived on the scene and continues to be published to this day, making it our longest running daily strip.

The character Ben Bowyang first appeared in the pages of the Herald in 1923 as the bush illiterate who commented on a wide variety of subjects in a series of letters. The ‘letters’ were the work of C. J. Dennis and they gradually built a large following. When it was decided to transfer Ben to the comics, Daryl Lindsay (later Sir Daryl) was given the job of drawing the strip from a script by Dennis. Lindsay prepared a small number of strips but, because of Den’s failure to provide jokes, left the project before publication. Some of these strips were eventually published. Ben Bowyang was then given to Alex Gurney who provided his own gags and it was his version that was published first. Basically, Gurney handled the strip until it was taken over briefly by Mick Armstrong before passing into the hands of Keith Martin, late in the year. Despite his dislike of the strip, Martin continued to draw it until 1939 when it passed on to Alex McRae who drew the comic until his retirement in 1963.

While Ben Bowyang was played out against a rural background, it was never true to the original character - due, no doubt, to the lack of participation by Dennis. Instead, the strip followed a gag-a-day format and gradually fell into a pattern of humour that revolved around a play on words. Most of the activities centred about Ben - a tall, moustached farmer sporting bowyangs - and his short, rotund, bearded friend. Bill Smith. Together with the support of Wilson the storekeeper (‘a mean coot’), Kanga, a battered car and the inevitable parson, they presented the popular concept of country life as seen through city eyes. Yet the strip must have captured some of the flavour of country attitudes as, apart from appearing in all capital cities, it was sold to many provincial papers.

  On 4 August 1934 the Argus introduced a daily adventure strip aimed at adults. Drawn by Reg Hicks (‘Hix’), Out of the Silence was an adaptation of Erie Cox’s novel of the same name which had first appeared as a weekly serial in the Argus during 1949. Cox had originally written Silence between 1913 and 1916 but had not been able to find a publisher. Starting in 1925, it was eventually published in book form in Australia, England, America and there were said to have been French and Russian editions.

  Regarded as a science fiction classic, Silence told the story of a huge sphere Alan Dundas discovered buried on his property. The sphere contained the records of the accumulated knowledge of a civilization that had perished 27 million years before. It also contained the body of the remarkably beautiful Earani - a veritable superwoman, placed in a state of suspended animation and committed to remaking the world in the image of her own civilization. The story follows the attempts of Dr Richard Barry to forestall the plans of Earani and the infatuated Dundas for world domination. Throughout the story popularly held racial bias was expressed and it was this aspect that has seen publishers and other media avoid the property since it was last published in 1947.

  Silence was the first Australian adventure strip of any consequence and followed the earlier format of no speech balloons and typeset text below each panel. As much of the original novel was based on lengthy dialogues and static situations, this format allowed the strip to remain basically true to Cox’s story. Though stiff and unpolished, by contemporary standards the artwork was adequate. Out of the Silence finished in December 1934 but Hicks was to continue drawing strips such as Robinson Crusoe and The Deerslayer until he joined the Melbourne Age in 1936.

  By the mid-thirties, the sale of syndicated material was making a marked penetration into the Australian market. The biggest impact was being made by the Yaffa Syndicate which had been established by David Yaffa in 1928, basically to distribute material from King Features Syndicate. For the Artists Ball in August 1935, the local writers and artists decided to go to print on the matter and published a small newspaper titled Syndicated Weakly. While the paper was ‘a protest against American and English price-cutters doing (our) work’ most of the barbs were aimed at Dave Yaffa. The masthead showed and American eagle with a firm grip on Australia and the legend ‘Above all - floor Australia’ and the price of the paper was conspicuously reduced from 5c to Vid. Bave Baffa’s Bargain Basement offered to fill newspapers at ‘Dynamite Prices!’ and satirical articles about celebrities (including Mr Winston Churchill) being willing to write for 1s. 4 ½ d. per column. Syd Nicholls satirized the King Features’ strips with Seed Gordon and Manflake the Magnificent and Mugs Aginnus (Muggs McGinnis); Stan Cross drew Mickey Louse (Mickey Mouse)', Joe Jonsson drew Slim Biler’s Muck (Tim Tyler’s Luck)', Dan Russell poked fun at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not', while Virgil Reilly got in his licks at Feg Murray’s Seeing Stars. They could not be accused of being subtle but they did make the point. But their protest didn’t alter the situation. ‘Sindy Kate’, as the paper called the syndicates, went on her merry way and there was little the artists and writers could do.

  In 1936, as part of an agreement not to publish an evening newspaper in Sydney, Frank Packer (later Sir Frank) and Ted Theodore had acquired the ailing Daily Telegraph from Associated Newspapers. Over the years, in an effort to make it a viable proposition, the paper had undergone various changes in name and format including its conversion to tabloid and the name Daily ?Telegraph Pictorial. From the first Consolidated Press issue on 23 March, the paper was returned to broadsheet and an entire page was devoted to new comic strips to support Pop and Mickey Mouse, which had been running in the paper for some years. While comic strips had previously occupied full pages in local newspapers they had never done so on a daily basis.

  Leading the new strips was Brick Bradford, the US strip which Packer had introduced into Fatty Finn’s Comic back in 1934. A number of daily strips were joined together to make a most impressive double-deck presentation. This was followed by Ben Bowyang (retitled Gunn’s Gully) and two double-deck strips by Australian artists - Prisoner of the Mirage by Syd Miller and Dick Dean, Reporter by Noel Cook. These strips represented the first genuine adventure-continuity strips to appear in Australian newspapers, as they used text and speech balloons all inside the panels. The two-tier format was a startling innovation and appears to have been some 40 years ahead of the rest of the newspaper field. The first daily, two-tier strip, Star Hawks, did not appear in the US until October 1977.

  The hero of Prisoner of the Mirage was Sturt Sanders, a young Australian flyer, who attempts to find a famous explorer who has vanished in Africa. In the process of his search, he encounters an Arab magician, crocodiles, The Mad Sheik, the Legions of Zomba, lions, leopards, man-eating plants, Elephantmen, and a host of diversions. With six to eight panels per day to move in, the story progressed at a fast clip with Miller excelling in those scenes which appealed to his illustrator instincts, It was an unusually imaginative strip, particularly for the period.

  Dick Dean adopted the usual reporter role of not being content to report on a murder but to solve it, as well. In tracking down the villains, his girlfriend is kidnapped, gangsters make a number of attempts on his life, and he is involved in the traditional car chases. Again, there was plenty of space to keep the story moving. On the early art, Cook was influenced by Alex Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9 which was running, for example, in the Brisbane Telegraph at that time and using the same double-deck as the Brick Bradford strip.

  Despite the trail-blazing nature of these strips they only lasted until May when they were replaced by such US strips as Tim Tyler’s Luck, King of the Royal Mounted, and Bringing Up Father.

  Perhaps it had something to do with his comparative youth but Packer had recognized the dawning potential of comic strips and his clever use of these and other features was instrumental in revitalizing sales of the Daily Telegraph. Up until that time, the Sydney Morning Herald had dominated the morning paper field and was thought to be unassailable. Yet Packer’s paper almost doubled its sales in the first 18 months to 187 610 while the Herald could only manage an increase of 3510 to take their circulation to 226 413 in the same period. A good portion of that increase was due to features - and one of those features was comics.

  It seemed that almost from the day he decided to introduce Mandrake the Magician to the pages of the Women’s Weekly in December 1934, Packer was aware that comics would attract buyers. His involvement with Fatty Finn’s Weekly was undertaken at a time when no other newspaper proprietor would have given a second thought to the project. Throughout his publishing career, Packer was firmly committed to the use of comics in his papers and even named two of his dogs, ‘Mandrake’ and ‘Henry’, after comic strip characters.

 

  The Argus advanced its idea of daily continuity strips a step further in August 1936 when it introduced The Roaring ’Fifties. Where Out of the Silence had located the text outside of the panel the new strip moved it inside. It was an improvement but the large type-face of the text often crowded the illustrations into insignificance and the absence of speech balloons and hand-lettered text gave it the appearance of a story with illustrations, rather than that of a genuine comic strip. Considering that just about every major Australian strip had been using speech balloons since 1920, the avoidance of this technique by the Argus is difficult to fathom. Written by Hermon Gill and illustrated by Bernie Bragg, well-known for his work in the commercial field, the strip lasted 167 episodes.

  In December 1936, the Melbourne Age introduced two daily strips - both written and drawn by Reg Hicks. Willy and Wally was a humorous comic about a small boy and his pet wallaby and the comic often used the continuous background technique that had been popularized by G. Miller Watt in his Pop. Betty and Bob was a continuity strip similar to Cook’s Bobby and Betty except that, in their journeys through various countries, Hicks placed more emphasis on alerting readers to the wonders of nature. With these strips, Hicks became the first local artist to have two daily comics running at the same time and the fact that he handled other journalistic chores as well gives some idea of his prolificacy. Betty and Bob completed their travels on 1 October 1937 and the following day another Hicks comic appeared. Jungle Drums. Eventually this strip adopted the title of The Adventures of Larry Steele and became the first adventure strip of any longevity, lasting until December 1940.

  The improvement in Hicks’ style and understanding of the medium was obvious. From the flat, tentative approach on Out of the Silence, he had developed a crisp, broken-line technique that gave the comic the required feeling of movement. He experimented with panel angles which added dramatic emphasis to the storylines. Larry Steele’s adventures took him to New Guinea, Africa, South America and other points around the globe as he solved mysteries and outwitted spies. Hicks became the first local artist to capitalize on the success and popularity of Australian aviators of the period by using aeroplanes as a regular feature of the strip.

  Reginald Ernest Hicks was born at Kent, England in 1915. He came to Australia with his parents in 1921 and settled in Melbourne. On leaving school at the age of 14, he spent four years learning colour stencil designing and, at the same time, studying music and learning to play the violin. In 1933 he began teaching violin and attending the National Gallery School under Napier Waller and John Rowell. As well as becoming an exhibiting member of the Victorian Artists Society he was supplying freelance caricatures, cartoons, and interviews to various magazines.

  In January 1938, Hicks drew The King’s Treasure which was replaced by The Space Patrol in December. These strips appeared each Friday in The Age’s Junior Section, a half-tabloid booklet that also contained text features. The Space Patrol was our first original science fiction style strip and Captain Rocket Blake was the Australian answer to Flash Gordon. Through 100 episodes Blake battled Black Barok of Mercury, the Marsh-men on Venus, and saved Australia from conquest by the Zio people. It was a comic that bustled with activity.

  While working for the Argus and the Age, Hicks created more newspaper strips than any other Australian cartoonist, yet still found time to freelance and work as a story reader for the Australian Broadcasting Commission and commercial radio. He became a member of Naval Intelligence in 1940 but was released from duty after nine months and joined Associated Newspapers. His long-running domestic humour strip, Family Man, first appeared in the Sun in 1940 and in 1941 the Sunday Sun carried the first episode of his adventure strip, Tightrope Tim.

  Hicks left Associated Newspapers in 1958 and became involved in a number of commercial enterprises but still found time to write and illustrate stories for overseas children’s annuals, design book covers for Hodders and a strip, Debbie, for New Idea. Hicks joined the Adelaide studio of ABC-TV as a graphic designer in 1963 where he remained until his retirement in 1977. A man of many talents, a versatile and prolific artist, Reg Hicks devoted a quarter of a century to comics during which time he helped establish and popularize the adventure strip.

  Through the ’thirties, Smith’s Weekly battled against a declining circulation and in 1938 Harry Cox was brought in as Editor-in-Chief to try and stem the slide. Cox brought with him a number of name writers and ideas for new features, including the introduction of additional comic strips. The new comics started on 9 July with Syd Miller and Jim Russell sharing a broadsheet page.

  Miller’s strip. Red Gregory, revolved around a reporter’s attempt to find an aviatrix kidnapped by the mysterious Glass Men who live beneath the Nullarbor Plains. The story combined science fiction and fantasy as Red Gregory tried to counter the efforts of Mafkah, the Dictator of the underground realm, in his attempts to supplant Princess Mirana’s father as the king of the Glass Men. The imaginative storyline allowed Miller considerable scope for his talent for drawing mysteriously garbed figures, towering monuments, rocket planes, battle scenes, and sensuous Lindsay-like women. He also broke away from the traditional rectangular panel by using both tapered and triangular panels which lent considerable variety to the strip. Red Gregory added to Miller’s reputation as a continuity strip artist and during the war years he revived the character in comic book form.

  Jim Russell found himself in the unusual role of drawing an adventure strip, Inspector Scott of Scotland Yard. Scott was the property of the actor-producer George Edwards (real name Hal Parks) who was a dominant figure in the field of radio programmes. The story appeared to be a visual translation of a radio script and moved at a fast pace with plenty of mystery, action and excitement.

  The paper added Cap'n Yonsson by George Donaldson and Sybil & Sue by Joan Morrison to their long-running You & Me, Oigle and Smith’s Vaudevillians. Cap’n Yonsson was a good, humoured tribute to the Swedish born Joe Jonsson, who had spent many years at sea and had gained a reputation for his sailor cartoons among others. Sybil & Sue simply transferred into strip form Morrison’s beautiful, male-chasing, and often scatterbrain girls. A basic tenet of the paper was broken when it admitted a non-Australian strip, The Little King, to its pages and this was indicative of the panic that had accompanied the drop in circulation.

  Smith’s also added a four-page comic book supplement. The front and back covers of this comic were devoted to another of the George Edwards radio serials, Dad and Dave. Drawn by Stan Cross (and later assisted by Arthur Homer), the strip was a straight adaptation of the serial which had commenced in 1936 and ran for 2276 episodes before finishing in 1951. Under Cross’ deft handling Dad, Dave, Mum, Mabel, Bill Smith, Alf Morton, Annie (from Bongoola), Ted Ramsay, and all of the other Snake Gully characters came to life and for many readers the anonymous radio voices appeared to have features for the first time. When it came to portraying the humorous side of the hard bitten bushman and country life, Cross was a past-master.

  The centre pages of the supplement were given over to yet another Edwards adaptation, David and Dawn. Drawn by Hottie Lahm and coloured by means of a red overlay, the comic was a fantasy aimed at children - a direction far removed from Smith’s traditional thrust. David and Dawn featured a small aborigine boy, Tuckonie, as a supporting character, though he was to become far better known in another Edwards serial, The Search for the Golden Boomerang. The popularity of this serial saw a number of books published in the early ’40s which were also illustrated by Lahm.

  It was an impressive line-up of comics drawn by some outstanding cartoonists - but, along with other features, they could not Wit Smith’s sagging sales. Inspector Scott finished in the December; Red Gregory was hurriedly wound-up in April 1939; and the comic supplement was discarded three months later. Smith’s circulation eventually recovered to a peak of over 300 000 - thanks to an influx of capital and the advent of World War II which provided the right circumstances, again, for a paper that championed the digger.

  When the time came for Packer to lay out the blueprint for the Sunday Telegraph, once again it was comics that were selected as a major attraction and the means of promoting the new paper. Arrangements were made with Acme Colorprint Co. Ltd of San Bernardino, California to print a tabloid colour section of 16 pages and ship them to Australia for inclusion in the paper. In a bold promotion, a sample section was given away in the Tuesday edition of the Daily Telegraph and in the Women’s Weekly in the week preceding the launching of the new paper. The Sunday Telegraph made its debut on 19 November 1939 and Color Comics, as the new section was called, was the largest and most impressive Sunday comic section ever to appear in this country. Featured in the comics were Brick Bradford, Dixie Dugan, Henry, Joe Palooka, The Gumps, Joe Jinks, Fritzi Ritz, Nancy, Li’l Abner, Jane Arden, Reg’lar Fellers, Rod Rian of the Sky Police, The Captain and the Kids, Hawkshaw the Dectective, Buck Rogers, and a number of lesser-known strips. The section also took advantage of the local newspaper tradition of running non-current strips purchased at lower prices - and the copyright dates were carefully removed from these strips. As Consolidated Press was the sole distributor of these sections they were able to bind five copies of the surplus or returned sections into a soft cover and sell them through the newsagents at Is. per copy. It was a trick they had learned from the distributors of Wags, a comic imported for news-stand sale.

  The AJA expressed its concern about the new comic section in letters to the Government. The Sydney Black and White Artists Club wrote to every member of the Parliament pointing to the ‘decay of black and white art and the dispersal of its exponents, unemployment in the printing trades, and the vitiation of the national consciousness’ that would result from the ‘fast-growing practice of publishing in this country American syndicated press copy and drawings’. Regardless of the validity of their claims, they were shutting the door after the horse had bolted as the letter was only sent two days prior to the publication of the Sunday Telegraph and was not read in the Senate until 5 December. The same letter also suggested that success of the imported comic section would mean that ‘other journals in competition will have to follow suit to avoid a severe handicap’. The point was well taken and may have proved correct had it not been for the War which had just started. The introduction of Import Licensing regulations effectively stifled any idea that other newspaper managements may have had towards importing similar fully-printed sections.

  As the leader in this area and almost unopposed, Associated Newspapers were concerned about the entry of Consolidated Press into the Sunday newspaper field. Yet they did little on the comics side to counteract the impressive new section. A token gesture was made two weeks before the new paper appeared when the name of Us Fellers was finally changed to Ginger Meggs, thus recognizing a de facto situation that had existed since the middle of the 1920s. From an artistic point of view the change in title was appropriate as Bancks had just embarked on his most stylish period and the best years of Ginger Meggs were still to come.

  Although there were syndicated comics in their own line-up {‘Speed’ Gordon, Jungle Jim, Connie, Popeye, Prince Valiant) that were likely to be affected, perhaps Associated Newspapers were aware that, within a short period, various import restrictions and regulations would bring Color Comics back to the field?

