Antipodean Currents: Comic Art in Australia and New Zealand (Part 2)
I originally wrote
‘Antipodean Currents’ in 2016, after being commissioned to write a
brief “layman’s history” of comic art in Australian and New
Zealand from the late 19th century to the present day. It was originally
intended for an academic essay collection, but the project was eventually
cancelled, and it never saw print. I subsequently made an illustrated PDF
version of this essay available on my Academia page, but this was only available to
Academia.edu subscribers. As I’ve had numerous academics and comic
fans/historians ask me to send them copies over the years, I’ve decided to
publish it over several instalments on the Comics Down Under blog and make it available
to a wider audience (You can read the first instalment here)
I hope you’ll enjoy
reading the second installment of “Antipodean Currents”.
– Kevin Patrick
Comic Strips and the Popular Press
 |
| Fig.1 |
When Great Britain
granted political independence to the newly proclaimed Commonwealth of
Australia in 1901, there followed an outpouring of patriotic magazines, some of
which made extensive use of cartoons and comic strips to comment on the vices
and virtues of the young nation. Chief amongst these was The Comic
Australian (1911-1913), the first magazine to print coloured comic
strips illustrated by Australian artists. Oddly enough, it was the poet Hugh McCrae (1876-1958), who drew a
pioneering series of comic strips for the magazine, featuring a bushland
retinue of kangaroos and koalas, which made the then-innovative use of speech
balloons enclosed within formally separated panels (Figure 1) (Note #1). The adoption of Australia’s exotic
fauna as anthropomorphic characters would become a recurring motif in
Australian comics from this period onwards.
The growth of Australia’s suburbs throughout the
1920s, serviced by public transport networks, created a new commuter audience
for newspapers and periodicals (Note #2). Newspapers
became a more visual medium, subscribing to what historian K.S. Inglis called
the ‘law of increasing brightness’, whereby ‘the headlines [grew] higher …the
display advertisements more seductive … [and] the photographs larger and more
vivid’ (Note #3). Comic strips
stood poised to become a vital component in newspapers’ growing emphasis on
graphic design and layout, yet some Australian newspapers were slow to embrace
the medium. Sydney’s Sunday Times, a self-styled “family
newspaper”, published Australia’s first comic-strip supplement for children on
14 August 1921 (Note #4). The
austere and conservative Sydney Morning Herald, however, steadfastly
refused to print any comic strips until 1945, when it published C.S. Gould’s
comic-strip canine, Shaggy (Note
#5).
 |
| Fig.2 |
Smith’s Weekly was a staunchly nationalistic newspaper which
traded on its working-class appeal and boasted an impressive roster of cartoonists
whose work was considered a cornerstone of the newspaper’s popularity
throughout the 1920s (Note #6). Their
leading cartoonist was the American-born Stan Cross (1888-1977), who was given samples of the American comic
strip, The Gumps, and instructed to devise a similar feature
for Smith’s Weekly. Cross responded with You & Me,
which became Australia’s first weekly newspaper comic strip upon its debut in
August 1920 (Fig.2). The series focused on the portly Mr Pott and
his lanky mate, “Whalesteeth”, whose barroom bonhomie frequently degenerated
into violent arguments over politics, religion, and other topical issues. Cross
ably transferred the domestic situation-comedy premise of The Gumps to
a recognisably Australian setting, filtered through a distinctive “Aussie”
vernacular, which saw the strip become a mainstay of Smith’s Weekly for
twenty years.
 |
| Fig.3 |
It
took a red-haired urchin named Ginger Meggs to prove beyond doubt comic strips’
potential value to Australian newspapers. Ginger Meggs was a minor character
in Us Fellers, created by James Bancks (1889-1952) for
Sydney’s Sunday Sun in November 1921. Meggs, who shirked
homework in favour of racing billycarts and getting into fights, gradually
became the leading character. Us Fellers (subsequently
renamed Ginger Meggs) captured the everyday argot of Australian
children, but its successful placement with newspapers in Britain, Europe, and
the United States during the 1920s suggested that the series’ appeal was
universal (Fig.3). Ginger Meggs became the undisputed star of
Australian comics, appearing in the annual Sunbeams Book series
(1924-1951), and on cinema screens in Those Terrible Twins (1925) (Note #7).
