Sunrise

This chapter will consider the failure of IPC’s Sun, a broadsheet newspaper that was launched by Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp in 1964 as a successor to the Daily Herald, and the impact of its subsequent sale to Rupert Murdoch in 1969. Murdoch, whose father had been a successful newspaper proprietor and had known key figures in British journalism since the days of Alfred Harmsworth, was sceptical of Cudlipp and King’s grasp of the cultural moment, and used Harry Guy Bartholomew’s old Daily Mirror style as the template for his new-look, and newly tabloid, Sun. This chapter will examine how the Murdoch Sun’s launch strip, Scarth, reflected this appropriative strategy as it adopted aspects of antecedent strips including Jane and Garth, whilst simultaneously utilising a highly contemporary visual mode and reflecting the freewheeling ethos and style of its parent publication. The parallels between Scarth and Varoomshka, a satirical strip in the Guardian, will also be considered before the chapter considers how groups such as SOCERLID, through which comics in the Franco-Belgian context were beginning to achieve a new level of cultural legitimacy, were beginning to argue for British newspaper strips to be considered as important precursors to emerging adult comics of continental Europe.