 

CHAPTER FOUR AT WAR AND PEACE

 

Associated Newspapers watched the obvious success of the Sunday Telegraph’s new comic section for some months before making a move. Nancy Thompson had written a children’s book, Animal Tales for Ann, which had been published in London and named by Peter Belloc, critic on the Daily Sketch, as one of the three best animal books of the year. The success of this book was responsible for the Sunday Sun approaching Thompson to create a new comic strip. In collaboration with Jack Baird, well-known for his paintings of racehorses and other animals, Thompson’s Pip and Emma made its first appearance with a double-page spread on 1 April 1940 and commenced in the Sun-News Pictorial soon afterwards.

  For many years, the comic followed the adventures of Pip and Emma as they journey around the world and with great attention being paid to details relating to backgrounds, clothes, foods and customs. Over the years, the engagingly drawn strip produced many entertaining situations and interesting characters. Two such characters, Tibby Tiger and Eric Elephant, eventually took over the strip when it was reduced to a single deck, gag-strip prior to its disappearance in the early ’fifties.

  The last imported Color Comics (No. 41) appeared on 18 August 1940 and the following week the section was reduced to eight half-tabloid pages and was printed by Consolidated Press. The first Australian comic to appear in the retitled Sunday Telegraph Comic was Alex McRae’s Ben Bowyang which appeared in September. It was simply a coloured version of the daily strip and ran under the name

Gunn’s Gully as it had since the time it first appeared in the Telegraph in 1936. The next change forced by wartime restrictions was the practice of redrawing comics. Because they were no longer allowed to import proofs of overseas comics, the newspapers had their artists copy various strips from tear sheets of comic sections that were supplied. In most cases, the results of the redrawings were lamentable and while many local artist could claim that they had drawn such world famous strips as Brick Bradford, Buck Rogers, Nancy, and Jane Arden they had nothing to boast about. This practice continued up until the late ’forties and saw such strips as Dick Tracy, Miss Fury, and Joe Palooka added to the list of strips mutilated by this process.

  Much the same thing occurred at the Sunday Sun where ‘Speed’ Gordon and Popeye became victims of the redrawing. However, as the Sun dropped many of their US comics and because the majority of those strips printed were locally drawn, the quality of their comic section did not suffer as badly as that of their competition.

  In Melbourne, the Herald and Weekly Times group tackled the war on a humorous level and on a daily basis. Because they were first into the field, Sydney had dominated the area of Sunday comics with many of their creations appearing in newspapers in other states. When it came to daily strips it was Melbourne that had done the bulk of the originating. With such strips as The Blimps, Ben Bowyang, Out of the Silence, Roaring ’Fifties, Betty and Bob, Willy and Wally, and Larry Steele they were a long way ahead of their Sydney counterparts. But, with the exception of Ben Bowyang, they had little success in selling their material in other states. However, that situation was soon to change.

  Towards the end of 1939, Smith’s Weekly was in financial trouble and during the period of uncertainty as to its future Keith Murdoch was able to induce Stan Cross to join his company. To capitalize on the reputation he established as a comic strip artist, Cross was asked to create a new daily strip. Called The Winks, the new strips commenced in the Melbourne Herald on 20 April 1940. For the first three months the strip employed a domestic comedy theme and, in reality, was a toned-down version of You & Me. Mr Wink took over the role of Mr Pott while the tall, thin, long-faced Wally Higgins assumed the role of Whalesteeth. And, in the initial stages, these characters were given their own strip each Saturday, 'Tiddley Winks & Wally. The Winks was only moderately popular until Cross decided to change the strip’s direction and take the main characters into the Army. Mr Winks became Major Winks on 15 July and Wally and the Major was born.

  Cross was at great pains to avoid the popular conception of the Australian soldier that he had seen created during his years at Smith’s. By making his characters part of the home-front army, he was able to unfold his humour at a leisurely pace and there was not the same sense of active participation as generated by other wartime strips. The laconic, saturnine Wally made a limited contribution to the strip, particularly after the arrival of Pudden Benson as Major Winks’ batman. When not playing the role of an obtuse buffoon, the bald, tubby Pudden was often capable of flashes of cunning insight. More often than not, Pudden was the catalyst in providing the strip’s punchlines. The Major was a short, rotund fatherly figure whose previous Army experience qualified him for a commission. One suspects that his battle experience was limited to wielding his pen in the battle of red tape. He was a gentleman of the old school with a middle-class background who had never come to grips with modem attitudes. He was constantly staggered by the assessments delivered by those around him. A highlight of the strip under Cross was the variety of expressions on the Major’s face in the last panel. They ran the full gamut of anger, frustration, shock, disbelief, painful resignation and, occasionally, beaming understanding. Cross 'forte was depicting an appropriate expression with an economy of line. One could well believe that Captain Mainwaring of the television series Dad’s Army was based on the Major. Wally and the Major quickly became a leading strip and was soon running in papers throughout Australia.

  Late in 1940, Alex Gurney began developing his legendary soldier strip, Bluey and Curley. In November 1940 it began appearing in Picture News, a short-lived magazine published by the Herald and Weekly Times. Initially a full-page strip, Gurney saw Bluey as the hard-headed World War I veteran involved with the exuberant new recruit, Curly. Again, the theme tended to revolve around camp activities rather than fighting. When Picture News folded the comic was picked-up by the Sun-News Pictorial who introduced the comic by running a full page of five strips on 1 February 1941.

  Unlike Cross’ strip, Bluey and Curley reflected the popularly held image of the digger as a fighting man without peer but more interested in his beer and gambling; resenting all authority; a confidence man with the ability to laugh at himself; and a ready disciple of the ‘you can’t win’ attitude. More than any other strip, Bluey and Curley gave civilians an insight into the hardships of Army life, the slang expressions of the period, and projected the mood of envy directed towards the more highly paid US soldiers. But all subjects were handled in a gentle, smile-provoking manner -for, while Gurney was not particularly subtle, he was never cruel. His handling of ‘fuzzie-wuzzies’ or ‘boongs’ and their pidgin-English were classics.

  With his protruding nose, long jaw, straight red hair and with a cigarette from his bottom lip, Bluey was usually a foil for his more gregarious mate. Curley, with his baby-face and curly blonde hair was the ladies’ man of the duo, with a girl in every town. The dialogue was pure Australian only lacking the actual swear words to make it fully authentic.

  Alexander George Gurney was born at Portsmouth in 1902. His father died when Gurney was five months old and his mother, who was Australian, brought the boy back to Hobart. Gurney completed his education at Macquarie Street State School at the age of 13 and worked for a short period as an ironmonger. He then served a seven-year apprenticeship as an electrician and during that period commenced art training, attending the high classes at Hobart Technical School. Gradually, he began selling cartoons to the Tasmanian Mail, The Bulletin, Smith’s Weekly and Melbourne Punch.

  Gurney published a book of caricatures of notable citizens, Tasmanians Today, in 1926 and the work brought him to the attention of mainland newspapers. He took a position with the Melbourne Morning Post and when this paper was incorporated in the Sun-News Pictorial late in 1927 he moved to Sydney to freelance. As well as contributing to The Bulletin he created the Stiffy & Mo comic for Beckett’s Budget. During 1928-9 he worked for the Sunday Times and in 1931 he joined, first, The Guardian and then the short-lived Labor paper, The World. When this paper folded in 1932 he went to the Adelaide News and in 1933, finally, found a permanent position as a sporting cartoonist with the Melbourne Herald.

  In 1933 Gurney drew the Ben Bowyang strip for a while before taking Sam Wells’ place as the leader page cartoonist when Wells went to England. On Wells’ return, Gurney set about creating Bluey and Curley. To get an authentic view of army life and humour, Gurney visited many army camps all over Australia and, in 1944, took his sketchbook to Lae, Port Moresby, Ramu Valley and other points in New Guinea where Australian troops were fighting. As a result of this visit, he came down with a bout of malaria in August 1944. The Sun-News Pictorial rationed his strips, running Bluey and Curley on a three-days-a-week basis until he came out of hospital.

  Gurney’s outstanding sense of humour was backed-up by detailed panels containing a great variety of angles and well-balanced figures. Acknowledged as one of Australia’s finest cartoonists, his particular strength was his ability to capture the flavour of the Australian character as seen through the eyes of Australians. Gurney died from a heart attack on 4 December 1955.

  A very nationalistic strip, Bluey and Curley covered all facets of Australian humour. It was at the peak of its popularity during the ’forties but tended to lose some of its appeal and individuality when the characters moved into civilian life. The common enemies of Army life were then missing. Soon after it was released the strip became an outstanding success and, as well as appearing throughout Australia, it also appeared in papers in New Zealand and Canada.

  The success of Wally and the Major and Bluey and Curley was not lost on the management of the Herald and Weekly Times and was, no doubt, instrumental in their post-war decision to develop the syndication of their comic features.

  Reg Hicks returned to the comic pages in September 1940 when he commenced drawing Family Man for the Sydney Sun. Wellington Drax was the plump, bespectacled, pipe-smoking family man who always seemed to come off second best in the verbal encounters with his family. His wife, his daughter Versena, and his small son usually managed to outsmart or outwit him no matter what the subject. There were plenty of chuckles and quite a few belly laughs in this domestic comedy that lasted until the late ’fifties. Using a neat, uncluttered style Hicks again made liberal use of the continuous backgrounds which were to characterize the strip.

  May 1941 saw the first issue of the Sydney Daily Mirror. As well as carrying Bluey and Curley, Dora and such English strips as Jane, Just Jake and Nipper, the paper introduced readers to the enigmatic Boofhead for the first time. Boofhead - drawn by Bob Clark and featuring a simplistically drawn, waistcoated young man with an elongated nose sheltered by a cantilever hair style - was amateurish and the humour mundane. It is difficult to fathom the reasons that this strip attracted readers but there can be no disputing its popularity. It continued to run for 29 years until Clark’s death in 1970; dozens of comic books were published reprinting the strip; it appeared briefly in the Sunday Mirror as a Sunday page (featuring a blonde-headed brother, Goofhead); and it brought back into common usage the term ‘boofhead’ in describing a simpleton or fool.

  Clark was very much aware of the shortcomings of his published art and made a number of approaches to the Mirror with a view to improving it. The management was adamant - neither the artwork nor the humour should be altered in any way. While they could not pinpoint the reason for the strip’s popularity they were not prepared to tamper with a successful formula. Clark, who created Boofhead back in the early part of 1939, was a gentle, quiet man who gave thousands of his original drawings to the Spastic Centre for the children to use in colouring exercises.

   The Sunday Sun added another local strip when on 3 August 1941 it presented Tightrope Tim. The comic was another from the pen of Hicks who had designed it as Associated Newspapers’ offering of wartime realism. Tim Blair and his associate, Major Merridew, worked for the Secret Service and spent most of the war years tracking down German raiders and spies and even working behind enemy lines in Germany. While the Japanese were mentioned as part of early plots, Tim did not actively engage them until late in the war. Drawn in the broken-line style of Larry Steele, Tightrope Tim was notable for its topicality, fast-paced action and the scarcity of women. Despite its wartime origins, the comic continued until 29 May 1949 and set a record as the longest-running continuity strip until that time.

   Adelaide came into the scene briefly when the Mail began publishing Alec the Airman late in 1941. It was a humorous view of life in the Air Force and notable, mainly, for the remarkably geometrically stylized drawings of Lionel Coventry, an outstanding caricaturist. Alec was grounded in March 1942.

  The poor appearance of the Sunday Telegraph Comic forced the company to consider running a local strip specifically drawn for their pages. On 29 February 1942, Nancy stepped aside for Nungalla and Jungalla. Created by Mary and Elizabeth Durack, the comic was the first major attempt to translate Aborigine legends into comic form and to adapt Aboriginal art techniques in both drawings and colour. Elizabeth Durack had illustrated her sister’s Bulletin article on station life with the Aborigines in the Kimberly district and the pair had produced The Way of the Whirlwind, which was published by Consolidated Press in 1941. Nungalla and Jungalla was an excellent early example of how didactic comics could be presented in an attractive and entertaining manner. The stories were suspenseful and interesting; the drawings fresh and unusual; and the vibrant colour in keeping with the theme of the comic. The comic lasted until February 1943 when it was replaced by a redrawn version of Superman.

  Three weeks prior to the departure of the Duracks another Australian strip was introduced. Wanda the War Girl was drawn by Kath O’Brien, a 28 year old artist from Mackay, North Queensland. As a girl she had travelled Australia with her parents while her father prospected for gold, broke horses, and worked in the outback. O’Brien studied at Brisbane Technical College before going to Sydney in 1937 to spend three years with J. S. Watkins. Journalist Bob Slessor knew that the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Cyril Pearl, was looking for a strip to replace Nungalla and Jungalla and suggested to O’Brien that she think about coming up with something. Her idea was a girl in the services to ‘give credit to Australian service girls for the marvellous job they are doing’. Pearl liked the samples and asked her to draw the comic for his paper at £9 per week.

  Wanda was a beautiful redhead and was soon coming to grips with Japanese soldiers and German spies in a sequence of encounters that continually left her clothes in tatters and her long, graceful legs and ample bosom well-displayed. No doubt one of the reasons that Wanda the War Girl took on the trappings of a voyeur’s delight was that it was influenced by the strip it had replaced. Black Fury, drawn by another woman artist, Tarpe Mills. The US strip contained more than its fair share of ladies stripped to their lingerie or less as well as elements of bondage. Also, Norman Pett’s Jane, who had been stripping in an opposition paper, could have proved an inspiration.

  As the strip progressed, O'Brien’s style began to reflect confidence and a leaning towards fashion designing could be detected. Gradually O’Brien developed a unique style which resembled some of the work of William Dobell and represented one of the most original and individual styles ever to appear in Australian comics. The early stories were written by a journalist, C. W. Brain, but O’Brien took over the writing after the war. She based her stories on the books by Ashton Woolfe, head of the French Surete, and combined the methods he detailed with current news items in the papers.

  After the war the strip became Wanda. The heroine involved herself in thwarting black-marketeers, foreign spies, smugglers, and the comic took on the mantle of an adventure/detective strip before it finished in 1951. Not only was Wanda reflective of its period but it was one of the first comics to reflect the female point of view.

  The Daily Mirror did not introduce a locally drawn adventure strip until 8 January 1945. The strip, Jo, was the work of another female artist, this time the 16-years-old Moira Bertram who signed the comic ‘Bert’. Jo was a beautiful, raven-haired dancer who used her magic cape to assist her boyfriend, an American pilot named Serge, to outwit gangsters and the Japanese. The comic only ran for a few months before moving into the comic books published by Frank Johnson and, later, those published by K. G. Murray.

  With the end of the war in sight, the Herald and Weekly Times enticed Syd Miller to discard the Chesty Bond strip and create new material for them. His first effort, Sandra, appeared in the Melbourne Herald in July 1945 as well as other Australian papers, and also appeared in England. Soon, Miller found that featuring a heroine limited him in the type of stories he wanted to present and with the blessing of his management began forging another strip. Sandra finished in November 1946 and was immediately followed by Rod Craig. Again, the strip was syndicated in various Australian states as well as Jamaica, Paris and Buenos Aires. It also became the first local adventure strip to be adapted as a radio serial.

  Sydney Leon Miller was born in Strathfield, NSW in 1901, the son of a newsagent. When he left Fort Street High School in 1916 he worked briefly at an importers before being given the position as a trial apprentice in the process engraving department of The Bulletin. Being surrounded by the best black and white artists of the day inspired Miller to further his interest in art by attending classes at the Royal Art Society. In 1917 he joined Harry Julius who had returned from the US to start Filmads to produce the first animated cartoons made commercially in Australia. He freelanced selling cartoons to The Bulletin, Aussie and in 1920, Smith’s Weekly. Later that year, he was given a contract with Smith’s to draw political, sports and general cartoons as well as writing and illustrating film and stage critiques.

  During the 1930s Miller ran weekly panel features, Curiosities, in the Melbourne Herald, and Nature Notes in the Daily Telegraph. In 1938 he created Red Gregory for Smith’s and the same year collaborated with Ted Maloney of the J. Walter Thompson agency to create Chesty Bond. Miller handled the advertising strip until he joined the Herald and- Weekly Times and the strip passed to another artist. During a wartime sequence of Chesty Bond the inclusion of Bob Hope brought the threat of a £.100 000 damage suit which was finally averted.

  From 1942 to 1945, Miller published many comic books and encouraged many young cartoonists. Starting in 1948 his single column spot, Animalaughs, appeared throughout Australia as well as England, Scotland and South Africa. It was unprecedented for an Australian artist to have two strips being syndicated overseas at the same time.

  In 1955 Miller commenced a new daily strip. Us Girls, which ran until 1957 when he resigned to enter a partnership in the production of TV animation and sound-slide films. He remained in this field until retiring to his copperwork and painting. Not only was Miller a prolific and versatile artist but he is arguably one of the finest and most under-rated this country has produced.

  Rod Craig commenced his comic career as a charter boat operator servicing the Pacific Islands, in company with his friend Cal Rourke and his faithful scottish terrier MacNob. Miller was never one to cling to a theme when attracted by other ideas and soon transferred the setting to the Australian mainland. It adopted the general theme of a detective strip and, as the comic progressed, Craig became a member of Sir Hugh Nette’s Australian Security group. The comic was an excellent example of strips that reflected the thoughts and attitudes of a particular era. The post-war preoccupations with large black-market operations, Nazi war criminals cloaked by a veneer of respectability, secret political organizations, plastic surgery, and the arrival of post-war migrants all found their way into the strip. Like Gurney, Miller had a keen ear for the Australian idiom and much of the Rod Craig dialogue was written in the vernacular. With Miller being greatly influenced by current trends and events and with some episodes being as short as six weeks. Rod Craig was a comic that was constantly on the move.

