Introduction

Through the twentieth century, newspaper strips became adept at operating within the wider communicative processes of their parent publications and formed part of a multilayered and self-reflexive authorial system that was mediated through the complex interanimation of multiple verbal and visual modes. So, too, were strips inherently bound to wider cultural processes, with strong reciprocal links to other types of comics both within Britain and overseas, as well as political cartoons, periodicals and a variety of entertainments from the stage and screen. This introductory chapter discusses the position of newspaper strips within the existing critical corpus of British comics studies, as well as within popular and fan writing. It examines the traditionally marginal position that British strips have occupied in academic scholarship and considers the linguistic ambiguity that lies at the heart of the discipline’s terminological frames of reference. Although this work focusses on the major developmental milestones of the twentieth century, it clarifies the book’s temporal scope, which ranges from the birth of the New Journalism in the 1880s to the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper nearly a hundred years later.