British Newspaper Strips - Hidden Gems or National Shame?

If... is the most over-rated UK newspaper strip ever - it's never funny and it's point is either blatantly obvious or totally obscure to me (due to pointless continuity like those penguins?) It's like Doonesbury in this regard. Steve Bell's editorial cartoons are ditchwater as well.

I also seem to remember a strip involving a big nosed, hyper cartoony bloke in the Foreign Legion. One of my friends showed me a book of it when I was a kid and we read the whole thing on the school bus. It seemed quite funny, but have not heard of it since.

To the above list I'd like to add a few more, and see if anyone remembers these examples and can shed a bit more light on them - I was reading The Penguin Book Of Comics recently and there were loads of British strips in there which seem to have been utterly forgotten, and with good reason it would seem for most of them. They are:

Flook (funny hedgehog/pig creature lives in the North, has satrical early 70's adventures involving cartoony union antics - looked interesting, actually)

Belinda (young English girl grows up in France, didn't look that great)

The Ruggles (strip using cartoons to explain "the inner workings of bureaucratic machinery" - single example looked like the most boring thing on earth, and the art was horrible. Includes a panel that reads "Tomorrow: Mr Ruggles visits the solicitor!")

Jane - Daughter Of Jane (before Jane was brought back in the 80's or whenever it was, they had a strip featuring her grown-up daughter in 1961. Judged to be rubbish and axed, apparently. From the single example in the book it seemed to be nothing but three panels of sub-cheesecake with a few word balloons imposing a narrative)

Four D. Jones (adventure strip featuring a cowboy with a magic hoop which transports him to different dimensions and stuff, but he keeps losing it, leading to hilarious mishaps. I noticed that this was drawn by the bloke who was eventually responsible for "The Family Ness" and "Jimbo" animated cartoons on Children's BBC. Hard to tell if this was any good as the only example in the book is pretty unrepresentative)

Tiffany Jones (Some sort of romantic strip featuring nice sixties style semi-cartoony but mostly illustrator type art - the woman who drew it was a fashion artist. Despite the art, however, it seemed to be rather dull all told)

Romeo Brown (goofy romance strip, by the bloke who did Modesty Blaise. A bit twee)

Carol Day (macabre and slightly quirky adventure strip, very well drawn - from the examples I've read it seemed to be really good)

Pip, Squeak And Wilfred (one of the first British newspaper strips ever from the 1920's. They were a penguin who carries a handbag everywhere, a big dog and a rabbit. The rabbit character (Wilfred) apparently became incredibly popular for a while. I seem to recall Spike Milligan refrencing this strip in one of his books.)

The Gambols (a tedious tedious tedious tedious gag strip featuring a husband and wife duo. The comics equivelant of anti-matter.)

As to more modern strips, I haven't read much of Striker but that kind of Poser-created CGI art I don't like much. It always looks too plasticy. Also I saw one strip where one of the team had his arms folded and I was bothered by the way one of the arms seemed to be sort of cutting into the other arm.

Flook = written by Keith Waterhouse? As a kid I always liked the art in this but never understood what was going on, my interest in politics being limited at the time.

If we expand 'newspaper' to include Private Eye will we end up w/anything good? Or Sounds/NME/Melody Maker for that matter...

(George and Lynne is best ever UK strip of course.)

Widening the pool to include Private Eye brings in Yobs, Celeb, etc. - none of them very good. Widen it to include the NME and you get Great Pop Things, which has its advocates, and Th' Lone Groover, which I hope doesn't.

I had forgotten the Gambols.

I would like to read some Pip, Squeak and Wilfred.

According to the Penguin Book Of Comics, Flook was written by George Melly. However said book was written in 1970, so Waterhouse may have taken over in later years.

I adored GREAT POP THINGS, by Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death! This was one of my favourite bits of the NME. I always liked the way Chuck drew Paul McCartney (with one eye closed, mouth in an "oooh" position and thumb always held aloft) and David Bowie (IIRC, a smiley face done up as Ziggy Stardust).

I am v. fond of 'Bristow' by Frank Dickens (cancelled by Max Hastings when he was ed of the Evening Standard because "nobody wears a bowler hat to work anymore")

And again, if you care more for art than story then yes, Jim Holdaway's Modesty Blaise and David Wright's Carol Day are as gd as any American story-strips - it's just that the adventure strip as a daily four panel form has always struck me as being inherently unsatisfactory

Old Daily Star Dredd strips were ace - new Metro ones sadly aren't though they try very hard.

http://www.tonystrading.co.uk/graphics/animated/beaupeep.gif

steven appleby is very good in the saturday guardian and (i think) sunday telegraph.

http://www.artofjamesbond.com/comic.htm

there wz a strange strip/panel in the obs mag that i can no longer remember what it wz called (or the artist), but its protagonist wz a beared jesus-lennon type character - it wz v.scratchily drawn, and cynical-naive funny

fred bassett = the garfield of middle england!!

i like the guys who do CELEB in PE: don't they do a strip in a paper also (abt high finance?) (they started at the maker if memory serves)

possibly flook wz in the mirror actually (this seems more likely)

the artist for the obs jesus/lennon character wz called (i think) something like john braisher

john glashan, and the strip wz called "genius" (it was a panel but occasionaly written strip-style w/i the panel)

The main question, however, is: Is The Fosdyke Saga really as good as I remember it being? I remember reading one volume about the Salford Moth which was particularly entertaining to my teenage brane, but are any of the others good? Am I right to look back fondly at the one I read?

it ran to HUNDRED of pages! and wz bein passed round like samizdat

Posy Simmonds art is still good but her narrative now seems a bit old fashioned and rehashed from her earlier stuff. At least she still seems to make an effort, unlike just about everyone else doing newspaper strips at the minute.

