What is Cartoon Museum ?

Peter Fluck and Roger Law had worked together since the 1960s. In the 1970s they began producing three-dimensional caricatures for the [Sunday] Times and other publications. Out of this work grew the satirical show Spitting Image, first screened in Britain in 1983, featuring Fluck and Law's latex puppets.

In the mid-1800s the illustrated magazine took many forms, ranging from the respectable and staid Punch to the more lurid 'penny dreadfuls', which entertained the lower orders with tales of crime and horror.  Fearful of the effects this might have on impressionable young adults, more wholesome offerings were launched such as the Boy's Own Paper (1879), filled with stirring tales of sporting prowess and imperial adventure.  In 1884 Ally Sloper's Half Holiday pioneered the first proto-comic strips.  The magazine was the first to mix strips with prose stories and joke cartoons with the Micawberish 'Ally Sloper' appearing in satirical takes on current events.

The real break came in 1890 when Alfred Harmsworth launched Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, the first halfpenny comic papers. They were a runaway success.  In 1896 Tom Browne created a pair of tramps who came to be known as Weary Willie and Tired Tim.  They held sway on the cover of 'Chips' until it folded in 1953.  In the years leading up to the First World War a host of new titles appeared including Puck, Merry and Bright and Funny Wonder.  So great was the demand for comic material that many British comic publishers relied on American reprints.

Competition was intense and publishers introduced colour in titles such as Rainbow, which introduced the 'Bruin Boys' led by Tiger Tim, who graduated to his own title in 1919.  The cinema inspired several comics including Film Fun and Kinema Comic (1920) featuring real comedians such as Laurel and Hardy.  As with most newspaper cartoon strips the story was moved forward by several lines of text that ran below the pictures: the speech bubbles playing a relatively minor role.

Paper shortages during the war hit many comics hard.  In the 1920s industry revived: the Scottish publisher DC Thomson began to publish a number of new adventure papers.  The Wizard (1927), The Rover (1929), and The Hotspur (1937) were essentially illustrated magazines.  However in the late 1930s DC Thomson broke the mould when it launched the innovative The Dandy (1937) and The Beano (1938).  These titles offered their readers powerful gag humour with authority-hating characters such as the cow pie devouring Desperate Dan.

In the 1950s the influence of American culture extended into the world of comics and many were imported into the UK.  Some Christian groups in Britain were concerned at what they felt to be the pernicious influence of American horror comics.  They responded with the groundbreaking Eagle.  The quality of the artwork, which included Frank Hampson's science-fiction hero Dan Dare, raised the bar for British comics.  Hulton Press followed up with Girl (1951) and Robin and Swift for younger children.  DC Thomson responded with a new generation of anarchic characters including Davey Law's Dennis the Menace (1951) and Leo Baxendale's Little Plum, Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids (1953/4).

In the 1950s and 60s new titles for boys offered sport, war and adventure in Lion, Valiant, and Hurricane. Bunty and Judy gave girls ballet and school stories, and for slightly older girls there was romance in Marilyn, Valentine and Jackie.

In the 1970s, the twin influences of American Underground Comics and Punk shook the industry.  Viz (1979) revelled in bad taste but earned a huge following and became the best-selling British comic ever.  A number of short-lived titles of the early 1970s introduced artists who were to become major names through 2000AD (1977).  These included Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Kevin O'Neill and Bryan Talbot, many of whom would later work for major American publishers DC and Marvel Comics.  2000AD also produced Britain's first major comic superhero, Judge Dredd.

In the 1980s the Japanese animated series Transformers began to appear on British TV screens while Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball and films such as Akira introduced a British audience to a very different tradition of comic art.  In recent years manga, anime and computer games have had a visible affect on the work of younger artists.

The cartoon art form began with 'caricatura'. A caricature - from the Italian caricare, to load or exaggerate - is a drawing that gives weight to the most striking features of its subject for comic effect. The great Italian masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Annibale Carracci and Gian Lorenzo Benini, all drew caricatures.

W.K. Haselden is regarded as the father of the British newspaper cartoon strip. From 1904 he began to produce 'reflections' on topical subjects in a panel divided into a series of up to eight frames. During the First World War he effectively lampooned the German Kaiser and Crown Prince in his series Big and Little Willie.

