The Sixties Start to Swing

During the early 1960s, Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp’s belief that popular journalism’s traditional working-class audiences were being replaced by a newly sophisticated, and largely classless, readership significantly influenced the newspaper strip output of the IPC’s newspapers. This chapter will first discuss how strips such as Keeping Up With the Joneses in the Daily Mirror were designed to appeal to this new style of reader, and how the paper continued to gradually remove long-running continuity series as its strip output began to coalesce increasingly around comedy and the paper as a whole moved further upmarket. The arrival of Modesty Blaise in the Evening Standard will then be considered, with the chapter arguing that the series was able to both update some of the key themes that had previously underpinned the narrative structure of Jane during the Second World War, whilst simultaneously incorporating contemporary themes and ideas to create a series that was well attuned to its cultural moment. Finally, this chapter will discuss the changing international environment and how, as adult comics began to become established in North America and Europe, British newspaper strips were able to return to the position that they had last adopted in the late 1940s, with erotica and nudity had once again become a feature of the British newspaper strip by 1969.