Conclusion

The final chapter of this book considers some of the developments that occurred within the British newspaper strip market during the final decades of the twentieth century. It examines how newspaper strips were by this time sufficiently well established to feature a significant degree of self-referentiality, and how they continued to interanimate with the wider cultural context, being both extended into parallel media forms whilst being in turn shaped by the surrounding media environment. The chapter will also consider how newspaper strips became more firmly established within the broadsheet market and the cultural implications of this extension into a journalistic sector more closely associated with the customs and behaviours of the middle classes than the ribald populism of the working-class tabloids. Along with the development of new markets for book-length comics and the emergence of the graphic novel as a cultural mechanism through which comics could attain greater cultural validation through absorption into the processes of literary production, it will argue that this allowed newspaper strips to once again be considered as capable of high artistic value. Drawing parallels between the discursive strategies and modes of production that surrounded W.K. Haselden’s work early in the century and those that grew around Posy Simmonds’ strips at the century’s close, the chapter identifies a new-found ability for newspaper strips to once again be absorbed into a cultural lineage that stretches back to the great satirists of the eighteenth century.