  Although Craig was the nominal hero of the strip his rather conservative and stereotyped personality was overshadowed by the myriad of supporting characters who vied for space in the strip. There was Geelong, a gentle giant and former circus strongman who became Craig’s friend and replaced Rourke as his assistant. In later years, Geelong played an increasingly important role in the comic while Craig remained in the background. There was Lacy Mist the curvaceous stage assistant to the crooked Cherub Bim and Geelong’s girlfriend; Indigo, the scar-faced security officer and designer of an array of futuristic cars and planes; Head, the crippled dwarf of the One-World Government organization; and the beautiful girls who paraded through the strip including Scourge, Lizette, Opal, and the De Milo twins.

  The blonde Anna (first known as Leeanna, ‘The White Goddess’) was Craig’s girlfriend and, later, his wife. In a bushland setting on 13 October 1952, the wedding represented the first and possibly only example of the main character from a local strip getting married. Miller advanced the cause of matrimony further when, nine days later, Geelong and Lacy married. The comic took an unusual twist in August 1955 when Anna was thrown into the path of an oncoming car and killed, making Craig our first comic strip widower.

  Miller had gained an outstanding reputation for his animal cartoons in Smith’s and The Bulletin and used this skill to great advantage throughout Rod Craig. As well as featuring in many stories, MacNob often provided foreground and background by-play that was in contrast to the more serious theme of the episode. In July 1953 Miller drew a four-day sequence that featured another dog, Pip. Presented from the dog’s point of view and showing his encounters with rabbits and a snake, the segment was cleverly executed by Miller. Such sequences in continuity strips are rare.

  While the male villains in Rod Craig were usually ugly the female villains were wide-eyed, well-fleshed beauties who reflected Norman Lindsay’s influence on the artist. An exception was the willowy, thin-lipped, hard-faced Carlina who often crossed Craig’s path in the early years of the strip. But physical attractiveness was never allowed to stand in the way of retribution and most of Miller’s villains, male and female, came to a sticky end.

  Miller used a variety of styles calculated to assist the mood of the strip, which was drawn almost exclusively with the dry-brush and split-brush techniques. By the time Rod Craig had finished in 1955 it had not only created a record for the life of a continuity strip but had set new standards in quality.

  Almost a quarter of a century after Smith’s Weekly had started the trend, the Sydney Morning Herald finally admitted comics to its pages. The process was a slow one and may have received some of its impetus from the strike by the Printing Industry Employee’s Union in October 1944. The managements of the Sydney Morning Herald, Telegraph, Sun, and Mirror combined to publish a composite newspaper that looked like a sickly version of the Herald and was, in fact, published by the Fairfax group. Comics from the other three papers rotated and readers found themselves in the unusual position of seeing Pop, Bluey and Curley, Henry, Blondie’s Family, Dot and Carrie, Nancy, Gunn s Gully, and Boofhead appearing side-by-side at various stages. Publishing these comics for almost two weeks may well have influenced the Herald to re-think their attitude towards comics.

  Commencing on 6 January 1945, the Herald began running an untitled pantomime strip once a week. In due course, this became a strip about a dog, Shaggy, drawn by C. S. Gould. This strip was followed by three US comics - Mr & Mrs, Penny, and Vic Flint. In November Gould contributed Skooner the Champ to the Saturday sports page and it was converted to a daily strip in December, only to disappear the following February. Harry Eyre Jr's The Types appeared briefly early in 1946 before the pages began to open up to outside comic artists with the introduction of a mid-week comic section, Playtime.

  This section emerged in June 1946 as a result of the circulation war between the SMH and the Telegraph, the latter having produced a four-page mid-week section that featured The Lone Ranger, The Berrys, Donald Duck and Stella King’s Adventures of Bunny Wiggs. For Playtime J. A. Barlock (‘Bart’) drew the adventures of Stockwhip Sam and his aboriginal offsider, Fergus. Humorous in content, the first adventure featured a weird race of creatures from beneath the ground who stole shadows. The story culminated in the ‘greatest horse race of all time’ using the shadows of Carbine, Peter Pan, and Phar Lap. A later tale involved a search for a bunyip in which Sam and Fergus encounter a Ned Kelly-style character called ‘Pistol-Finger’ who is really Drongo Dick. In using the term ‘drongo’, Barlock was perpetuating the slang term for no-hoper which had been revived during the war years to describe all new recruits. Like many service expressions, it had wide currency in the immediate post-war years.

  Kaark the Crow was written by Kenneth Neville and drawn by Anne Drew. While strips about animals and birds were not new, Neville’s innovation was that he made the leading character something of a scoundrel. Kaark tried to take over the valley with the idea of charging the other bush creatures rent and even turned to bushranging for a period. His accomplice in the latter endeavour was Red Jelly who wore a large jam tin over his head and, once again, reflected our writers’ and artists’ fascination with the Ned Kelly mythology. Kaark was full of puns, plays on words, and alliteration and became a particularly readable strip when the drawing was taken over by Walter Cunningham in April 1947. Neville and Drew also collaborated, briefly, on a humorous strip about a small Aborigine boy, Little Fella Nukla.

  Other Australian strips featured in Playtime were Bill Davies’ Little Ali, Dick Sealey’s Sandy and Sue, Keith Chatto’s Destiny Scott, Lock and Scott’s Gale of the ‘Gundigai’, and Chris Thornton by Jill Meillon and Anne Drew (‘Adye’). There were also overseas strips including Tarzan, Red Ryder, Dickie Dare, Pip, Squeak and Wilfred and adaptations of such popular classics as Treasure Island and The Three Musketeers. But the real star of the comic section was Eric Jolliffe’s Tom Flynn - Stockman that made its first appearance in October 1946.

  The initial story covered the resentment of the Pultara tribe of Aborigines, in the Northern Territory, as the prosperous cattle industry encroached on their age-old hunting grounds. With a remarkable eye for outback detail and an obvious knowledge and understanding of aboriginal culture and customs, Jolliffe was able to present comics’ first realistic portrayal of the impact of European civilization on the indigenous population. Except for the rare moments of comedy relief, Jolliffe showed the aborigines in a very sympathetic manner and while Tom Flynn was the hero of the strip, the comic was used as a showcase for the aboriginal point of view. The fact that Jolliffe had a message to present did not stop the comic from being an enjoyable adventure story.

   Because his drawings show such an affinity for the bush and outback, many people are surprised to learn that Jolliffe came from England. Eric Ernest Jolliffe was born at Portsmouth in January 1907 and came to Perth with his family in 1914. The family moved to Sydney after six months where Jolliffe, because of what he calls his ‘rebel streak’ was always in trouble with his teachers. By the time he was 15 he was delighted to be able to escape to the bush where he spent the next six years working as a boundary rider, rabbit trapper, and in shearing sheds. When he returned to Sydney to visit his family a chance visit to Angus and Robertson started him on his artistic career. Discovering a book on drawing he ‘learned to my surprise that art wasn’t necessarily a gift divine, but a craft that could be studied and worked at’. He enrolled for an introductory course at East Sydney Technical College where his teachers were almost unanimous and outspokenly frank about his lack of talent! But Jolliffe was determined to prove his critics wrong and continued with his drawings. During the Depression he obtained a job as a window cleaner at a building opposite The Bulletin. This allowed him to inundate that magazine with cartoons and be close at hand to retrieve the inevitable rejections over the next few years. Jolliffe’s approach was a new one for a cartoonist. He showed the hard reality of the bush as it really was and The Bulletin could not understand his harsh, realistic approach. Eventually, they began to buy his cartoons and by the outbreak of World War II he had become a regular contributor and took over the Andy cartoon feature from Arthur Homer. It was during the war, when he served as a camouflage officer with the RAAF, that he first met the tribal Aborigines of Arnhem Land and along the West Australian coast:

   ‘It was love at first sight. As a bushman I could appreciate their deep love and understanding of their country. Their capacity to live off the harsh land and their complex social and cultural life never failed to absorb me.’

   Jolliffe joined Smith’s Weekly after the war but again he found that the management was not in sympathy with his approach to the Aborigines and the outback. He resigned and, as a freelance, sold Saltbush Bill and Witchetty’s Tribe to Pix Magazine where they settled in for a long run. By the early ’seventies, books reprinting these characters had sold more than 6 million copies. In 1973, Jolliffe began publication of his own magazine, Jolliffe’s Outback, which contained both Saltbush and Witchetty, portraits and sketches from the outback, Jolliffe’s own humorous accounts of country life, and reprints of Sandy Blight - a comic strip which had run in the Sun-Herald for almost two decades.

  Playtime only lasted until 24 September 1947 when the Sydney Morning Herald announced that, as a means of preserving dollars, all of the newspapers had agreed to cut their imports of Canadian newsprint by 25 percent. As the Herald wanted to keep ‘its important news service at the highest level’ the comic section was suspended, leaving a small Aborigine boy in Tom Flynn facing a crocodile, hurling itself at him with jaws agape! But Tom Flynn and a number of other comics from the Playtime section were to be revived with the arrival of the Sunday Herald.

  Following the introduction of Playtime, the Herald decided to launch a regular daily strip in the form of The Conways on 10 November 1946. The storyline was by Betty Rowland, author of the prize-winning play, Touch of Silk, while the artwork was handled by John Santry who had a reputation in the commercial field as well as being a cartoonist. The earliest episodes were pure soap opera. Within the first two weeks, Martin Conway’s stock-broking partner has skipped town leaving Martin to face a £60 000 embezzlement charge; Martin had collapsed with shock and is rushed to a hospital; an angry mob of investors threaten to wreck the office; Dinah, a daughter, is aghast at the thought of having to go to work; Clive, Dinah’s fiance, loses interest because of the sudden loss of riches and gives back the ring; and Bill Conway, the son, threatens to assault Clive! Fortunately, as the comic progressed it moved away from the melodramatic clichés and later episodes that were set on a country station were far more interesting. Also, as he became more familiar with the medium, Santry’s art gained character. The Conways lasted until the middle of 1949 when it was replaced by an obscure overseas strip. Kit Conquest.

  In February 1946, Carl Lyon’s Tim O'Hara appeared in the Daily Mirror. Tim was a reporter and with his press-photographer friend. Pinkie, became involved in the usual relentless pursuit of lawbreakers, always managing to escape the hazards in their path. Apart from being an entertaining adventure story, Tim O’Hara was the first local newspaper strip to feature a fully naked woman. In the absence of any editorial comment, it can only be assumed that it was not detected by the guardians of public morals.

  The Mirror published its second non-humorous strip in the middle of 1946, The Life of Les Darcy. The work of 21-years-old Peter James, it was one of the very few local comic strips to use a sporting theme. In fact, for a country that has a reputation of being addicted to sport, local sporting strips have been fairly conspicuous by their absence in Australian newspapers. Possibly the artists are at fault and have little or no interest in this area as the newspapers have demonstrated, by using such strips as Joe Palooka, Curley Kayoe, Big Ben Bolt, Mac Divot, and Gunner, that they are prepared to run comics with sporting themes.

  With newsprint supplies becoming easier to obtain both the Sunday Sun and the Sunday Telegraph increased the size of their comic sections. On 24 November 1946 the Sun commenced running Stanley Pitt’s science fiction comic, Silver Starr in the Flameworld, replacing the long-running 'Speed' Gordon. Following lead-up publicity, the strip was run as a double-page tabloid spread for some weeks before reverting to a single page. Drawn in the Alex Raymond tradition, the arresting artwork and tasteful colouring made the new strip an immediate success and it remains, today, the most visually pleasing strip of the genre.

  Stanley John Pitt was born at Rozelle, NSW in 1925. As a schoolboy he devoted more time to drawing than to his schoolwork and was constantly in trouble with his teachers. Through the ‘Speed’ Gordon pages, Pitt became entranced by Raymond’s classic style and that artist’s clean line and penchant for detail left an indelible impression on him. In 1942, while working as a milkman, he sold his first comic book, Anthony Fury, to Consolidated Press. The following year he began selling comics, written by Frank Ashley, to Frank Johnson Publications. Lacking any formal art training, the opportunity to meet and observe such artists as White, Williams, Lyon and Russell provided him with invaluable experience. He produced comic strip advertisements for Colgate-Palmolive in 1945 (a number of which appeared in the comic section of the Sunday Sun) which led to Associated Newspapers placing him under contract to develop a new science fiction strip. Following a dispute regarding the printed size of the strip, Pitt left the paper and the last Silver Starr appeared in November 1948.

  Pitt was soon employed by John Fairfax and Sons for their new paper, the Sunday Herald, and another s-f strip. Captain Power, appeared on 6 March 1949 with the storyline provided by a journalist, Gerry Brown. He continued to handle the comic until June 1950 when the pressure of other work saw him pass the strip onto Peter James. Just before leaving Captain Power, Pitt commenced drawing the Yarmak comics for Young’s Merchandising and, along with assistants, carried this comic through to 1952. With his brother, Reginald, he attempted to get two strips, Lemmy Caution and Mr Midnight, syndicated in the US while doing freelance covers and illustrations for various publishers. When the syndication attempts failed he joined Cleveland Press in 1956 where he created a series of new Silver Starr comics to supplement the reprints of earlier episodes. Following the collapse of the comic book industry, Pitt remained with the company to paint covers for western paperbacks.

  The magnificent artwork on his unpublished comic. Gully Foyle, became legendary throughout the comic world in the late ’sixties. As a result of this work, Pitt was approached by two US companies to handle comic book work for them. With the publication of his work in The Witching Hour #14 (National Periodical Publications, Inc.) and Boris Karloff #33 (Western Publishing), Pitt became the first Australian artist to have original material published in US comic books. In 1969 the US cartoonist A1 Williamson arranged for Pitt to ghost an 11-week sequence of his daily strip. Secret Agent Corrigan, and a further four-weeks in 1972. Because of his detailed style and perfectionist approach, Stanley Pitt has not been a prolific producer of comics - but it has been a case of quality triumphing over quantity. Combining dedication with artistic integrity, he has become recognized as a leading illustrator of science fiction, and the finest comic artist in the classic adventure tradition that Australia has produced.

  Silver Starr was an Australian soldier who had returned from the war to join an expedition into the Earth’s interior. As Silver and his companions, Onro and Dyson, ground their way through the Earth’s crust in a rocket-style ship, the radar-television threw up an image of a beautiful, red-haired girl who was surrounded by lashing tongues of bluish flame. This was Pristine (De Solvo) - Queen of the Flameworld and Pitt’s compliment to Raymond’s Dale Arden. In due course, Pristine became Silver’s girlfriend and was his constant companion through the adventures. The storylines were of average standard for this type of comic but the real attraction was the artwork. Under Pitt’s deft handling, the scenes of rock formations and underground caverns came to life; as did the seas of molten lava and the ship winding its way through rock and water. The Earth’s interior was peopled by a race of giants with massive heads and a race of scaly Ape-men - all ideal subject for Pitt’s fertile imagination. In its latter days, an editorial decision removed the colour from the comic and reduced it drastically in size, robbing it of much of its appeal.

  Replacing Silver Starr was Carl Lyon’s Black McDermitt - a historical adventure tale set in the nineteenth century. McDermitt was transported to Australia on a charge of cattle stealing and assigned to his wife as a servant. They live on a small farm with their sons and endeavour to carve out a new life. Through a series of misadventures they become involved with Blaxland, Wentworth, and Lawson and McDermitt is a member of the party that makes the historic crossing of the Blue Mountains. Possibly Lyons’ best work, the strip showed, again, that historical subjects could be taught in an entertaining manner through the medium of comics - provided the artist knows what he is doing.

  The Sunday Herald entered the field in January 1949 and revived their Playtime section, this time in colour. The lack of planning behind the section was obvious as comics were added and dropped in the first few months, and some of the strips that had appeared in the earlier section picked up their storyline from 1947, to the confusion of the readers. With a small Aborigine boy, Nim, for his companion, Tom Flynn moved from the outback and looked at the pearling industry on the north coast of Western Australia. Once again, Jolliffe highlighted the impact of white civilization as pearlers trespassed on sacred ground and stole the sacred Churinga of the tribe. In later adventures the location was shifted to New Guinea where Jolliffe depicted the native tribes, customs and habitat with great authenticity. The strip was picked up by the Age who ran it in their Friday Junior Age as a companion feature to The Sandemans. This comic was set in the bushranging period and was the work of Marguerite Mahood, who became better-known for her well-researched and detailed study of early Australian cartoons in her book The Loaded Line.

  Nan Fullarton adapted and illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland for 18 weeks before giving way to Joan Lintott’s adaptation of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This allowed Fullarton to concentrate on Frisky, which had started in the Sunday Herald in February under the byline ‘Killibinbin’. Frisky was a small rabbit whose stories were designed for younger children. Aided by clean, accurate linework and an array of charming characters, Fullarton’s strip soon attracted a large following in much the same way as May Gibbs had done a quarter of a century previously. The popularity of Frisky was to see it continue to appear in the papers for over two decades.

  Pitt’s Captain Power made its appearance in March and was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the defunct Silver Starr. Closer to the comic books than to the newspapers, Captain Power relied heavily on super-hero style costumes and gadgets for its impact. When Pitt left the strip in June 1950 it passed into the hands of Peter James who imitated Pitt’s style for a period before gradually changing it to his own.

