200 Years of British Comics?

Alex Fitch writes a piece of original research for this blog, asking the question: Is June 11th 2025 the 200th anniversary of British Comics?

Comic Book Origin Stories…

Comic book readers love an origin story for their favourite characters, not only within the superhero genre, but for long-running comedic, sci-fi, and horror series.

In terms of origins of the British comic itself, a number of Scottish researchers point to the publication of the first issue of The Glasgow Looking Glass on June 11 1825.

This satirical magazine certainly contains a number of storytelling innovations in the same place for the first time, which together might be considered to define what we expect of a comic.

These include: the use of “to be continued…” at the end of stories, as serialised comics were an innovation at this point, as well as the novel use of word balloons, where the words spoken by a character are shown to emanate from their mouth, often surrounded by the drawing of a bubble with a tail pointed at the speaker.

Word balloons were not a new idea though, as 18th-century artist and satirist William Hogarth was one of the first people to use word balloons in  1750s humour prints, and medieval religious art had previously pioneered their use.

The Glasgow Looking Glass is also notable for containing serialised illustrated narratives (something that later Victorian magazines were known for, via stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens) and it had also reoccurring characters in cartoons and strips.

So with earlier uses of its ‘ingredients’ in mind, what makes The Glasgow Looking Glass the first comic? One can see the periodical as a tipping point for the medium as it contained more comic strips than text, but we need to question whether this is a good enough definition to single out the title as the first uniquely identifiable example of the medium.

Excerpt from the strip History of a Coat from The Glasgow Looking Glass

Predecessors to The Glasgow Looking Glass

The late comics historian Dennis Gifford wrote about predecessors to the Looking Glass as being “prototype comics“. These include The Comick Magazine (first issue dated April 1 1796) and The Poetical Magazine (May 1 1809). The earlier of these titles started the long confusion between something being “comic” (funny*) and “a comic” (a periodical made up of picture strips), which persists to the present day.

The Comick Magazine (published from March to December 1796**) featured William Hogarth’s series of humour prints Industry and Idleness. Gifford argued that in their “narrative sequence”, these “could be described as an early form of comic strip”.

It’s worth noting that a book collecting Hogarth’s serialised humour prints was also released in 1768, so perhaps that might earn the definition of the first British comic, beating The Glasgow Looking Glass by 57 years, even if it only had a limited print run and was purchased by upper-class collectors of humorous prints.

The Poetical Magazine also featured a reoccurring character, Dr Syntax, in a serialised story written by William Combe and illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson. Both of these early titles were mainly text-based, like later satirical magazines such as Punch. But they normalised the idea of comic drawings in periodicals.

How to describe a comic?

Because the term “comic”, unlike “sequential art“, doesn’t have an exact definition or formula, the first example is hard to pin down. The term itself isn’t always used when describing a printed collection of sequential art – comics with a larger page count, have been re-imagined for casual readers as graphic novels over the last 40 years. In general, British Comics can be seen to have certain differences to titles published in other countries; they are on paper approx. 30% bigger than American Comics for example (i.e. A4 ‘magazine size’), and are generally anthologies, while the majority of American comics tell a single story which may be part of a longer narrative serialised across a number of issues. British Anthology comics contain a mixture of stand alone stories (the norm in humour titles) and serialised stories, such as in periodicals like 2000AD and The Phoenix.

This term “comic” reveals a great deal about how we perceive comics. As noted above, “The Comick Magazine” is an Eighteenth Century title, and this confusion between a term for the medium (i.e. comic = a collection of sequential art) and “comic” meaning funny has persisted throughout the existence of the form. The modern term “Graphic novel” (referring to a longer narrative between two covers) was first suggested as a title for self-contained comics in a 1964 fanzine. This term is often used to confer a more literary association to longer comics, and was popularised by cartoonist Will Eisner to describe his down-to-earth stories about New York Jewish Tenement life in the late 1970s as a marketing device that gained traction in the 1980s.

Muddying the waters – examples of early comics

Agreeing on just what the first example of a piece of media is is often contested, with different scholars looking at different definitions of an item in order to pin it down. If we look at American Comics, then different writers have different ideas on what ‘the first American Comic’ might be. Some point to an 1840s reprint of Swiss Cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer’s ‘graphic album’*** Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois, called in English The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck.

Conversely, a very popular story told about ‘the first American Comic’, is the publication of Famous Funnies (dated to either 1933 or 1934, depending on whether you count the test printing, or first monthly instalment), which reprinted newspaper comic strips before engaging with new material. This is a story repeated by fans of DC and Marvel Comics who want to date the origin of the medium to the 1930s. However collections of newspaper comics date back to two decades earlier, with collections of strips such as Mutt and Jeff.

So, if people cannot agree on what was the first American Comic – depending on what definition you might use, regarding its format and originality – it means that perhaps trying to find the first British Comic might be equally problematic.

What is the first British Comic?

Does a British periodical have to contain mainly strips, which use word balloons, serialised narratives, and reoccurring characters, to earn its definition as a comic? Perhaps…

19th Century humour magazines often mixed strips, individual cartoons and articles, but with much more text between them. There is a noticeable gap between the the Looking Glass’ last issue in 1826 and Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday launching nearly 60 years later, which was the first comic based around a single character, and the first to last a significant number of years in publication. Perhaps the Looking Glass was ahead of its time as a magazine with far more images than text, pioneering this as a format, before there was an audience ready to support this innovation. Demonstrating its legacy, early this year, readers curious about the history of this pioneering title kickstarted a relaunch of this comic. It’ll be interesting to see whether more issues are produced following this new issue one…

Masthead for the relaunched 2025 Glasgow Looking Glass

While people might argue over just what the first British comic might have to contain to earn that definition; as a moment in history, the Looking Glass certainly ticks many boxes as a significant stepping stone in the creation of comics. As such, although this 19th Century comic lasted less than a year – renamed The Northern Looking Glass from issue five onwards – it deserves to be celebrated for aiding the creation of a medium that has now lasted for over 200 years. Whether it definitively was the first British Comic, is still somewhat open to debate.

With thanks to Julia Round and Anna Walker for peer review and copy editing on this article.

* ‘The Funnies’ also being a long running term for humorous newspaper strips.

**…then as now, many magazines have a date on their cover which doesn’t signify the date they are published, but rather the date they should be removed from news-sellers’ stands and newsagents, as they will have been on sale for a week or month at that point.

***I’m using this term anachronistically, as it hadn’t been coined yet, but in Europe, what we might call ‘thin’ graphic novels, are termed ‘Albums’, and this is the norm for many popular titles featuring characters such as Asterix and Tintin.