These were technical exercises in virtuosity with the aim of defining the essence of a person in a few deft strokes of the pen.

In 1915 the Daily Mail asked well-known children's illustrator Charles Folkard to create a daily feature for their children's corner. Teddy Tail proved so popular with younger readers that within a few years most of the popular papers were running strips: Pip, Squeak and Wilfred was created by A.B. Payne in 1919-20, Rupert by Mary Tourtel in 1920 and Bonzo by George Studdy in 1922. The most popular strips inspired huge followings amongst their young readers. Pip, Squeak and Wilfred appeared on plates, had their own song, and a fan club called the 'Wilfredian League of Gugnuncs'.

Hogarth created a new form of picture-story, 'comic history-painting' full of 'characters', not 'caricatura', copies of nature, not exaggerations.  His 'modern moral subjects', that can be seen in The Harlot's Progress and The Rake's Progress, depict critical moments in life, in act and consequence.

The first strip aimed at an adult audience was J. Millar Watt's balding everyman Pop (1921). Watt's strips showed a sophisticated understanding of how a narrative could be developed across the time and space of linked panels. Another adult strip was Norman Pett's Jane (1932). Jane's greatest hour came during the Second World War when every episode saw her lose her clothes one way or another. She was revived in the 1960s and again in the 1980s and 1990s.

Time is represented in space, between and within each scene.

Domestic strips were among the most popular and enduring. The suburban family saga The Ruggles (1935-57) was followed by the even more popular Gambols (1950), created by the husband and wife team of Barry and Dobs Appleby. The most popular of all domestic strips featured a drinking, gambling, work-shy northerner Andy Capp (1957). Reg Smythe's original single panel evolved into the most popular British strip ever: at its peak it was syndicated in over 1,400 newspapers worldwide. Another popular export was Fred Basset, Alex Graham's 'Hound that's almost Human'.

It is for this reason that Hogarth is widely regarded as the father of British caricature, in spite of himself, and of the comic strip.

A very different tradition was the masculine adventure and detective story. Square jawed Dick Tracy had appeared in American papers in 1931. Britain's first action hero was Garth created by Steve Dowling towards the end of World War II. The exploits of the wartime RAF and a fascination with the space race inspired Sydney Jordan to create Jeff Hawke in 1955.

From the 1770s it was the gentleman amateur and semi-amateur, such as Townshend, Bunbury, Woodward and Nixon, who transformed the artform, introducing a more playful style and a strong element of personal caricature.

Office politics was the setting for Frank Dickens' Bristow (1961) and again in 1987 when Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor created the thrusting merchant-banker Alex. Rufus and his friend Flook started out in 1949 as a strip for children drawn by 'Trog' (Wally Fawkes). However in the 1960s and 70s it became a sophisticated satirical vehicle for writers such as Humphrey Lyttleton and George Melly. For ten years John Kent's beautiful blonde Varoomshka innocently picked her way through political minefields, enraging legions of feminists along the way.

Social satire blossomed, offering humorous observations on current fashions and social pretensions.

In the 1970s and 80s Posy Simmonds' The Webers followed the mid life crises of the liberal middle classes, Steve Bell charted the rise of Thatcherism in his strips Maggie's Farm and later If..., while Tony Husband's Yobs and later Yobettes offered another slant on hitherto uncelebrated sections of British society.

In the 1780s political satire ripened. Print-shops flourished in the City, Westminster and St. James's, many holding caricature exhibitions.

In the same period cartoon strip and comics artists began to develop increasingly complex narratives.  In 1977 Bryan Talbot produced what is regarded as the first graphic novel with the fantasy The Adventures of Luther Arkwright.  Alan Moore's collaborations with Dave Lloyd on V for Vendetta, Dave Gibbons on Watchmen and later with Kevin O'Neill on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were landmarks within a genre.  Others such as Raymond Briggs showed how the medium could range from children's fantasy in The Snowman to a post-nuclear war scenario in Where the Wind Blows.  Talbot returned to tackle the sensitive issue of child abuse in the award-winning The Tale of One Bad Rat.  There were also graphic novels inspired by works of literature such as Hunt Emerson's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Lady Chatterly's Lover and Posy Simmond's Flaubertian tale 'of adultery and soft furnishings', Gemma Bovary.