  Also starting in March was Percy Benison’s comic, The Adventures of Billy Koala. Benison was a veteran cartoonist who had contributed to The Lone Hand, The Bulletin, Smith’s Weekly and many other publications and was prominent in the commercial art field. He was particularly interested in boxing and used this as his theme for Billy Koala, with animals being drawn in a semi-realistic fashion as the young bear fought his way through the ranks to become world champion in July 1950. In a period when boxing was booming and large crowds were flocking to the stadiums, the theme was an apt choice.

Walter Cunningham returned to comics, briefly, in June to illustrate a version of Leslie Rees’s Digit Dick. As Cunningham was also the illustrator of the Digit Dick books the transition to the comic page was quite smooth.

  Willie Fennell, later to establish himself as a character actor on TV and in films, was a leading radio comedian whose phrase ‘Ow yer going, mate?’ was known to millions. The Sydney Truth decided to capitalize on his popularity with the introduction of a Willie comic early in 1949, which was drawn by John McGilvray who signed his work ‘Camac’. Fennell contributed the gags for the first six months but even when this task fell back to McGilvray the strip continued to exhibit the ‘extra grouse slanguage’ favoured by the radio character. Willie mangled the English language while continually dropping ‘h’s’ and it was, perhaps, this down-to-earth approach to humour that made him such a popular figure.

  Born at Packakariki, New Zealand in 1911, John Cameron McGilvray was one of many artists who crossed the Tasman. He arrived in Sydney in 1935 as a qualified signwriter and spent the next few years plying his trade, picking fruit, and walking through New South Wales. He joined Darrell Lea Chocolate Co. in 1937 as an advertising and display artist and spent time at evening classes at East Sydney Technical College. When Quiz Magazine started he became a regular contributor of cartoons and created two comics, Quentin Quiggle Quiz Office Boy and Signwriter Joe. While serving in New Guinea during the war he continued to contribute cartoons and strips to Quiz, many executed with primitive drawing instruments. In 1945 he won a competition run by the Army Educational Journal, Salt, for the design of the best Disneylike characters. With characters that included Maestro Koala Offenbear, Digger Dan, and Willy-Willy, he beat a number of other well-known artists including Sergeant Cyril Tighe and Sapper W. E. Green (Weg). At the same time as he was drawing Willie, another of McGilvray’s strips, Dulcie, was running in a number of lower circulation papers including the Adelaide Express. After his strips finished McGilvray left the field to concentrate on commercial areas until his retirement in 1977.

Hermon Wizzer of Merryville College began about May 1949 as a coloured feature in the Argus Week-End Magazine and branched out

to become a daily strip in October 1950, appearing in a number of states. Wizzer and his friends were senior public schoolboys who were always finding themselves in hot water as a result of one of Wizzer’s many inventions. The tone of the strip was more in keeping with the English schoolboy yams of Gem and Magnet rather than any Australian tradition. The comic ran until 1957 and aside from the fact that the collaborators were A. D. Renton and W. J. Evans (with Evans thought to be the artist) little is known about the creators.

  For newspaper strip artists the ’forties closed on a reasonably buoyant note with over two dozen local comics being published. It was true that the bulk of these strips originated from Sydney and that very few of the artists made a full-time living from drawing them, but the number of artists being employed was higher than at any other time since the late ’twenties.

 

 

 

CHAPTER FIVE THE SLOW DECLINE

As the 1950s opened, despite the increasing cost of newsprint, there was no indication that it would be a rather traumatic decade for those connected with comics.

  The first blow came with the closure of Smith’s Weekly in October 1950. In its lifespan of 31 years, Smith’s had not only built up the reputation as the home of original, lively and often abrasive journalism but it had fostered and made household names of many black and white artists. And while it was obvious that such talented practitioners would soon be employed by other newspapers, the fact that such an institution as Smith’s could cease publication because its owners were more interested in the real estate that it occupied than running a newspaper was enough to make artists and journalists feel uneasy.

  With the agreement of Smith’s, Jim Russell modified Mr & Mrs Potts and sold it to the Herald and Weekly Times group, first as a daily strip and then as a Sunday. The new version, The Potts, appeared in the Sun-News Pictorial on 23 January 1951 and in most other states soon afterwards. To make the strip more appealing to the general readership, Russell suddenly materialized a daughter, Ann; Son-in-law, Herb; and Grandchildren, Mike and Bunty. What Russell didn’t realize was that there was a precedent for this family as a You & Me strip back in December 1920 had shown The Pots as they were then, with two children, a boy and a girl.

   With the introduction of Uncle Dick, a genteel scrounger who was to play an increasingly important part in the comic, the success of The Potts was assured. By 1958 it had become an international strip with an estimated daily circulation of 15 million - by far, the largest circulation experienced by any local strip. It appeared in New Zealand, Turkey, Canada, Finland, Sri Lanka, and 35 US papers including the Washington Star, New York Herald-Tribune, Buffalo News, Milwaukee Journal, and Detroit Free Press. The price paid for this popularity was that the humour became less nationalistic and more international.

   James Newton Russell was born at Campsie, NSW in 1909, the son of a council plumber who was killed in an accident in 1915. After leaving Lewisham Christian Brothers in 1924 he became a copy boy on the Sydney Daily Guardian and soon transferred to Smith’s Weekly. Because his drawing ability had not reached the standard required, Russell drifted into a series of jobs including that of office boy at Sydney Stadium, where he also became a preliminary boxer for a brief period. During this time he improved his drawing and sketches he made of notable boxers were published in various Sydney papers. In 1926, the head artist of Fox Films offered to tutor Russell in the basics of art if he paid £100 and worked for two years without pay. Russell accepted and by the time he left Fox Films he had become a capable artist.

   He joined the Sydney Evening News in 1928 and was the youngest political cartoonist in the country. When the paper folded in 1931 he became a sports caricaturist with the Referee then transferred back to Smith’s. For almost two decades he handled single-block cartoons, strips, and film reviews. When Stan Cross left, Russell took over You & Me, altering the title to Mr & Mrs Potts, as well as becoming Art Editor and drawing Smith’s Vaudevillians. Through the war years Russell was also responsible for two satirical strips, Adolf, Herman and Musso and Schmit der Sphy, which were rumoured to have put Russell on the blacklist, if the Allies had lost the war.

   As well as being a cartoonist, Jim Russell is a writer, radio and TV personality, publisher of dancing and music magazines, and finds time to run two travel agencies. He retired from the Herald and Weekly Times staff in 1976 but continues to draw The Potts under agreement.

   Many of the other Smith’s Weekly artists were signed up by Sir Keith Murdoch to establish his Sydney Production Unit of the Courier Mail. Their weekly, single-page grouping of cartoons on a single theme helped give the Brisbane Sunday Mail and the Adelaide Sunday Mail a Smith’s appearance. Les Dixon was appointed Art Editor for the unit and created two humorous strips, Little Trump and Phil Dill. These comics were later handled by Stewart McCrae before he moved on to become the editorial cartoonist for the Courier-Mail. Jean Cullen devised a strip, Pam, which was carried on for a number of years by Mollie Horseman while Lex Bell created a series of small Sunday adventure strips including The Battle for Rufus River.

   But the most original and successful strip to come out of the Unit was Joe Jonsson’s Uncle Joe’s Horse Radish. Combining some of the characters from his Oigle comic with the theme of his racing strips, Jonsson presented an eccentric cast of country folk whose fortunes hinged on the success or failure of Radish as a racehorse. While winning such noteworthy races as the Cabbage Tree Cup and the Butcher’s Picnic Cup, Radish was anything but a consistent performer. During spells between races, Radish was expected to earn his keep as a general hack around the farm pulling sulkies, dog carts and the plough and doubling as a pack-horse or show-jumper, when required. Uncle Joe and his wife, Gladys, were always worried that Joe would be cut out of the will of Granpa’s sister - the very bossy Aunt Ella. When Ella decided to become a partner in Joe’s racing activities she was anything but a ‘silent partner’, interfering with the training routines and generally making life uncomfortable for the menfolk around the farm. Radish’s jockey was the baldheaded Manfred who when not admiring his own style as a jockey was admiring shy Mabel. With the assistance of Radish the pair became engaged. Oigle tended to be in the background except for those stories that involved Paw-Paw, Radish’s young brother. Miss Fitz-Twiddle, Pat Murphy, Artichoke the goat, and assorted nobblers and touts rounded out the cast of supporting characters.

  Radish looked like a candidate for the glue works and part of his appeal was in his down-trodden appearance. After making his first appearance in the Brisbane Sunday Mail in January 1951, Radish soon spread to most other states and gained a popularity comparable with that experienced by Spark Plug, the hayburner of the US strip Barney Google. When Jonsson died in 1963 the comic was taken over by Ian Gall for some years until the Unit was disbanded because of escalating costs.

  The newspaper fraternity had hardly recovered from the loss of Smith’s when, in February 1951, Jimmy Bancks repudiated his contract with Associated Newspapers and took his case to the Equity Court. After 20 years as the major attraction in the Sunday Sun, it seemed unthinkable that Ginge would part company with his birthplace. Bancks contended that his £80 per week contract had been breached when the paper had failed-to run Ginger Meggs on the front page of the comic section, as stipulated. For three issues the comic section was published as part of the rotogravure section and, so Associated Newspapers contended, for technical reasons the front page of the comic section was not printed in colour. Ginger Meggs appeared on the third page of the section, in full colour and below the title block Sunday Sun Comics. Even though the comic was published on the front page after Bancks had made a number of protests, the Equity Court ruled that the contract had been breached. At the time of the repudiation, Bancks had signed a contract with his long-term friend, Frank Packer, for the comic to appear in the Sunday Telegraph. Paradoxically, Ginger Meggs’ appearance in the Telegraph on 3 June 1951 was as a double-page centrespread and not on the front page of the comic section. It was an unusual strip as it had Mr and Mrs Meggs discussing their appearance in the new paper and approaching Bancks (who had drawn himself into the strip) about a new dress for Mrs Meggs. Bancks refused. The final panel showed Ginge having been severely battered by Tiger Kelly to prove that while he may have changed papers nothing else had changed. This legal drama did not affect newspapers in other states where Ginger Meggs continued to be published as usual.

  The Sunday Sun’s replacement for Ginge was Snowy McGann, drawn by Hottie Lahm. Hardtmuth Lahm was born at Tallinn, Estonia in 1912. His father was a jeweller who lost a small fortune in a financial crash and decided to migrate to Australia. A family friend noticed Lahm’s flair for drawing and soon after he enrolled at the East Sydney Technical College he sold his first cartoon to the Sydney Mail. The payment of two guineas had to last a long time as he did not sell another cartoon for two years. A fellow student who couldn’t get his tongue around Hardtmuth nicknamed him ‘Hotpoint’. The name stuck and Lahm started to sign his work ‘Hotpoint’ and this was inevitably shortened to ‘Hottie’.

  During the Depression, Lahm took whatever freelance work came his way and in 1934 he created two strips for Fatty Finn’s Weekly - Pam and Popsy Penguin and Basso the Bear. When the comic folded in 1935, Lahm hit on the idea of going to the country and doing caricatures in hotel bars at 2s. a time. As fast as he made a few pounds he would, spend it buying drinks for offended customers. Lahm returned to Sydney and in 1937 he commenced a long career of supplying Associated Newspapers with covers, caricatures and cartoons for their various publications. The following year saw the birth of his best-known creation, Snifter. A dog that relieved himself anywhere and on anyone, Snifter was to be a back page feature in Man Magazine for over 30 years and the subject of many cartoon books, including special editions that were published to raise funds for the war effort.

  Snowy McGann was an adventure strip with plenty of comedy relief provided by Pistol Packer (a comment on the opposition?), Herman the Strongman, McGonigle and the rest of the troupe that toured the country with Snowy and Bunce’s Circus. With his wide-eyed characters, Lahm’s natural inclination was towards broad humour and slapstick yet he was capable of producing very realistic drawings for sequences that demanded it. This v/as the case in many of the episodes that were devoted to boxing and in one such sequence he used the former champion boxer, Vic Patrick. Snowy McGann’s only problem was that it suffered from being asked to fill the shoes of Ginger Meggs - and that task was beyond the capacity of any strip likely to be brought forward. The Sunday Sun promoted the strip with various competitions but it was fighting a losing battle as their former trump card was in the hands of their opponents. Snowy McGann finished in 1954.

  In December 1951, the Sydney papers dropped the colour from their comic sections due to ‘rising costs’. Obviously, the same costs didn’t rise in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Brisbane as those cities continued to publish coloured sections for many years. The Sunday Herald also reduced its comic section to four pages and completely changed their line-up of strips. Radish was introduced to Sydney readers and Fatty Finn reappeared after an absence of some 18 years.

 

  Jimmy Bancks’ died suddenly from a heart attack on 1 July 1952 and the country was stunned. Tributes poured in from all over the country including one from Sir Keith Murdoch who said:

  ‘Mr Bancks’death has come as a great shock to me. I am only one of millions who had a deep affection for Bancks and his craft. He was undoubtedly one of Australia’s greatest black and white artists. He worked for me in Melbourne way back in the ’twenties. He wanted to go back to Sydney, and I let him on the understanding that I would receive his work. I have always been sorry that I allowed him to leave my organization. Bancks created a family which not only amused Australia, but stirred the warmer affection and feeling in everybody.’

  Once the initial shock had worn off, Consolidated Press busied itself with the task of finding another artist to continue the strip, as had been Bancks’ wish. Many artists submitted trial pages and in the final judgement Ron Vivian was given the job ahead of Dan Russell. In the years that followed, Vivian made a remarkably good job of attempting to remain true to Bancks’ style and concept. When he was tempted to stray, in June 1960, by involving Ginger Meggs in a science-fiction adventure, a flood of letters to the editor brought him back on the right path. Vivian was to draw the strip up until his death in 1974 when it passed into the hands of Lloyd Piper.

  In England, Arthur Homer’s Colonel Pewter made its first appearance in the News Chronicle in 1952; continued in the Daily Mail after a takeover in October 1960; and transferred to The Guardian in May 1964 where it continued to run until Homer retired the strip in 1970. During its 18 year run the entire series was syndicated to the Melbourne Age, where it had a strong following.

  The eccentric Colonel lived in the old-world village of Much Overdun where he worked on such inventions as his weather- interference detector and his anti-gravity flying egg-cup. His household comprised his great-nephew Martin; an articulate dog, Sirius (the result of a liaison between a local bitch and a visiting space dog); his man, Glub, who had been quick-frozen in Upper- Palaeolithic times; and his long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs Aspic. Other notable citizens of the Whimshire county include Lord Crombleigh Parjit; the Reverend Crumble, Rector of St Vitus; the Pinyons, an intellectual couple and cultural force in the community; and Sam Piker, editor of the vigorous Whimshire Clarion.

  The theme varied between home and abroad (including visits to Australia), rural and urban, fantasy and satire, timeless and topical but with a consistent thread of affection and gentle irony for England, as seen by a colonial living in the country.

  Arthur Wakefield Homer was born at Malvern, Victoria in 1926, the son of a civil servant. The family moved to Sydney where Homer was educated at Sydney High School and studied at the National Art School. While he was a student he wrote and acted in radio plays. He drew regularly for The Bulletin for whom he created the cartoon series Andy before joining the staff of Smith’s Weekly. At Smith’s, one of his jobs was to assist Stan Cross on the Dad and Dave strip. Homer created a comic about two radio announcers, Nat and Reg, which ran for a brief period in the ABC Weekly prior to his joining the Army where he served in New Guinea and Borneo, first in a camouflage unit and then as part of the Military Field History Team. On being demobbed, he travelled to England where he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London and travelled extensively on the continent.

  He freelanced in Fleet Street and was political cartoonist for the Tribune; News Chronicle; and New Statesman before commencing Colonel Pewter. After retiring the strip, Homer followed it with another comic, The Thoughts of Citizen Doe which ran until 1972. He then did regular work for Punch, Private Eye, and The Times as well as graphic reportage for the Sunday Times and BBC TV.

  Homer returned to Australia late in 1976 and settled in Melbourne in partnership with his wife, who was making films for children’s television. He now works regularly for the Age doing theatre drawings, political and social cartoons, and his weekly strip The Uriel Report. To celebrate his return to Australia he drew a special Colonel Pewter story, The Pukka Ashes, to tie-in with the Centenary Cricket Test. The delightful, satirical story raised the hopes of Pewter fans that he had permanently returned to the newspaper - but that was not to be. However, he did make another comeback in October 1978. Due to many readers’ negative reactions to the Walt Disney version of Winnie the Pooh, the Age was forced to drop the comic in mid-story and a 20-year-old Colonel Pewter story, Brolga’s Uncle Jack, was selected as a replacement.

  Homer’s comic was not the only expatriate’s strip to be exported from England. Rick Elmes’ All in a Day’s Work commenced in the mid ’thirties and ran for many years in the Argus and, later, Horak’s James Bond was to run in many Australian papers. Pat Sullivan’s creation, Felix the Cat, was reprinted in many local publications but even though the comic carried Sullivan’s signature the strip was drawn by other artists, mainly Otto Messmer. This was not unusual with animated cartoon characters that were adapted to comic strips, the best example being the characters of Walt Disney. There is no record of Disney having drawn any of the newspaper strips that bear his name and the comic strip version of his most famous character, Mickey Mouse, was drawn by Floyd Gottfredson for 45 years without credit.

  When the Sunday Sun and Sunday Herald merged in October 1953, the comic section of the Sun-Herald brought together the cream of local Sunday newspaper strips - Fatty Finn, The Potts, Radish, Bib and Bub, Frisky, Wally and the Major, Snowy McGann, Billy Koala, and Sandy Blight. The Sun-Herald went on to become the largest selling Sunday newspaper and some of its success can be attributed to its comic section which has always contained a reasonable percentage of Australian strips. As Brian White indicated in his book, White on the Media, most newspaper men would be surprised how many readers buy the Sunday papers simply to read such features as comics.