In 1927, the Auckland
Star published one of New Zealand’s first comic strips, The
Tee Wees’ Adventures, a charming “bush fairy” serial by D. Price (Fig.4).
This was followed in the early 1930s by two comparable series, each illustrated
by female artists: Jocelyn Harrison-Smith’s Ngaio and her Magic Paddle and
Avis Acres’ The Adventures of Tink and Wink, the Star Babies (Note #8). Their frequent use of Maori
language and iconography demonstrated how Australasian cartoonists frequently
drew on indigenous cultures to differentiate their work from British and
American comic strips.
 |
| Fig.4 |
New Zealand’s
relatively small publishing industry forced many local cartoonists to cross the
Tasman Sea to Australia in search of work, where some would make an indelible
contribution to Australian comics throughout the 1920s and 1930s. One notable
expatriate artist was Noel Cook (1896-1980), who drew cartoons for the New
Zealand Observer, before migrating to Sydney, where he contributed
illustrations to The Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly.
In 1923, Cook produced Peter and all the Roving Folk for
Sydney’s Sunday Times, considered by some to be the world’s first
science-fiction comic strip (Note #9).
 |
| Fig.5 |
Women’s
magazines played a pivotal role in cultivating the public’s taste for
adventure-serial comic strips. The Australian Women’s Weekly unveiled a new American series, Mandrake
the Magician, in December 1934 (Fig.5). The Australian Woman’s Mirror followed suit with its equivalent American comic-strip
hero, The Phantom, in September 1936. Both series, created by
author Lee Falk (1911-1999), were sold throughout
Australasia by the Sydney-based Yaffa Syndicate, which, as the regional
representative for King Features Syndicate (US), offered back-dated American
comic strips to local clients at artificially low prices (The company
sold Mandrake the Magician to the Women’s Weekly for
just A£5.00 per full-page episode) (Note #10). Coupled
with the perceived dearth of equivalent local content, this pricing strategy
allowed American comic strips to gradually dominate the Australasian newspaper
market by the late 1930s.
To be continued in ‘Antipodean Currents’, Part 3
Image
Sources: Fig.1: (Pikitia Press) ; Fig.2: (The LaTrobe Journal); Fig.3: (20th Century Danny Boy); Fig.4: (From Earth’s End); Fig.5: (Trove/National
Library of Australia, via Pinterest)
Note #1: John Ryan, Panel
by Panel: A History of Australian Comics (Stanmore, NSW: Cassell
Australia, 1979), p.13.
Note #2: Ian Gordon, ‘From The Bulletin to
Comics: Comic Art in Australia 1890-1950’, Bonzer: Australian Comics
1900-1990s, Annette Shiell, Ed. (Redhill South, VIC: Elgua Media, 1998),
pp.2-3.
Note #3: K.S Inglis, ‘The Daily Papers’, Australian
Civilization: A Symposium, Peter Coleman, Ed. (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire,
1962), p.152.
Note #4: R.B. Walker, Yesterday’s News: A
History of the Newspaper Press in New South Wales from 1920 to 1945 (Sydney:
Sydney University Press, 1980), p.36.
Note #5: Ryan, Panel by Panel, p.57
Note
#6: George Blaikie, Remember
Smith’s Weekly? (Adelaide: Rigby Limited, 1966), pp.3, 55.
Note #7: Lindsay
Foyle, The Most Important Boy in Australia: 75 Years of Ginger Meggs (Strawberry
Hills, NSW: Australian Black & White Artists’ Club).
Note #8: Adrian Kinnaird, From Earth’s End: The
Best of New Zealand Comics (Auckland: Godwit Books/Random House New
Zealand, 2013), p.13.
Note #9: Tim Bollinger, ‘Comics and Graphic Novels –
Early Years of Comics, 1900s to 1940s’, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand (4
March 2014) .
Note #10: Denis
O’Brien, The Weekly (Ringwood, VIC: Penguin Books Australia,
1982), p.55.
