Focus Education


buy their own magazine when there is so much to read online? Sam Hewitt says she is creating a website and app which complement Sea Urchins but says: “The comic is still the main focus; I wanted something children could hold and encourage them to take away from the PC.” Cathy Olmedillas agrees: “We are printed and proud of it. We have an iPhone app with games on it as a way of reaching out to a wider audience but the website for Anorak is aimed at parents rather than children.” Strip Magazine, as befi ts its more futuristic content, is probably the most internet- linked, and can be bought as a download from iTunes for iPad (although you don’t get the free poster with that medium). Comics traditionally come into their own with


the Christmas or Winter annual. The modern comic replicates this through hardback albums or graphic novels which can be found in bookshops. Jasper Bark admits that on Christmas Day, his daughters still settle down to read their Christmas annuals after lunch just as he did several decades ago. “I think they still feel like a treat,” he admits. It’s not just the quality of the words that matter:


one of the best known authors of graphic novels is, of course, Raymond Briggs. Which art-mad teenager could resist the beautifully drawn illustrations in Fungus the Bogeyman or When


the Wind Blows? British author Martin Handford’s best-selling series Where’s Wally? may be whizzed through as a bit of light relief, but they’re also examples of Wimmelbilderbuch (which translates from German as “teeming picture book”), a distinct kind of picture book, full of abundant images of richly detailed humans, animals and things, derived from the artistic style of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. So can the new comics appeal to both girls


and boys? Print media Productions (publishers of Strip Magazine) publishes a hardback series called Mirabilis, Year of Wonders where characters include “warrior saints, vegetable monsters and chess- playing robots walking the streets of Edwardian London”. Jasper Bark points out that in Japan, 80% of the comic-book reading audience is female thanks to the rise in popularity of Manga (comics read by all ages with topics including action- adventure, romance, sports. The Manga market is worth about US$3.6 billion). For girls who eschew The X Factor and teen romance magazines, and particularly for self-confessed tomboys, comic books could off er a new world of reading matter. Jasper points out too that comics are ideal


for handling diffi cult topics when talking to adolescents. But they’re also excellent for foreign language learning. “If you can get children reading and laughing at the same time,” he says, “learning becomes fun.” Anyone whose home has been overtaken by Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories tv series, which uses comic strip in some of its books, will know how powerful this type of format can be for teaching Egyptian burial practices too! Lastly, if your own child is truly captivated


by the happy marriage of words and pictures, Dundee University launched a Comic Studies degree course this year – so there may even be a future in their passion too!


A comic romp through history


Oliver Preston retraces the origins of the cartoon, caricature and comic art and explains why the British are still at the top of their game…


there was such a large divide between the rich and poor, Mark Lemon, editor of the new Punch magazine, established in 1841, asked his artists to submit their own cartoons for the competition. From this date, the word cartoon became associated with satire and ridiculing the Establishment. The golden age of caricature between 1780 and 1815 had seen the birth of English political cartooning with Gillray, Rolandson, Woodward and Cruikshank. They viciously lampooned the court of George IV and the regency period and their caricatures were sold in print shops in St James’. There were no newspapers and the gloriously coloured printed poster in the windows of print shops was the only way that society, including the poorer echelons of it, could see images of the elite and follow the gossip and goings on in society circles. They were avidly collected and sometimes placed in albums that – like a DVD – you could rent for the night. Sir John Tenniel and Earnest Shepard are maybe better known to us as the illustrators of Alice


In


in Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh but for over 40 years their day job was political cartooning for Punch. George Cruikshank, whose political caricatures so irked the Prince Regent — is the illustrator of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. H.M. Bateman, Sir David Low and W Heath Robinson were the mainstay of British


cartooning in the early 20th century. They were highly paid, hugely popular, and in Heath Robinson’s case, his drawings were so well known that his name became a byword that entered into the English dictionary. The French artist Caran d’Ache was very infl uential to artists such as H.M. Bateman and Fougasse. With the arrival of the 20th century, the very busy cross-hatched drawings of the Victorian era gave way to a simplicity of line-drawing espoused by Phil May and Bateman. Speech bubbles accompanied the growth of comic cartoons at this time. Hergé’s iconic cartoons of Tintin arrived on the scene as Tintin and the Land of the Soviets in 1926, for a magazine called Petite Cinquième.


With the arrival of cheaper printing, comics became a popular avenue for advertising and entered into the mass market. Comics, or “funnies”, started appearing in the late 1890s as halfpenny comics, such as Chips but the comics we know today arrived in the late 1930s. The


Dandy, founded in 1937, introduced the caricature Desperate


Dan, followed by The Beano


which was founded in 1938. And Dennis The Menace has been causing mayhem since 1951.


www.fi rstelevenmagazine.co.uk Michaelmas 2011 FirstEleven 43


1851, a competition was organised asking for designs for pictures for the newly built Houses of Parliament. They were seeking cartoons – preparatory drawings for oil paintings – to hang on the walls of Barry and Pugin’s new edifi ce. At a time when


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© Hergé


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