  Woman’s Day made an unexpected entry into the comics field when, on 25 January 1954, it published a full colour strip, Mike Manly - Miracle Man. From a storyline supplied by Ivan Southall, the author of the Simon Black adventure books for boys, the comic was illustrated by the 27 year old Peter James. He had studied at East Sydney Technical College and sold his first comic, Les Darcy, at the age of 21. James had drawn comic books for Pyramid Publications as well as the newspaper strip. Captain Power. Mike Manly was a scientist who was exposed to a radio-active ore that gave him unusual powers including invisibility and the ability to transport himself through time and space. After an indifferent beginning, James began to draw in a clean, detailed style that was reminiscent of the work of Stan Pitt - but the storyline tended to be disjointed. After a year the strip passed to Vernon Hayles who drew the comic capably until it finished in 1956.

  When the Argus introduced Speewa Jack in February 1954, there was no immediate indication that it would become a minor classic. Written by Alan Marshall, the well-known short story writer and novelist, and drawn by Doug Tainsh, for the first nine months the comic was almost a gag-a-day strip with Speewa Jack trading tall stories. Then, Speewa Jack started spinning stories about the ‘old days’ which led to tales of gold miners and bushranging days. From these tales three characters gradually emerged - Captain Candlelight, Pedro, and Dingo - who were not the most honourable or desirable of citizens but who, by the sheer force of their personalities, displaced Speewa Jack from his own strip. The trio involved themselves in any scheme that was likely to bring them rewards without hard work and when their plans came unstuck (as they always did) it was usually because Dingo had taken some instruction literally. The use of villains as the main characters in a humour strip was unusual but it was a formula that appealed to the readers.

  When the Argus failed in January 1957, after a short break, Speewa Jack made a brief appearance in the Age. Candlelight, Pedro, and Dingo devised a fire brigade insurance scheme where they sold insurance to hotels and promptly set fire to them to drum up business. The management at the Age failed to see the humour and the strip was dropped after a few weeks because of ‘un-Australian activities’.

  Born in Sydney in 1921, Doug Tainsh came into comics with no real background in cartooning. After being demobilized from the Army, he studied painting for seven years and travelled to Europe where much of his work was published. Tainsh actually learned the craft of cartooning through the evolvement of Speewa Jack, and by the time the strip had run its course Tainsh had developed a very pleasing, clean, concise style that allowed him to restrict his original drawings to slightly larger than the printed size. His battling swaggie panel, Cedric, has been running in the Australasian Post for the last 25 years

and he has an outstanding reputation as a television scriptwriter.

  Under Packer, the Daily Telegraph had always placed considerable emphasis on its coverage of horse racing. Observing the continuing popularity of Radish and Rusty Riley in opposition papers, Packer introduced a daily strip, Clamour, in February 1955. Clamour took a more realistic approach to the racing game following the career of ‘an unknown country colt who rose to become the darling of the Australian turf. However, the incidence of bribing, doping, and double-crossing that unfolded in the strip must have had race officials, trainers, and punters alike raising their eyebrows. The comic was located on the back sports page, written by Gavin Casey and drawn by Will Mahony.

  Francis William Mahony was born in London in 1905 to Australian parents who returned to this country in 1914. He was indentured to Smith & Julius as a commercial artist in 1922 and joined the art staff of the Evening News two years later. Around this period he began using the name Will to avoid confusion with his father, Frank Mahony, who had earned a reputation as one of Australia’s leading painters and cartoonists. After three years at East Sydney Technical College, Mahony joined the Sydney World, then contributed cartoons to the Labor Daily until he joined the Daily Telegraph as a cartoonist in 1940. From 1945 he freelanced, drawing the Chesty Bond strip for five years and contributing cartoons to the Daily Mirror. He rejoined Consolidated Press in 1954 working as a general illustrator before becoming a teacher at the National Art School in 1962. He retired as a teacher in 1976 and now paints and does book illustrations. Clamour was a well-drawn strip, suited to Mahony’s illustrative technique - but it finished abruptly in September 1955 after Casey had left the strip. While other writers were available none could be found with Casey’s knowledge of racing who were capable of scripting a continuity strip.

  Clamour had hardly left the track when another racing strip emerged, this time in Adelaide. On 8 October 1955, the Mail presented Darky - The Kid from the Snowy River. Written and drawn by Dan Russell, the comic was timed to take advantage of the annual Melbourne Cup fever. Darky had the unusual gift of being able to talk to horses and when the colt from old Regret got away, Darky was able to locate it simply by asking the other horses. Russell was able to give a new twist to the expression ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’. With the introduction of a little girl, Hulda Pzkrjalmkpa, Russell mirrored the average Australian’s feeling that the names of New Australians were complicated and unpronounceable. Darky became The Colt’s jockey and found himself involved with Pa Quinn, ‘Sharp’ Schuter, Hoop McGloop, and Harris Tweed. With characters like this it is not surprising that Darky was anything approaching a serious look at horse racing and Russell carried it off with great gusto. Darky went into retirement in April 1957 but was revived and redrawn for the Sunday Mirror in November 1958 - which is the first time this has happened with an original strip.

  The only other horse-racing strip was Perce the Punter which originated in the Sydney Truth in 1946 and transferred to the Sunday Telegraph in 1961. The strip, drawn by Jack Quayle, recorded Perce’s attempts to pick winners at the previous day’s race meeting and his wagers with his bookmaker, Shaw Todds. While using the comic strip form, it was not a comic strip in the generally accepted sense.

  After the completion of Rod Craig, Miller’s Us Girls commenced in the Melbourne Herald on 3 December 1955. It was a complete change of pace after the serious approach of Rod Craig and allowed Miller to indulge his penchant for shapely girls as well as poking fun at the fads and conventions of the period. Unlike many gags strips, much of the humour had a timeless quality and remains relevant to contemporary situations. Us Girls finished in 1957 when Miller left the newspaper field for commercial projects.

  Another shock hit the newspaper community on 3 December 1955 when Alex Gurney died from a heart attack. Gurney had guided the fortunes of Bluey and Curley for 15 years and during that period had made his characters household names. The artist selected to continue the strip was Norm Rice. Like Bancks, Gurney’s shoes were hard to fill and Rice was only coming to grips with the comic when he was killed in a car accident inside a year. The strip then passed to Les Dixon who, by the time the comic was retired in July 1975, had handled it longer than the originator. A generation grew up identifying Dixon with the strip, with no knowledge of Gurney or of the wartime origins of the characters. Dixon gradually altered the art style and introduced new characters including Jazzer, a swaggie, and Trotters, an old reprobate, to assist in the strip’s popularity.

  Bom Leslie Charles Brailey at Sydney in July 1910, Les Dixon was adopted by Charles and Lillian Dixon at the age of six months. He attended schools in Balmain and Drummoyne before moving to Cobargo with his family in 1918 on a venture of stripping wattle bark, trapping rabbits, and share dairy farming. During this period his education was conducted by correspondence from the Plunkett Street School, Sydney. In 1929 Dixon returned to Sydney and obtained a job as a blacksmith’s striker for six months before taking a position with the Vacuum Oil Company. He also continued to take art lessons by correspondence. In 1938 he was forced to leave the oil company after sustaining a fracture at the base of his skull and dislocating his neck. While on the dole he studied life drawing at the Catholic Guild and as a freelance was able to sell drawings to The Bulletin, Rydges, and Smith’s Weekly. Called into the Army in 1941 he was discharged in three months due to his inability to wear a tin hat. The same year he joined the staff of Smith’s and remained there until the paper folded. When Russell left Smith’s, Dixon was appointed Art Editor but it was not ratified before the paper closed down. He became Art Editor of the Courier Mail Production Unit and remained there until he took over Bluey and Curley. In his retirement, Dixon drew a comic about a hale and hearty old age pensioner, Sandy Lakes, that is seen in the Central Coast district of NSW in the Advocate.

  Television made its official debut in September 1956 when the Sydney station TCN9 began transmission. Few could guess the impact this event would have in altering the pattern of our life-styles and only close observers of the British and US experience could predict that the new medium would affect the country’s reading habits. One of the earliest and certainly one of the most popular children’s programmes was Captain Fortune, from the studios of ATN7 in Sydney. As well as the usual games and competitions the programme contained a segment that purported to be a re-enactment of the Captain’s adventures around the world. Produced live on a shoestring budget and exhibiting a minimum of technical expertise, the segments were crude in presentation. But both the Captain and his adventure segment gained a large following.

  On 21 December 1957, Captain Fortune appeared in the Sun-Herald and became the first Australian television character to be adapted to a newspaper strip. The comic was the work of Yaroslav Horak who did an excellent job in capturing the likeness of the Captain and the exotic setting for the adventures gave Horak the opportunity to show his skills in depicting detail and his understanding of the medium. Captain Fortune continued to appear until the middle of 1962 when the television series finished.

  Yaroslav Horak was born at Harbin, Manchuria in 1927 to a Czech father and Russian mother. The family migrated to Sydney before the war broke out and Horak spent those years completing his education. After the war, while trying his hand at various jobs, he wrote and drew strips for his own amusement. In 1948 he approached John Edwards who offered him work drawing comics at £2 per page and Horak created two strips, Rick Davis and The Skyman. Edwards was also responsible for Horak’s nickname of ‘Larry’ when he couldn’t get his tongue around Yaroslav and Horak began signing his work in this manner. He then moved onto Syd Nicholls’ publications where he drew Ray Thorpe and Ripon at £4 per page before creating Jet Fury for Pyramid Publications. When the latter company failed, Horak moved to Melbourne where he found a steady outlet for his work with Atlas Publications where he drew such strips as The Lone Wolf, Brenda Starr, and Sergeant Pat. For Atlas he also created The Mask which ran into problems with the authorities and after abandoning the strip in disgust Horak returned to Sydney to do freelance illustrating for K. G. Murray and Woman’s Day. Following Captain Fortune he began drawing Mike Steele . . . Desert Rider to a script supplied by Roger Rowe. It was this comic that revealed the mature Horak style of busy pen lines that was to become familiar in the years ahead. In January 1963 he left for England where he drew comics for D. C. Thompson of Scotland as well as war comics for Fleetway Publications in London. It was during this time he went back to being called Yaroslav.

  Late in 1965, the Daily Express offered Horak the chance to take over the James Bond strip from John McCloskey. Horak accepted and, to a storyline written by the American scriptwriter Jim Lawrence, his first strips appeared in January 1966. Despite the fact that the Daily Express dropped the comic when the paper was reduced to tabloid size in 1977, James Bond continues to be syndicated to newspapers around the world. Horak left England in 1973 to live in Spain, then Holland before returning to Australia.

  After serving a long apprenticeship in the comic book field, John Dixon was able to break into the newspaper field in June 1959 with his Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors. The strip made its first appearance in the Sun-Herald followed two weeks later in the Perth Weekend Mail and, later, in the Brisbane Sunday Mail and the Adelaide Sunday Mail. Air Hawk has now completed a run of 20 years which is unprecedented for a locally drawn continuity strip and a tangible comment on Dixon’s skills as a comic strip artist.

  Initially, Air Hawk was the name of an air charter service operated by Jim Hawk, an ex-World War II fighter ace. The charter base was in Alice Springs and they worked in conjunction with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Dr Hal Mathews was a close friend of Jim Hawk who worked for the RFDS and Sister Janet Grant belonged to the Australian Inland Mission, whose medical clinic adjoined the air strip. In the mid-seventies, Jim Hawk was granted a franchise to supply a special Emergency Relief Unit. The Unit’s function is to relieve any Flying Doctor Base in need of assistance and to be available for special emergencies. Hal Mathews has been seconded to work with the Unit and Janet Grant is now his full time assistant. With the change in responsibilities the ‘Doctors’ part of the title has reverted to the singular.

  With his hero, Dixon has portrayed the tall, lean, suntanned, unflappable Australian of popular mythology and given him more technical skills than his legendary counterpart. Dixon scripts are well-written with plenty of action, drama, suspense, and characterization. Air Hawk is played out against a background of cathedral-like ridges, barren landscapes, caverns, rivers and waterholes of the outback country. The setting allows for the introduction of native fauna, Aborigines and their way of life and Dixon captures all of these with graphic authenticity.

  While the strip acts as a continual reminder of the unique aspects of the RFDS, Air Hawk is, above all, an aviation strip. A great deal of the strip’s popularity stems from the amount of time-consuming detail that he exhibits in his drawings of a variety of aeroplanes. Apart from satisfying the readers’ taste for realistically drawn adventure, Air Hawk offers the majority of its readers an opportunity to experience the far-off, exotic frontier of the rugged yet beautiful country. Dixon has taken care to see that his character has not strayed from his basic role of a flying adventurer and, though there is an obvious romantic attachment, has avoided requests that Jim and Janet marry.

  John Dangar Dixon was born at Newcastle in 1929, the son of a school principal. After completing his education at Cook Hill Intermediate High he became a trainee window dresser at a softgoods company. He became interested in art and obtained a position as an advertising artist with the same company. In 1945 Dixon moved to Sydney where he took a series of jobs with department stores and advertising agencies. An agency acquaintance suggested that he try the comic book and he set out to take samples to Frank Johnson Publications, towards the end of 1947. His route took him past the offices of H. John Edwards and so started a long association with that company.

  While with Edwards, Dixon drew over 150 issues of Tim Valour, about 50 issues of The Crimson Comet, many issues of Biggies and a variety of filler comics and covers.

  In 1958 he created a ‘new’ Catman Comics for Frew Publications and Captain Strato for Young’s Merchandising and the following year created The Phantom Commando for Horwitz Publications, as well as drawing filler comics in that company’s war comics. Dixon was a prolific producer of comic books and while pressure of work sometimes affected the quality of his drawing no one had a better understanding of the mechanics of the medium. He knew how to progress a story and his understanding and appreciation of panel-to-panel continuity was to stand him in good stead on Air Hawk.

 

 

CHAPTER SIX THE LEAN YEARS

 

Compared with previous decades, the sixties was a period of stagnation for local newspaper strips. Long established favourites such as Ginger Meggs, Fatty Finn, The Potts, Ben Bowyang, Bib and Bub, Wally and the Major, and Bluey and Curley continued to be seen but many others dropped from the scene. Radish, Captain Fortune, Suzy and others stopped appearing and very little local material was used to replace them. Few newspapers seemed to hold Sir Keith Murdoch’s conviction that they had an obligation to publish Australian comic strips. When the Adelaide News wanted to drop the fledgling Suzy in 1949, Murdoch refused the idea and suggested that an Australia-wide contest be instituted paying £1 per day for jokes to be used in Suzy. That Ian Clarke’s Suzy survived until 1966 was, in no small way, due to Murdoch’s commitment towards Australian comic artists.

  Syndicated material was the easiest and cheapest way of replacing strips. Because they used material that was months and, in some cases, years behind the overseas publication dates the syndicated material represented a guaranteed continuity of supply. Many newspapers felt, not without some justification, that they could not rely on the same continuity from local artists. Australian artists could only be expected to be paid a rate comparable with that being paid for the cheaper syndicated material. This meant that even if their strip appeared in most capital cities they would be lucky to earn a living wage. If their strip only appeared in one or two papers the artists were required to do other work to supplement their incomes. In turn, this could lead to deadline problems or a drop in the quality of their strip due to their inability to concentrate on the comic on a full-time basis. As a consequence, this had led to many cartoonists developing less detailed and less time-consuming styles that place greater emphasis on the idea itself, rather than the execution of same. John Dixon would be one of the very few local freelance comic artists who does not have to supplement his income in some manner - and the result can be seen in the quality of his work. Many former and aspiring comic strip artists would welcome the opportunity to be involved in the field of comics but their desires and the economics of the situation are not compatible. After almost 60 years of regular comic strip activity, this is a sad commentary on the local field.

  After a quiet beginning, Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors gradually increased its popularity to the point where the Herald and Weekly Times agreed to syndicate a daily strip in May 1963. Because of the detailed nature of the strip, Dixon hired Mike Tabrett as an assistant and trained him to take over the Sunday page while Dixon concentrated on the daily strip. Unlike most US adventure strips, the Sunday and daily continuity on Air Hawk were separate stories and Dixon continued to write both. Tabrett remained with the Sunday page until it passed to Hart Amos. The introduction of the daily strip seemed to give Dixon new impetus as he polished and refined his technique, gradually removing all trace of the slicker comic book approach. Of the Big Three, Foster, Raymond, and Caniff, only the latter had any influence on his style and even that disappeared with maturity. By the late ’sixties Dixon had developed a comic strip technique that was equal to any continuity artist in the world. His careful spotting of blacks assists in giving his panels great depth and heightens the mood and drama of the story. In an era in which continuity strips have suffered at the hands of gag strips, Dixon has continued to produce outstanding work and has secured his place as the finest adventure strip artist Australia has produced. His work is held in high esteem overseas and Air Hawk appears in New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Africa, Ireland, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and Argentina. A number of comics have reprinted the strip in Europe, including the full-colour Spanish series Halcones De Aero.

  Alec McRae retired at the end of 1963 after 25 years of drawing Ben Bowyang, in which time his work had delighted readers. He had also drawn a strip about a jockey, Willie Wynn, for the Sporting Globe for some 15 years. Ben Bowyang passed to Bevyn Baker who handled the comic until it was taken over by Peter Russell-Clarke in December L969. Russell-Clarke, who had previously drawn the short-lived Harry Carna strip, continues to draw the comic between his activities as a commercial artist, television personality, and gourmet chef.

