This week in 1929: THE JOKER No.86

I recently bought a run of issues of The Joker from 1929 so you can expect to see a few more samples on my blog from time to time. This is issue No.86, dated 22nd June 1929, the issue that kids would have been reading 86 years ago this week.

Published by The Amalgamated Press, the comic's format is typical of the early 20th Century: tabloid, no colour, 8 pages equally divided between comic strips and prose stories. Thanks to the research by the late Denis Gifford I'm able to identify the artists of these strips.

Firstly that cover strip. Very racist by today's standards, Jim Crow and Oliver Twitter are a typical twosome of comics of the time, unemployed, sometimes homeless, wandering from one situation to the next. The name Jim Crow is particularly jarring as it derives from the slang term describing anti-black laws in America. Despite some of it being uncomfortable to read today the strip has excellent artwork by Percy Cocking.

Inside, one of the text stories was Burke, Chief of Police, a complete mystery tale. 

As with other comics of the time, he centre pages feature an array of short strips. Here are two of them, Our Wandering Boy by Albert Pease...

...and Tilly Tappit the Typist by Louis Briault. Note the blatant plug for two of The Joker's companion comics... 

On the back page, The Cruise of the Winklepin by H.C. Milburn. It's yet another variation of the wandering twosome that had been popularised by Weary Willie and Tired Tim in Chips. This time the spin on the theme was that the wanderers had a boat.

I know posts on pre-war comics aren't very popular amongst most visitors to this blog but I think it's important to show the history of British comics and to bring the work of those early artists to modern readers.  I hope some of you enjoy seeing them anyway. Please leave a comment below with your thoughts/opinions. 

TIP TOP

Tip Top was an 8 page tabloid size comic published by The Amalgamated Press from 1934 to 1954. By the time of the issue shown here (September 23rd 1950) it only had a few years left, but the quality of strips was still high.

On the cover, Artie the Autograph Hunter was drawn by Albert Pease in an excellent and lively traditional UK comic style.

Inside the comic were the usual mixture of humour strips, adventure strips and prose stories. Here's one of the funnies, - The Happy Family, - drawn by Reg Parlett. Interestingly, Reg would later be commissioned to draw a different strip, The Harty Family, for TV Fun in 1957, - which was later reprinted in Buster and renamed as The Happy Family!

Kids with gimmicks proliferated in IPC's humour comics of the 1970s, but here's a precedent with Teddy Tring - Pops through Anything! The art style looks like Hugh McNeill to me, unless anyone knows differently?

On the back page, - the adventure strip Spies At Work enhanced by spot colour. I'm not sure who the artist of this one is. 

Like most A.P. comics of the time, Tip Top was starting to look dated by 1950, but it still delivered the goods regarding the quality of its contents.