British Newspaper Strips

“A welcome and necessary addition to the histories of print in Britain. What a joy to have such a volume finally.” - Ian Gordon, author of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture “Told with a scholar’s meticulousness and a journalist’s nose for hidden connections… Twycross offers a new framework, one that will become indispensable as readers discover the riches of newspaper comics in the exploding online archives of our new century.” - Joe Sutliff Sanders, Associate Professor, University of Cambridge, UK “Rigorously researched and engagingly written, it’s a fascinating read.” - Julia Round, Associate Professor, Bournemouth University, UK This book explores the history and development of the British daily newspaper strip. It considers such strips within their political, commercial and societal contexts and fills in a crucial section of publishing history that has been largely overlooked by both comics and newspaper studies to date. Beginning with an examination of the role of the image within British publishing in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the book moves on to explore the arrival and development of the first daily strips. It considers the links that bound these strips to surrounding cultural forms, their relationship to their host newspapers, and their position within the wider structures of the emerging popular press. Subsequent chapters cover a range of topics including the impact of the world wars, the anti-comics campaigns of the 1940s and 50s, and how changes to British publishing and wider society shaped the newspaper strips of the final decades of the twentieth century. Culminating with a discussion of the way in which strips became established within the broadsheet press from the 1960s, the book builds to provide a detailed overview of the twentieth century development of this most neglected cultural form. Adam Twycross is a Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, UK and has taught extensively in the fields of animation, comics studies, VFX and computer games. His research focuses on newspaper strips, comics for non-juvenile audiences and the lost histories of British comics creators. British Newspaper Strips is his first book.