  Commencing in June 1965, Vicky the Viking ran for 12 years in The Australasian Post. A gag strip using a viking as the central character,

it was drawn by John Norton of Mt. Gambier, South Australia. Norton was an English migrant who had always been interested in art, had spent three years at Brighton Art School, and had his own commercial studio prior to migrating to Australia in 1962. He got the idea for the strip while doodling on the boat on the way over. In yet another coals to Newcastle performance, the highlight of Vicky’s career was when it was syndicated for a period to Katso Lehti in Helsinki.

  In May 1967 the Sunday Telegraph introduced Ken Emerson’s The Warrumbunglers. Previously, most ‘funny animal’ strips had been directed at children but Emerson’s comic was a modem, sophisticated look at life and aimed at an adult audience. The strip had developed out of another Emerson strip, Bush Folks, which had commenced in the Australian Woman’s Mirror in May 1961 and had run for a year. The Warrumbunglers saw kangaroos, bears, bandicoots, echidnas .and other bush creatures as a community with all of the problems that permeate modem society.

  Much of the comic’s activities are centred around The Ritz Pie Cart, an ancient converted chaff cutter. Run by Gunna, a goanna, the cart is in the best tradition of the famous Harry’s Cafe-de-Wheels and the clientele of Billy, Spike, Waddy, Tich, Dan, and the rest are just as colourful as the real life cross-section. The strip reflected the mateship, tall tales, and bush sayings that are bound up in the Australian mythos.

  Kenneth Albert Emerson was born at Sydney in 1930 and spent part of his youth working in Central Queensland. The outdoor life and mobs of roos, big goannas, plains turkeys, and general wildlife made a big impression on him and provided the basis for his future comic strips. He spent three years studying at East Sydney Technical College before spending a few years in New Zealand as a freelance artist and odd-job man. On returning to Sydney he entered the advertising field while selling a few cartoons to The Bulletin. Emerson worked as an animator in the early days of television before returning to advertising where he remained until 1976. During this period he supplied cartoons to a variety of publications as well as drawing comic strips. His own love of the outback is shared by his father-in-law, Eric Jolliffe.

  Like many artists in this country, Emerson has experienced his share of editorial indifference but few strips have suffered the up-and-down existence of The Warrumbunglers. Considering the delightful artwork and original humour, it is difficult to understand why the strip has had to battle so hard to survive. It was dropped by the Sunday Telegraph in July 1969 only to emerge as a four-panel strip in the Sun-Herald in December and to appear in the Melbourne Herald as well. It was dropped, again, in 1971 and remained in hibernation until May 1977 when it was one of the strips selected as a replacement for Fatty Finn in the Sun Herald.

  Emerson’s approach to humour is original and he rarely has to fall back on the well-worn gags of other cartoonists, many of whom have not been averse to rehashing previously published gags. Attuned to contemporary humour and satire, Emerson’s nationalistic approach was to be a harbinger of moves in this direction by other local artists.

  Also commenting on the contemporary scene but with far more realism was Brigette. Created by Gerald Carr, the strip was directed at the 15-17 year old market and made its first appearance in Go-Set Magazine in October 1968. Realistically drawn, the comic followed the attractive young Brigette as she faced the problems of adolescence, the generation gap, and a world of changing values. The strip finished in Go-Set in May 1969 when Carr’s agent, Sol Shifrin, was able to sell it to both the Brisbane Sunday Mail and the Perth Sunday Independent, where it commenced in both papers on 5 July. Carr picked up the storyline from Go-Set and the comic was quickly in trouble. Maxwell Newton bought the strip for the Independent on the basis that it was controversial - and that’s what he got. Because it appeared without introduction and part-way through a story, the first few episodes appeared disjointed. Further, a part-owner of the paper, who pursued his beliefs to the point where he wouldn’t allow cigarette advertisements in the paper, objected to the moral tone. One letter to the editor saw the strip as being ‘sick humour’ and thought that the comic ‘glamourizes and glorifies some of the greatest ills in our society’. The strip was dropped from the Independent at the end of August.

  In Brisbane, the Sunday Mail felt they had been deceived as the storyline was different from the tone in the proofs they had seen of the first story. In fact their introduction to the strip had read:

  ‘Brigette’s world is our world ... a place where streets are filled with Holdens, where kids talk good Australian slang, where people eat pies, and the swing set finds fun at the local disco. This is something quite new; an Australian strip that is as Australian as gum trees!’

  It would have been difficult to find a single Brigette strip that fitted the description. The Sunday Mail wrote to Carr expressing their disappointment with the strip which they saw as continuing to portray ‘the less desirable type of teenage conduct’ and said that unless the comic made a dramatic change they would be forced to drop it. They dropped it after the episode of 21 September. Two weeks later it commenced a five months run in the Melbourne Newsday only to become a victim of the economies used by the paper as its financial problems deepened.

  Gerald Robert Carr was born at Bendigo, Victoria in 1944 and spent four years studying art at the Bendigo Institute of Technology. While employed as a letterer on the local Walt Disney comics in Sydney he

attended the art classes of Walter Cunningham before moving onto advertising and freelance work. After Brigette he published his own comic fanzine, Wart’s Epic, illustrated a number of Devil Doone strips for K. G. Murray; and in 1975 commenced a comic book line, which publishes his own comics in Vampire! and Brainmaster.

  Brigette was written around the television/pop scene of the ’sixties with its hip language, new fashions, and drug culture. Apart from a brief episode where a supporting male character has his drink spiked with LSD in an effort to discredit him, there was almost a total absence of reference to drugs in the strip. In terms of teenage violence and robbery there was a minimum, despite the fact that such strips as Dick Tracy and Kerry Drake had been featuring, in Australian newspapers, these ‘less desirable’ aspects of teenagers for some years. Go-Set was most reluctant to allow Carr to withdraw the comic for syndication as it had proved one of their most popular features, indicating that it was reaching the audience for which it was designed. Had Carr been willing to bow to editorial pressure and cater to the more conservative elements the comic, probably, would have been assured of a reasonably long run. Carr’s attitude was summed up in his letter published in the Independent:

‘A Woman’s Honour Defended’

‘In defence of Brigette, I feel H. McDonald does me a great wrong. Brigette does not glorify any ills in the present young society. Brigette intends to report realistically the fact that there is a drug problem in Australia, just as The Independent reported the problem of VD. But H. McDonald, not thinking, clearly jumped the gun before that sequence came to its natural conclusion. It is exactly this type of bigotry I am trying to eradicate. Teenagers today are well aware of life, very much down to earth and don’t like anything phony. I doubt that they would respect me if I pulled my punches.’

  Another comic which looked at the permissive society was Fred & Others, which first appeared in the Melbourne Herald on 29 September 1969. Drawn by Paul Tandberg with Thurber-like sparsity of detail, the comic took an anything but serious approach to permissiveness, pollution, women’s liberation, drinking and other facets of society. Tandberg avoided the use of formal panel divisions - a technique he continues to use on the political comic strips he draws for the Age. Eventually, Fred & Others was picked up by United Features Syndicate, Inc. and distributed in other countries. One country was South Africa where it ran into trouble. One of the Others’ was a Voice from Above which, apparently, scandalized the South Africans to such an extent that they banned it as being blasphemous. It would appear that there was no place in comic strips for God - leastways, not for Tandberg’s kind.

  The Didgeridoos is a Saturday strip that first appeared in the Melbourne Sun-News Pictorial in October 1969. The artist is Ralph Peverill who, in supplying the strip from Alice Springs, must qualify as our most isolated comic strip artist. The strip began with an intentional outback flavour and Peverill wanted to call it Aussie but the editors felt this was an over-used expression and one that was not favoured even editorially. The name of the comic was changed and the main character, a barefoot boy, was re-named Oz as an abbreviation for Ozzie. Considering the direction in which the strip has developed, the change in name was a wise decision.

  The locale was set in the ‘back and beyond’ using indigenous animals, Bindi the kangaroo, Fred the frilled lizard, Dingo and his blunderbuss, Doc Pelican (‘The Flying Doctor’), Buster Crow and his family, a hermit called Borroloola Ben, and Munga the Aboriginal. Like Emerson’s The Warrumbunglers, the strip used a modem approach to humour with more than its share of social comments. When it was suggested to Junior Crow that he needed to go to school to 'learn the three Rs to obtain a job, he responded ‘And after you get the job you know what happens? RE-trenchment, RE-deployment, and RE-dundancy!’

  Two insects, Peewee and Bugsy, have gradually taken over the strip. They are a couple of bugs of some unspecified species and it is usually Bugsy who plays the straight man to the. smaller Peewee. While it is not unusual for Peverill to have a single character talk a gag through the entire strip, when needed he is quite skilful in executing the integration of words and drawings that is required when pursuing an ideal comic strip.

  Ralph William Irving Peverill was born at Korumba, Victoria in 1932 and studied art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Through the influence of Wally Driscoll, he obtained a temporary position as a press artist with the Herald and Weekly Times group in the early ’fifties before eventually drifting to Alice Springs. During this period he turned his hands to all types of jobs to keep the wolf from the door - barman, taxi driver, salesman, ticketwriter, signwriter, and a struggling cartoonist always.

  From the publicity department of Hoyts Theatres he obtained a job as an animator with GTV9 Melbourne. After three years with the channel he returned to Alice Springs where he became a signwriter up and down the track to Darwin. Then he began doing freelance animation from Alice Springs - a situation that continues to this day. He has worked for Hanna-Barbera, Air Programs International and A1 Et Al, the company run by Alex Stitt the well-known cartoon designer. He is currently working on a two-year project, the full length cartoon Grendel, and designing new comic projects with an eye to overseas syndication.

  As the ’60s drew to a close there were only a dozen local artists working on comic strips and the majority of those comics had emerged some 20-40 years previously. There were signs in some of the newer strips that papers were prepared to start looking at some new ideas but it had been a decade that had shown no overall progress. The national daily, The Australian, had begun in July 1964 but could find no place in their paper for a national strip, relying on imported material. Consolidated Press, apart from the short appearance of The Warrumbunglers, had relied on Ginger Meggs and Gunn’s Gully /Ben Bowyang to relate something of the Australian experience through the period. It seemed that only the Herald and Weekly Times and Fairfax groups had any interest in encouraging locally drawn comics.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN ON THE MOVE AGAIN?

 

With the exception of the short-lived Sunday Star, Melbourne was forced to exist without Sunday papers up until 1969 and during that period it was the Saturday editions of the daily papers that carried the comics and special features that other states carried in their Sunday papers. Street newsvendors in Melbourne did a roaring trade selling interstate Sunday papers - purchased, mainly, for their comic sections. Perhaps because they were raised as a Sunday paper-less society, Melbournians have not taken to their Sunday papers of the last decade and no lasting Australian comic strip has emerged from their ranks.

  However, the Sunday Observer was responsible for the introduction of a satirical comic that was new and refreshing in its approach and which remains the only comic of its type to grace the pages of the establishment press. The Observer’s eight-page, full colour comic section was introduced in September 1969 at a time when all established comic sections had long since gone to the cheaper black and white sections. Featuring Dick Tracy, Tarzan, Prince Valiant, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Alley Oop, Pogo, Dennis the Menace, Brenda Starr, Bugs Bunny and a number of other well-known US strips, it was an impressive section but it had no room for the local product. This situation was rectified in June 1970 with the commencement of Iron Outlaw.

  Written by Graeme Rutherford and drawn by Gregor Mac Alpine, Iron Outlaw sometimes ridiculed but mostly poked fun at the political and social institutions of Australia and set about the ‘Ocker’ image with great relish. At the same time they highlighted the popularity of comic book super-heroes, particularly the characters from Stan Lee’s Marvel Comic Group, and imitated the styles of well-known comic book artists, like Neal Adams, to reinforce their point.

  The alter ego of Iron Outlaw was Gary Robinson, a junior accountant for the Melvem City Council who was tormented by the injustices against the good people of Melbourne. On a visit to Glenrowan he finds an old Kelly-style helmet and wishes that he had the strength and courage of Ned Kelly to combat the forces of evil. From nowhere appears Yum Yabbi the spirit of the bush and an Aboriginal answer to Brittania. With a winged kangaroo perched on her head, an Aboriginal kangaroo motif on her shield, she points a bone at Gary and by uttering the magic words ‘Ah hoo la la’ she transforms him into a super being and presents him with a pair of golden boomerangs. Gary thinks it is ‘Bonzer!’.

  In typical super-hero fashion, Iron Outlaw soon gained an offsider in the form of Steel Sheila, who is really Dawn Papadopolis, a council typist. Together they ride the countryside in Iron Outlaw’s orange FJ Holden with wide wheels and broad GT stripe. The early stories were restricted to Melbourne where they mercilessly caricatured Sir Henry

Bolte as ‘Humpo - The Hunchback of St Paul’s’, who is determined to spread gloom by making every day like a Melbourne Sunday. Called upon by Prime Minister John Gorton to serve their country, the strip broadened its area of operation.

  A number of episodes involved the Prime Minister, then William McMahon, as the super-hero Kokoda Kid - complete with digger hat and a chest full of medals. The strip kidded the conservative reputation of Melbourne in a panel where Steel Sheila was changing out of her costume. A text box was added to read ‘In deference to our sensitive Victorian readers, Dawn appears nippleless’.

  With the closure of the Sunday Observer imminent, Iron Outlaw and Steel Sheila (as the strip was now called) transferred to the pages of the Sunday Review in February 1971. Now in black and white, the strip hit its visual peak with some stunning artwork by MacAlpine on a story about the Yellow Peril and featuring Madam Loo and Warlord Nong. By the time it had finished in June the same year, the comic had satirized everything in sight and, in the process, confronted readers with some of the more unpleasant aspects of our society. In the final story, Iron Outlaw became the dictator of Australia and imprisoned the incredulous Steel Sheila - after all, she was only a ‘little wog’! Greg and Grae, as they bylined themselves, moved on to other fields and the world of comic strips was poorer for their leaving.

  Max and Min - The Weather People, which made its- first appearance in the Sun-Herald on 4 October 1970, was to become one of the cleverest and most enjoyable of the satirical strips. It was the work of Max Foley who, though a staff artist for John Fairfax and Sons, supplied the comic on a freelance basis. A play on the words ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’, the main characters lived in the unusual town of Weatherby which was divided into two distinct districts. Max came from the Eastern part where there was glorious sunshine all day; Min came from the Western side where it was always raining; and where the rain stopped and the sun shone was right down the middle of the main street. The main supporting characters were Min’s nasty Uncle Charles, the beautiful schoolteacher Pert Petunia, The Weather Controller, the policeman Constable Bright, Gran and Norm, and Max’s father who was the weather man for the local TV station and who only ever gave one forecast, ‘Sunny’. Often the real stars of the comic were the assorted characters and villains who peopled each new episode. Foley’s strip soon developed into a comic that could be read at two levels. It could be enjoyed by children for its surface story and many of the quips and puns by its characters, while the adults obtained additional enjoyment from its satirical approach and social comment.

  Throughout its 300 episodes, Foley used Max and Min as a springboard to make comments upon such subjects as the emerging African nations and Idi Amin (General Mowgli of Mowgliland), time travel (Dr Strudel Noodle), Soviet and American competition (Premier Nyetski and General Nyorker), the boom in table billiards and snooker (Redblack and Miss Q), pollution, economic conditions, and anything else that took his fancy. In a tale using a farming background, Foley used a Malcolm Fraser lookalike called The Grazier. When advised that his homestead stood on a hill of pure Uranium, he cautioned Max and Min to keep quiet on the subject as he made more money out of Government farming subsidies than he was likely to make from mining royalties!

  Maxwell Charles Serle Foley was born at Drummoyne, NSW in 1944. His father was killed by a falling tree in the last months of the war, while he was serving in the Army. Foley began drawing comics as a small boy and became an avid reader of them, often spending his school lunch money to buy them. In the early years, these were secreted in the attic and read by the light of a candle before his mother returned from work. Eventually, the comics were allowed down into his room after he had missed his footing on the rafters and crashed through the ceiling to his waist, amid mortar, battens, and a billowing cloud of dust. On leaving Fort Street High School he spent two years as a copy boy at the Sydney Morning Herald and was a cadet for four years at the Sun under Ron Melville. During this time he studied at East Sydney Technical College for four years. He left the Fairfax organization in 1968 to work for a firm that manufactured flameproof electrical switches. The firm burnt down.

After limited success in producing one-line cartoons he became an artist at a printery for a short period before rejoining Fairfax. For Pix Magazine he created Cindy in August 1970. The voluptuous blonde with a capacity for losing her clothes was originally titled Chesty Blonde. While the name was apt and smile-provoking the editor, aware of Bonds’ copyright on Chesty Bond, wisely decided to change the name to Cindy. While the strip was still running, Foley commenced drawing Max and Min as a replacement for Nan Fullarton’s Frisky.

  The pressure of increasing demands for daily journalistic art convinced Foley that he would have to drop Max and Min - and in one final, climactic adventure he literally killed-off most of the characters. Max and Min remained topical and incisive to the last. In the 300th episode on 4 July 1974, Max and Min are seen departing into a thick, pea soup fog and towards a queue they can make out in the distance. From the final, fog-filled panel rises a single balloon, saying two words - ‘Dole bludgers’.

