What is Cartoon Museum ?

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.

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 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'.

In the years leading up to the First World War a host of new titles appeared including Puck, Merry and Bright and Funny Wonder.

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'.

So great was the demand for comic material that many British comic publishers relied on American reprints.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A collection of comics, graphic novels, animation and caricatures devoted to exploring this often overlooked art form.

In 2006 a dedicated cadre of cartoonists, comic artists and collectors known as the Cartoon Art Trust put their resources and heads together to create a permanent home for a collection of graphic and satirical art and commentary. The resulting Cartoon Museum, housed in an old London dairy, is devoted to exploring the sometimes overlooked art form.

The museum has over 5,000 books, 4,000 comics and 1700 original strips, graphic novels, animation and caricatures, continually updated and curated, with hundreds of examples always on rotating display.

The collections of the Cartoon Museum, which is a block away from the much bigger and loftier British Museum, hardly fit the definition of propriety. It’s not the sort of place where you’d expect the Duke of Edinburgh (aka Prince Phillip) to show up, let alone cut a big red ribbon to kick things off. But there he was on opening day as the museum’s royal patron, neatly pressed and ready to face whatever might be waiting inside to poke at him and the rest of the royal family.

It’s good to know that the prince is a strong supporter of the comic art form, well aware of its crucial place in history, culture, politics and social reform. And she might not admit it, but even the Queen probably had a subscription to Punch.

The Cartoon Museum is a London museum for British cartoons, caricatures, comic strips and animation, owned and operated by the Cartoon Art Trust (Registered Charity 327 978). It has a library of over 5,000 books and 4,000 comics relating to the subject.

The museum issues catalogues and features a changing display of over 250 exhibits from its collection of over 1,700 original cartoons and prints

The museum states that it is "dedicated to preserving the best of British cartoons, caricatures, comics and animation, and to establishing a museum with a gallery, archives and innovative exhibitions to make the creativity of cartoon art past and present, accessible to all for the purposes of education, research and enjoyment

The Cartoon Museum, co-founded by cartoonist Oliver Preston, was opened on 23 February, 2006, by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh.

Curator Anita O'Brien noted, "There has never been a cartoon museum [in Britain]... In spite of the very strong historical tradition here, there has always been a very strong ambivalence towards comic art.

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

The museum runs a learning programme for primary and secondary schools in a range of subjects, including art, media, history, English and animation

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