Why do newspaper strips in Britain seem to be much less important than in America? There are detourned American strips (of the type that Mark S describes) but that's Oor Wullie one is the first time I've ever heard it being done to British stuff.

http://nemi.thtn.com/creator.shtml

Well we seem to have found a few good ones. I've decided that Alex probably is good, I need to re-read some though.

What is Posey Simmons famous for - I only became aware of her a few years ago when she was doing Gemma Bovary (which I have several times almost started a thread on, it being an unusually sustained attempt to make longform comics relevant to middle-class Grauniad readers). She did a great strip in one of the - generally rotten - G2 Cartoon Specials a few years ago about cultural-asset-stripping island-hoppers but Literary Life has not really set my pulse racing.

But I digress.

It's really hard to discuss these UK strips because they exist at the edge of memory like phantoms and when you try to pin down concrete ideas about them they disappear. And there are hardly any online resources for them. They probably inspire no nostalgia whatsoever (except in mentalists like us.)

George and Lynne is the best ever UK strip tho'. They should do a complete hardcover collection ilke they are with the Peanuts strips.

I'd never heard of her until I just happened to be looking through the Guardian today, as somebody mentioned there was a cartoonist competition.

Now I am just thinking that the judges will look at anyone using comic sans and think "hey, this guy's alright!" when in my mind there can be no greater sin.

It doesn't even fit with her own letters. Ugh.

Though it looks like that's a kid's narration, I s'pose the point is that they'd be so tasteless as to use CS themselves.

having yr strip still look good >>>> making a point and using CS

I think the letters should always fit the art, and the point can still be made in a less detrimental fashion. These letters are so jarring it's like eye kryptonite!

This is true. Looking at the Leviathan website is a bit like walking into an abandoned house - there's just a sad feeling about it of no-one caring any more.

-- Tom (freakytrigge...), January 11th, 2005"

Mostly for doing a long-running weekly comic strip in The Guardian. Mrs Weber's Diary, it was called, or somesuch, appearing in the 70s/80s.

Or, as Wikipedia puts it: "Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds (born 9 August 1945) is a British newspaper cartoonist and writer and illustrator of children's books. She is best known for her long association with The Guardian, for which she now draws a cartoon titled Tamara Drewe.

Posy Simmonds was born in Berkshire and educated at a boarding school, the Sorbonne and the Central School of Art & Design in London. She started her newspaper career drawing a strip for The Sun in 1969 before joining The Guardian as an illustrator in 1972.

In 1979 she started drawing a weekly comic strip for The Guardian, initially titled The Silent Three of St. Botolph's as a tribute to the 1950s strip The Silent Three by Evelyn Flinders. The strip focused on three 1950s schoolfriends in their later, middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George with a large brood of children; Jo Heep, married to whisky salesman Edmund with two rebellious teenagers; and Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope with a young baby. The strip, which was latterly untitled and usually known just as "Posy", ran until the late 1980s. It was collected into a number of books: Mrs Weber's Diary, Pick of Posy, Very Posy and Pure Posy, and one original cartoon book featuring the same characters, True Love. Her later cartoons for The Guardian and The Spectator were collected as Mustn't Grumble in 1992.

In 1987 Simmonds turned her hand to writing, as well as illustrating, children's books. Fred, the story of a cat with a secret life, was later filmed as Famous Fred and nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film and several BAFTAs. Her other children's books include Lulu and the Flying Babies, The Chocolate Wedding and Lavender.

In the late 1990s Posy returned to the pages of The Guardian with Gemma Bovery, which reworked the story of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France. It was published as a graphic novel in 1999. Literary Life appeared in The Guardian's "Review" section on Saturdays from November 2002 until December 2004. One collected edition of Literary Life cartoons has been published.

Posy's current Guardian series, Tamara Drewe, made its début in the Review section on 17 September 2005, in the first Saturday paper after the Guardian's relaunch in the Berliner format."

I got one of those collections mentioned upthread from a charity shop and it's pretty good--the lives of 70s/80s Guardian readers in comic form. I really like her art.

She's very different to everything else in UK comics.

It's doing "Far From the Madding Crowd", I think (perhaps this is obvious), as opposed to "Madame Bovary". Three suitors fight over one woman; Hardy-esque tragedy (or not) ensues.

It feels like it has been going for about 5 years not 1.

Well, it is Thomas Hardy, innit?

It's pretty lovingly crafted, but I always forget it exists until I read the Graun review again on Saturday. And nothing is amusing as the name of the writer-character in Hardy's novel, "Mr Boldwood".