  Gerry Lants first began developing Basil in 1965 but it took him five years to reach the point where he was satisfied with the character. At that time he had been working as an illustrator for the Melbourne Herald for some 11 years and the company’s Features Editor, Neil Newnham, suggested that Lants approach Inter Continental Features. When Sol Shifrin agreed to handle the syndication the Herald was the first to buy it and it has been appearing in that paper since November 1970, and soon began appearing in other states. In March 1974 the comic broke into the tight US market. Universal Press Features (syndicators of Doonesbury) agreed to handle the North American rights and sold the strip into 85 outlets. Basil also appears in many other countries and can make the transition to the foreign language press more readily than most strips - for Basil is what is commonly known as a pantomime strip, a comic which contains no dialogue.

  To produce any comic strip over a long period takes ability and application but the creator of a pantomime strip needs an additional skill - the ability to deliver the point of his humour in purely visual terms and restrict the narrative to three or four panels. Apart from a few Grant Butler stories he drew for Frank Johnson Publications in the late ’forties, Lants had no real experience in the comic field - yet, he has produced thousands of Basil strips which have delighted readers all over the world.

  Basil continues the tradition in Australian comic art that it is impossible to win. If something can go wrong ... it will. If Basil fires his shotgun at a flight of ducks he brings down a balloonist who crashes on top of him; instead of sinking a short putt the golfball will only knock the hole further away; a file to cut through the bars in a prison brings no joy when he realises that, with or without bars, his pear-shaped body will not fit through the window. Seldom without his ivy league cap and often accompanied by a huge cat and dog who walk upright, Basil seems to meander through most countries and in all types of climates. At times he is well-dressed and appears affluent while at other times he is scruffy and unshaven with his clothes the worse for wear. But regardless of his situation, it is a rare occurrence when Basil doesn’t get a backhander from Fate.

Lants receives considerable mail regarding his character and was, perhaps, paid the ultimate compliment in two letters received from

America. One letter simply said ‘Basil - Great!’ while the other berated him for the manner in which he had drawn the headdress of an American Indian. He thought the strip had been drawn by an American cartoonist. Basil is an excellent example in the art of visual narrative. It compares favourably with the best overseas pantomime strips and, certainly, it is the most successful strip of the genre to be produced by an Australian.

  In October 1972, the Sunday Telegraph returned to the field of locally produced comics when it commissioned Lloyd Piper to draw Wolfe. Piper had drawn comic books for many publishers during the ’forties before settling-in to a long career as an advertising layout artist and, later, becoming a part-time teacher at the National Art School. Wolfe was a roving adventurer who travelled as fate and fancy prompted him. Wolfe’s strength was its strong storyline and the fact that Piper restricted his wanderings to Australia, giving readers an opportunity to identify with the various suburbs and country towns - and it was these aspects that attracted a large following for the strip.

Piper assumed the drawing of Ginger Meggs after the death of Ron Vivian, giving him the distinction of having two Sunday comics running in the same paper at the same time. Wolfe was terminated just before Ginger Meggs transferred to the Sun-Herald. Both Wolfe and Ginger Meggs were replaced by US strips.

Born in Adelaide in 1939, Donald Langmead is the Senior Lecturer in the History of Architecture at the South Australian Institute of Technology. With a string of letters after his name he would seem an unlikely candidate for the ranks of comic strip artists. But beneath the academic exterior is a man whose love of the medium was kindled in the ’forties and ’fifties when he was entranced by the comic books of Amos, Chatto, Dixon, Nicholls, Wedd, Lawson, and the others. However, it was not until 1972 that his interest in entering the field was really aroused. After a boring four week drawing project, he set his students a relief project - ‘Draw a Comic Strip’. A caveman idea came up and Langmead tried to show his students the type of thing he wanted them to do. The idea snowballed and before long he had completed 40 strips. He approached a number of newspapers and when the Adelaide Sunday Mail agreed to take it, The Almost Human strip was born. The comic made its first appearance in January 1973 and began appearing in the Melbourne Sunday Press in September that year. Langmead signed with an English syndicate who, after running a stunning promotion, sold the strip to papers in the US, Brazil, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.

  Langmead sees his characters in an historical context - that human beings have never changed, in spite of environmental and technological change. The little man - nameless - is a loser. His best laid plans turn to nothing. The handful of characters in The Almost Human transfer modem humour to their prehistoric setting as they examine the problems of pollution, the energy crisis, currency fluctuations, domestic problems etc. The comic contains its fair share of sarcasm which Langmead blends fluently with the visual humour.

  Due to litigation, The Almost Human has not reached a large audience in Australia. Now that the legalities have been decided in Langmead’s favour he has altered the name of the comic to Piltdown and will look for a wider, local readership.

  The Adventures of Og and Oliver commenced in the Melbourne Age in April 1972. Created by the author-educators Bill and Lorna Hannan, the comic was an attempt to tap the educational potential of the medium. Over 700 years old, Og was an affable, short-sighted, eight-metre tall giant who lived in a cavern in the outback of Australia. Oliver was a self-sufficient ostrich who tended to get carried away with his own importance. The comic was designed to be read out to smaller children without boring the reader and introduced a variety of topics and ideas - from customs to metric conversion - as well as many games and activities. The art for this interesting and worthwhile experiment came from Stitt and Weatherhead’s Jigsaw Factory, a company which specialized in unusual and imaginative graphic designs.

  Steve Landon made its first appearance in the Brisbane wraparound edition of The Australian in July 1973. It was the work of George Smith, a local silkscreen printer, and followed the adventures of an ex-Senior Detective who resigned from the force after the death of his wife and child. One of the few adventure strips of the last decade, Steve Landon used Brisbane and the Gold Coast areas as its background and a number of segments featured extensive use of rhyming slang. The comic finished in August 1974 when the use of local sections was discontinued by The Australian, leaving Steve Landon as possibly the only locally drawn comic to be connected with that paper. Smith returned to the scene, briefly, in December 1976 when the Brisbane Sunday Mail published his Behind the UFO as a full-colour comic book insert.

  When The Almost Human appeared in the Sunday Press in September 1973, accompanying it was Allan Salisbury’s Fingers and Foes, an American gangster strip set in the ’thirties. Fingers and Foes represented a milestone for Australian comic artists as it was the first strip to be sold to a US syndicate without having first been published in this country. Purchased by the Publishers-Hall Syndicate, the US launching of the comic was scheduled for March 1974 - but when the Sunday Press expressed interest in the strip they agreed to let the comic make its debut in Australia. Eventually, the strip appeared in dozens of North American newspapers including the Chicago Sun-Times, Dallas News, Philadelphia Enquirer, Miami Herald, Vancouver Sun, and the Winnipeg Tribune.

  Allan John Salisbury was born at Kyabram, Victoria in 1949. On completing his education he took a position with the Cyclone Company in Melbourne where he pushed a broom, wrapped parcels and did other routine jobs while working his way towards becoming the company’s advertising officer. In this position he liaised with agencies but did not do any artwork himself. Always interested in comics, he began working on a strip entitled The Ludicrous Life of Lennie the Loser which was autobiographical in theme. Salisbury then went to see Weg, at the Herald, who suggested he would be better off with an agent and recommended Sol Shifrin. As Shifrin already had one pantomime strip in his stable, Basil, he suggested that Salisbury put aside Lennie and look at developing a comic with dialogue. After a long struggle, Fingers and Foes emerged and Shifrin was able to accomplish the almost impossible by selling an American gangster strip to the Americans.

  But the strip encountered problems from the beginning. One of Salisbury’s characters was a Hanging Judge who had a bottle of whisky in one hand and a gavel in the other as he dispensed justice. The prospect of a drunken judge did not appeal to the syndicate and he was, quickly, sobered-up. When Salisbury indulged in his favourite sport of playing with words, the syndicate wrote out the idea of using a bra shop as a front for Fingers and his mob. They also indicated that while mugging for a few bucks might be funny in other places it was no longer funny in the US. And in one of their periodic anti-violence campaigns they began to paint out the guns in the gangsters’ hands. Towards the end of 1974 the strip was dropped by mutual agreement but not before readers of the Adelaide Advertiser had a chance to view some of the antics of Fingers, his girlfriend Molly, his bodyguard Ape, his lawyer Springa, and the rest.

  Fingers and Foes never really got off the ground but it did highlight the fact that it was possible to sell direct to the US and that in Salisbury we had a young cartoonist with a keen sense of humour and of the ridiculous. Wasting no time, Salisbury created a new set of characters, this time with an Australian background, and The Old Timer made its first appearance in the Daily Telegraph in October 1974. His initial group of characters included The Old Timer, an elderly bloke with a long thirst and a reluctance to shout for beers; The Con Man, with an eye for a deal and a dollar; The Kangaroo, with a desire not to end up in the soup; The Flyin’ Doc; and The Last Lost Tribesman and his Wife, who are determined to stay lost. In July 1975 the Sun-News Pictorial picked up the strip as a trial replacement for Bluey and Curley. Les Dixon had reached retirement age and the Herald and Weekly Times, feeling that Bluey and Curley had outlived its popularity, decided to retire the strip at the same time. The Old Timer was substituted for Bluey and Curley without any fanfare and the paper sat back to watch the reactions. The readers’ reaction to the disappearance of a longtime favourite was minimal. On the other hand, the Daily Mirror wanted to take over the comic but could not come to satisfactory terms with the Herald and Weekly Times - so Salisbury settled in to the task of establishing his new strip.

  Rather than handing them the joke on a platter, Salisbury enjoys making his readers think. Consequently, he makes great use of the ‘play on words’ device. While this is nothing new in Australian comics, Salisbury extracts more from the device than many of his predecessors by combining the words with a visual punchline.

Readers are often forced to re-read the strip, paying closer attention to the drawings which contain the joke’s raison d’etre.

  While he added characters like the Crazy Croc, Lillie (the Old Timer’s distant admirer), a devious butcher, a group of duck hunters and sundry spear-carriers, the comic did not begin to make a big impression until the introduction of Snake. This pathetic creature crawled into the strip in 1976 and has gradually taken-over the comic to the point where the name was changed to Snake Tales in 1978. All Snake wants in life is a friend and, maybe, some limbs. The cult of Snake followers that has sprung up bombard Salisbury with requests to make their hero’s life more bearable or offering to be his friend – but Salisbury, often apologetically, sees that it is his job to keep Snake miserable. And he does. Snake has offered pathetic pleas to his creator for relief and, on one occasion, when Snake yelled that God would get Salisbury for what he was doing to him, the Sun-News Pictorial censored the word God! Snake goes from strength to strength, appearing all around Australia as well as in the Scandinavian countries and may soon be published in the US. There have been two excellent collections of the strip published in book form as well as a Snake coffee cup and a Snake doll marketed. With all the evil connotation associated with the name, Snake is the most unlikely hero - yet children love him and he is particularly popular with women readers, which is something for psychiatrists to ponder. With their love of the underdog (and Snake is about as under as they come), readers could well make the character the most popular and most identifiable Australian comic strip character since the days when Ginger Meggs was the undisputed king of the field.

  A good deal of the credit for Salisbury’s success goes to Sol Shifrin of Inter Continental Features. Initially, Shifrin’s syndicate handled only overseas material but in recent years it has become the only syndicate specializing in Australian and New Zealand comic strips. The fact that Salisbury signs his strip ‘Sols’ is not related to Sol Shifrin’s involvement with the strip - it is sheer coincidence. Sols has been Salisbury’s nickname since schooldays.

  Ken Emerson returned to the comic field in February 1974 when the Sydney Sun commenced running On the Rocks, on the unusual basis of two strips per week. Inspired by The Rocks area of Sydney, the comics featured the exploits of Floyd Fingal, transported con man, as he matched wits with the paymaster of the New South Wales Rum Corps, Major Unheaval; the bumbling Colonial Governor; and his hopeless aide, De Camp. While offering comments on the hardship and misery of the era. On the Rocks stepped outside of its historical period to reflect the broader canvas of local affairs. Sly-grog, six o’clock swill, pollution, metho drinkers, Alcoholics Anonymous, glue sniffing, take-away foods, television cue-cards, bin testings, etc. - they were all there and permeating all of the gags was the characteristic resentment for authority and the conviction that the little man was smarter than his keepers. The comic deserved a wider audience but fell victim to editorial changes at the beginning of 1977.

  On the Rocks was bought by the Brisbane Sunday Mail in August 1975 and the name changed to Ball and Chain. Various newspapers have had a propensity for altering the names of comic strips going back to the early ’twenties with comics like The Clancy Kids and Somebody’s Stenog. They have also felt the need to change Flash Gordon to 'Speed' Gordon, Bugs Bunny to Ben Bunny, Ben Bowyang to Gunn’s Gully, the Sunday Wally and the Major to Pudden, and so on. In most cases it is difficult to understand the reasons behind the changes. A similar situation existed in the comic book field where the US comic strip Skyroads was reprinted as Hurricane Hawk. Slightly more understandable was the ‘doctoring’ of strips to give the impression that they were Australian. With The Phantom, the Australian Woman's Mirror changed Diana Palmer into an Australian girl and substituted the names of local cities for those of overseas. Comic book publishers did similar things and for many years the Justice League of America was reprinted as the Justice League. Prior to the advent of Decimal Currency, all reference to dollars were purged and pounds, shillings and pence substituted. Most times, the alterations stuck out like a sore thumb.

  Following in the footsteps of On the Rocks and the general awakening of interest in the early days of Australia came Lafferty. Created by Stephen Stanley, the comic first appeared in the Daily Telegraph in April 1974 followed by appearances in the Melbourne Herald, Adelaide Advertiser, and a Sunday page in the Sun-Herald in May 1977.

  Stephen Stanley was born at Liverpool, England, in 1950 and came to Australia with his parents in 1965. He obtained a place in the South Australian School of Art but became instead, an apprentice signwriter in Whyalla. In 1971 he began drawing a weekly, sponsored cartoon for the Whyalla News and the panel worked its way up to become a regular feature of the editorial page. Stanley began sending cartoons to newspapers and magazines and had one accepted by The Australasian Post, where samples of his work were seen by Shifrin. Contacting Stanley, Shifrin suggested he draw a comic strip and the result was Lafferty.

  Another in the line of born losers, Lafferty is set in the convict settlement days. He seems to spend his days dragging around a ball and chain, hanging from a tree by his thumbs, or trying to escape from soldiers decked out like Xmas trees. Occasionally he bests authority but such victories seldom bring him any material rewards - he usually wins as a result of a sarcastic remark. Authority is at every turn yet Lafferty’s spirit remains undaunted. He lives by the creed lllegitimati non carborundum.

  Stanley’s style appears relatively simple and open - yet it is deceptive. He is one of the few artists drawing humorous strips who devotes time to shading and background details, giving the comic an added depth. The appearance of Lafferty is characterized by large, irregular lettering and all of the characters appearing in half or full profile. The strip abounds in anachronisms as Stanley is not one to let history stand in the way of a good idea and his punchlines are a mixture of wit, sarcasm, puns, and a play on words. Another of Stanley’s strips, School’s In, commenced in the Sun-Herald in May 1977 and ran for just over a year.

  The Sydney Sunday Mirror(now called Sunday) was interested in a comic strip to help promote the Ned Kelly rock-opera and made a fortunate choice in approaching Monty Wedd. Early Australian history is one of Wedd’s passions and his Ned Kelly made its first appearance in September 1974.

  Montague Thomas Archibald Wedd was born in Randwick, NSW and, as a small boy, was instructed in art by Oswald Brock at 2s. 6d. per lesson. He left high school during the Depression and, after six months, found a job at Hackett Offset Printing Company at 10s. per week. After six months he became an artist for a furniture manufacturer, spent some time in the Army, and then had a further stint as a furniture artist before joining the forces in 1941 where he served in the Army and then the RAAF. After the war he spent three years studying art under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme. During this period he began selling comics to Syd Nicholls including Bert and Ned and Captain Justice, which was responsible for awakening his interest in Australian history and Australiana. After Nicholls had closed his comic line, Wedd began supplying comics to Elmsdale Publications which included TodTrail and Kirk Raven - but he was dissatisfied as the publishers would not allow him to retain the copyright. New Century Press contracted him to do 23 Captain Justice stories for £102 per issue. Returning to Elmsdale he was paid £.160 per issue to draw The Scorpion until that comic ran into problems in Queensland. He then did a series of Captain Justice stories for Calvert Publications before commencing his long association in drawing features for Stamp News. He also began a 16 year association with The Australian Children’s Newspaper for whom he drew many full page adventure comics. From 1958 he contributed regularly to Chuckler’s Weekly with Captain Justice and King Comet.

  Captain Justice surfaced, again, in September 1964 in the pages of Woman's Day where it ran until April the following year. After producing another five Captain Justice stories for Horwitz Publications in 1963, Wedd became involved in the animation field working for both Artransa and Eric Porter. He was involved in such programmes as Marco Polo vs. The Red Dragon, Charlie Chan, The Lone Ranger, Rocket Robin Hood, and Super Friends. On leaving the animation field Wedd concentrated on freelance work and Ned Kelly.

  The original plans called for Ned Kelly to run for 25-30 weeks but when Wedd sensed the opportunity to be able to produce a detailed examination of Kelly’s life he approached the Sunday Mirror and explained what he had in mind. They agreed that he should draw the comic on an open-end basis and so Ned Kelly ran for 146 weeks, finishing in July 1977. Apart from the standard research that would go into a comic of this nature, Wedd visited the courtroom and various other spots to make the strip as authentic as possible. He told the story with an even-handed approach and left it to the reader to make his own determination of Kelly’s rightful place in our history. Rendered in a style that resembles earlier engravings, with considerable cross- hatching, the comic was an excellent example of how to use the medium to teach history. Replacing Ned Kelly was another Wedd strip about bushrangers, Bold Ben Hall, which is following the same approach and format as its predecessor.

  MS started in the Melbourne Herald in July 1975 and is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek look at the modem, liberated woman. But then, it is the work of two men, Aubrey Collette and Stan Marks. Collette, who comes from Sri Lanka, is much better known for his editorial cartoons. In October 1975 the Sunday Mirror published Salisbury’s Lennie the Loser. The name proved to be an apt one as the strip didn’t last very long.

  The 35 years old Geoff Augustine’s Ossie appeared in the pages of the Sun-News Pictorial in April 1976 and began a once-a-week appearance in the Sun-Herald in January 1977. However, Ossie had originally appeared in Ansett Airlines’ inflight magazine. Panorama, in 1974 as a well intentioned tourist wandering in and out of predicaments. Augustine had been an Art Director in an advertising agency and left to become a staff artist with Ansett.

  To launch Ossie as a daily strip, Augustine added a wife, who is worried about her weight but more concerned about getting a dishwasher; a son, Mozzie, and his friends Patsy, Kye, and Fatty. Ossie is another character who seldom wins and even the garden hose and his umbrella continually outsmart him. And when he starts chopping at a tree, as he often does, you know where the tree is going to finish up, one way or another. Augustine uses the children, with their simpler and more direct approach, to give an insight into adult values and preoccupations. Often, the children are quite brutal in their honesty - but usually funny with it. Possibly, Ossie is the only current humour strip that is a genuine reflection of what is happening in suburbia. Certainly, it contains more political and social comments than any other strip.

  Torkan has occupied the front page of the Sunday Telegraph since it first appeared in July 1976. It is the work of Sydney artist Roger Fletcher who only decided to draw the comic when he couldn’t find another artist to illustrate his stories. Torkan caters for the upsurge in demand for heroic-fantasy stories created by the Marvel Comics Group’s adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian.

  During 1976, to celebrate their Golden Jubilee, CSIRO produced a comic strip, The Researchers, giving details about the CSIRO’s various research divisions. While it used the general comic format of a series of panels, it contained no speech balloons and was, in reality, the equivalent of an illustrated text book. The long-running Frontiers of Science suffers from the same defect. It is an excellent educational feature but it fails to make use of the special characteristics of the medium and is not a genuine comic.

  Syd Nicholls died on 3 June 1977 and Stan Cross was dead less than two weeks later. They, along with Bancks, had pioneered Australian comic strips in the early ’20s and had been major influences on the field.

  With Nicholls’ death, the Sun-Herald revamped their comic section in May and commenced running strips by Emerson and Stanley. Also introduced to the section was Lucky Cat, drawn by Theo Batten. A Walkley Award winner for illustration, Batten had created Lucky Cat for the pages of the Women’s Weekly in 1969 where it ran until pressure of work forced Batten to drop it. The comic is aimed at animal lovers and observes the manner in which cats, in particular, see themselves as the focal point of a household. In recent times a parrot has been introduced to the household and Lucky finds that it is far easier to outwit his owners than it is to best the bossy Polly.

  Professor Om appeared in Sunday in September 1977 and was drawn by the young Sydney cartoonist, Paul Power, who had drawn the Sunday Air Hawk page for some months. The comic had a science fiction background and the scripts, by John Snowden, were full of tongue-in-cheek humour and many in-references to personalities in the fields of science fiction and comics. While Power’s use of comic book layouts was a fresh approach the strip only lasted six months.

  In February 1978 the Adelaide Sunday Mail added Sleuth, a Sherlock Holmes parody, to its comic section. Drawn by the pseudonymous ‘Chiz’, the comic joined Max Sutch’s strip, The Allsports, and The Almost Human to give that paper three comics drawn in Adelaide. As the section also contains Ginger Meggs, The Potts, and Air Hawk, it is the only section in the country where Australian comics outnumber the imported ones. This is a direct contrast to many papers, such as the Canberra Times, which cannot find space for a single local comic.

  The Sunday Mail also carries a specially prepared Sunday version of Footrot Flats. The comic is drawn in New Zealand by the talented Murray Ball and the daily strip has been running in various Australian states for some years. In mirroring the humorous side of farm life in New Zealand, Ball highlights the amazing similarities between the two countries - and very few readers realize that it is not an Australian strip. Ball’s cave-man strip, Stanley, also appears in Australia as well as in many papers overseas. There was a time when most New Zealand artists had to come to Australia to further their careers - now, pleasingly, it seems that they can succeed from their own backyard.

  By the time the Sydney Morning Herald introduced Tennison’s and Gilmour’s Roscoe in November 1978, the decade had produced over two dozen locally drawn newspaper strips. Some had a relatively short life but many remain and, added to those that were already in existence, the field seems to offer some encouragement to prospective comic strip artists. There appear to be many factors behind the willingness of some newspapers to publish an increased number of locally drawn comics - but two of the motivations seem clear.

  During the ’seventies the price of syndicated material increased. Not dramatically (though in the case of the Wizard of Id the price doubled) but to a point where local cartoonists had a slightly better chance of competing. Even so, the situation still depends on the artist’s ability to produce comics quickly and have them accepted by a number of newspapers. Unless a comic appears in the larger circulation newspapers in both Sydney and Melbourne, as well as other capitals, there is little chance that the comic will bring the artist a reasonable return. Another prime mover has been the awakening of national pride which began to gain impetus in the early years of the decade. As a whole, the nation has become more aware of our history and culture and the fields of film and television have demonstrated that local products, with local themes, are not only enjoyed by the Australian audience but are of world standard.

  There is also a trend, particularly in the US, for newspapers to return to the principle that it is features that build circulation. In an age where the immediate news content of newspapers is out-dated by television news and direct telecasts of major events, there is a need to provide the reader with other, non-news, reasons for buying the paper. Comics are one of the features which can be, and in some cases are, exploited as an attraction. They are old friends who wait to greet you each day. Some have been with readers all of their lives while others are more recent acquaintances. They can be studied at leisure and savoured - and a missed episode can easily be read the next day or even many days later. If newspapers gave just portion of the space to promoting comics that they give (without charge) to their opposition media, the results might well surprise them.

  Comics have always played an important part in the mass media and there are very few people living who can recall the time when there were no regular comics in some form. They have amused, delighted, enchanted, charmed, thrilled, inspired and sometimes annoyed countless millions of readers - and any field with such a widespread appeal through all ages of the community should not be ignored. In particular, the Australian contribution to this field deserves further study.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT SPREADING THE GOOD WORD

 

The use of comics for advertising or propaganda is deserving of a separate study but it would be remiss of me not to make a brief mention of them in this book.

  Advertising comics began to emerge in the mid-’thirties and gradually encompassed a wide range of products. Singing the praises of cosmetics, household lines, and patent medicines the comics were a graphic portrayal of how the products would change the readers’ lives by bringing them romance, making them more popular, or advancing their careers. Some approached their subjects on a serious level, others in a light-hearted manner - but usually the claims were extravagant to say the least. Certainly, they would not be allowed under current Trade Practices legislation.

  The most successful advertisers using comic strips have been those with some understanding of the comic strip’s place in the field of visual communications and an appreciation that the medium, to be effective, has its own set of rules. Often, advertisers would cram the panels with word-packed balloons and attempt to force the message on to the reader. The dialogue in all forms of comics should be short, crisp, and to the point - delivered, almost, with the economy of a telegram. Comics containing excessive wordage tend to be automatically rejected by the eye of the potential reader.

  The artwork for comics can come in all shapes and sizes, varying with the type of comic, but the most attractive to the eye are those comics that are well-balanced, clean, and only containing such detail as is required to project the desired mood of the strip. Advertising strips have often fallen down in this area when the artwork has been handled by those who are not suited to the medium. A good artist does not necessarily make a good comic artist. It is a specialized field.

  In the mid-’thirties, Aria became associated with producing comics advertising Solvol soap. The artist’s clean, open style and understanding of comics assisted in the popularity of this series which ran for many years. During 1936, Philips ran a series of strips promoting their light bulbs. The strips contained humorous situations such as a man proposing to the wrong (ugly) sister and an accountant declaring profits of £10 000 instead of £10 - all because they did not use ‘Philips’ Coiled Coil Lamps’.

  The most successful advertising comic ever used in Australia was Chesty Bond. The character was a co-creation of Syd Miller and Ted Maloney, the Bond’s account executive at J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, and was designed with the idea of promoting sales of the company’s singlets. Devised in 1938, Chesty Bond only made spasmodic appearances along with another Bond’s strip, Aussie History, until it was decided to make the comic a regular feature in 1940. It started in the Sydney Sun in March, running three times a week - each Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Chesty’s antics soon gained a large following and by 1942 it had been extended to five days a week becoming, possibly, the first advertising daily strip of its kind in the world.

  When Miller left the comic in 1945 it was taken over by Will Mahony who remained with the strip until 1950. Chesty was then handled briefly by Virgil Reilly before being passed on to Cec Linaker, followed by John Santry who drew the comic until it was retired in 1964. While all of the artists contributed to the success of Chesty Bond, it was Syd Miller who was the definitive artist on the character. As well as drawing the strip and creating Chesty’s unmistakable features, Miller wrote the stories and set the pattern for others to follow. Once, while in hospital with scarlet fever, he drew a series of the comic which had to be fumigated before it could be passed on to the agency. When this operation was found to be delaying the strip an agency employee began hovering outside Miller’s window, through which he would drop each strip after it had been completed. The fate of Chesty Bond was tied to Miller.

  Chesty was a well-built young man, with fair hair and a jutting chin, dedicated to clean living and doing the right thing. When his massive chest was covered with a Bond’s athletic singlet he became something of a super being, capable of performing amazing feats. In many ways, Miller was fortunate in controlling Chesty Bond during an ideal period. The wartime situation allowed Miller to be very patriotic, commit mayhem on the German, Italian, and Japanese soldiers as well as ridiculing Adolph Hitler and the Emperor Hirohito. Earlier, Miller has satirized Hitler in his 1939 strip, The Big Boss, for Smith’s Weekly but was forced to drop it due to the pressure of work. Provided he was wearing his singlet (which was most of the time), no task seemed beyond Chesty as he ripped apart enemy submarines, warships, and tanks; lifted small islands; caught enemy shells and threw them back; and lassoed aeroplanes with barbed wire. Under Miller, Chesty’s companions included a half-pint blowhard, Willie, and a wisecracking parrot - but these disappeared when other artists introduced their own characters.

  Commencing in 1944 was a sequence which used Bob Hope and Jerry Colona. Readers must have scratched their heads when no sooner had Hope met Chesty than he quickly left the strip. Through his Australian agent, Hope had threatened a law suit for using him without permission and, by implication, suggesting that he endorsed Bond’s singlets. The sequence was terminated after only seven episodes.

  Considering the cost of running the strip, Bond’s did not go overboard in promoting their product in the comic. Most references to their product were low-key and seldom interfered with the progress of the story. They were also quite generous in giving free publicity to War Loans and other patriotic activities. As a result of the company’s attitude, Chesty Bond became accepted as a normal strip on the comic page and, as such, promoted the product far more effectively than any hard-sell approach. Chesty Bond was allowed to be a comic strip that advertised a product - and not an advertisement that wore the clothes of a comic strip. And therein lay its great appeal and success.

  With the end of the war, the artists had to look to other areas to make use of Chesty’s capabilities. Like many other strips with a wartime background, they found it difficult to develop situations that were not relatively commonplace. The humour remained, though at a more subdued level, and the standard of artwork remained high - but the comic gradually lost its former zest and was retired. Forty years after his birth, Chesty Bond remains a well-known promotional figure for the company concerned.

  During the mid-’fifties the energetic Miller was associated with another advertising strip, A Little Bear Will Fix It. Created for Behr-Manning, the comic was a series of self-contained episodes showing how, with the use of the company’s adhesive tape, Little Bear could solve almost any problem. When Miller exhausted his ideas the strip was reprinted for a number of years but, by comparison to Chesty Bond, there was nothing subtle about the way the product was promoted.

  One of the earliest, full colour advertising series was The Sea Rover, which made its first appearance in the Sunday Telegraph’s comic section in December 1947. Again, the sponsors of the strip, Ovaltine, restricted the mention of their product to a minimum. However, as the comic was set in the days of pirates and sailing ships, there was an anachronistic touch about the characters making some reference to ‘a drink of hot Ovaltine'. The comic was tied-in with radio broadcasts of The Sea Rover, which was heard each Sunday evening on 48 stations throughout Australia. From September 1948 a 64-page annual was available, at a cost of 2s. 6d., and The Sea Rover left the newspapers in February 1949.

  The Federal election of 1949 saw the major parties using comics as part of their campaigns for the first time. With a photograph of Prime Minister Ben Chifley on the cover, the Labor Party’s eight-page coloured comic was titled The Way Ahead and presented the case that under Labor life would be ideal and no one would ever have to fear another Depression. The Liberal-Country Party groups published two titles, The Road Ahead and The Road Back. The latter title contained 16 coloured pages and took the theme of a country shackled by controls and being bled white by taxation. One Melbourne paper saw them as ‘an affront to the intelligence of the electors. They are pathetic in their presentation, infantile in their intention and false in their context’. It seemed a fair summation and highlighted two aspects in relation to comics - that many who try to capitalize on the appeal of the comic strip have no idea of its components and what makes it work, and the critic’s automatic linking of comic books with childish interests.

  The early ’fifties saw the free distribution of a comic published by The Australian Constitutional League in Melbourne. Is this Tomorrow? - Australia Under Communism was a 48-page, partial reprint of a similar comic (sub-titled America Under Communism) that had been published in the US in 1947. The book was given an appropriate Australian cover and a number of pages were redrawn to suit local situations but, substantially, it was the same comic. Filled with riots, bashings, bombings, executions, floggings, starvation and other violence against the citizens it was a horrific presentation of an extreme view. The comic reflected the reds-under-the-beds hysteria that was predominant at the time.

  Untamed was the title of a charming comic drawn by Ken Maynard for the National Parks and Wildlife Service. The purpose of the comic was to give children a greater appreciation and understanding of local flora and fauna. Fred Cul Cullen’s The Adventures of the Jolly Swagman was a series of 16-page coloured comics used as a promotion in conjunction with Ampol service stations in the early ’seventies. Cullen was no stranger to comics having drawn comics for Kings Cross Whisper during the ’60s and he has been drawing Fred the Fisherman for Fishing News for some years. Cullen is better known for his acting on television and script writing, having won Logies for both categories. Cullen’s comics have a distinctive Australian flavour both in the character and style of humour presented.

  The overnight transport company, Comet, used comics to promote their service with a series of single-sheet comics (some measuring 55 cm x 42 cm) devoted to the adventures of Captain Comet. Captain Comet took its impetus from the popularity of the super-hero comic books, strips and television cartoons and the derivation was the same for The Terrific Trio. The latter was a series of strips used by Ira Berk in Brisbane papers to promote three of their car dealers. The pseudonymously drawn strips were the work of a Brisbane animator, Max Bannah, who followed in the footsteps of the 1975 Safeway Sam series drawn by George Smith.

  There have been comics promoting deodorants, soaps, hair cream, cough mixtures, milk, soft drinks, chocolates, religion, politics, and just about every other item or idea that is promotable. The incidence of advertising comics waxes and wanes and seems to follow no particular pattern or cycle. While many advertising strips have been successful none have been able to match the combined popularity and longevity of Chesty Bond.

  The use of comics to promote a particular philosophy was first observed in William Mug. In the ’sixties, the alternative lifestyle movement and drug culture devotees found expression in limited circulation comic books which were known as underground comix. These publications started in the US with God Nose Comics and were followed by hundreds of other titles which included Zap, Snatch, Uneeda, Leather Nun, Slow Death, Yellow Dog Funnies.

  The Australian underground comix appear to have surfaced in the early ’seventies. Because their political-social context is at odds with the current mainstream their circulation is limited and it is difficult to establish a clear picture of the total volume and when they appeared. One of the pioneers appears to have been a Melbourne artist, Bob Daly, with his Understatement strip published by the Action Against Racism group for the 1971 Springbok Rugby Union tour. As well as publishing his own Kobber Komix, Daly’s work has appeared in Kobber Kommix, Much More Ballroom Funnies, and the more overground Revolution, High Times, and Digger. His graphic style is superior to a lot of his fellow undergrounders - many of whom have no knowledge of the basics of drawing, let alone any idea of the mechanics of comics.

 

  Expatriate American Pat Woolley had been involved in the production of many of the underground comix including Pharoah Phunnies, After Dinner Moose's After Shave Digest, and Cobber Comix. Now a partner in a publishing firm, she has published an anthology of underground comix which includes the works of Ian McCausland, Phil Pinder, Neil McClean, Peter Dickie, Jon Puckeridge, Martin Sharp, and Daly.

  The major problem faced by local comix is that the American comix are as much a threat - artistically, culturally, and economically - as in the overground industry.

  The ability of some underground artists to communicate visually has been recognized by a number of publishers, including the Macmillan Company. When they decided to publish remedial readers for use in schools they selected some of the better-known underground artists - Colin Stevens, Peter Dickie, and Rick Amor - along with Neil Curtis, Don Porter, and Chris Payne. Published under the title of Falcon Comics, the series commenced in 1975 and, to date, Amor has contributed the most titles with The Ghost of Gaffers Creek, The Junk Shop, and Star Bores.

  There appears to be a virtually untapped market for the use of comics in both the educational and remedial fields. However, if such projects are to succeed in their objectives, the creative control must remain in the hands of the artists and those who understand the medium. Comics do not have to be thrust on a reader as is often the case with a book. All readers see comics as a diversion that will bring them some pleasure and this provides an ideal opening for educators who can take advantage of the comic’s ability to communicate.