1906–1920: A Period of Consolidation

This chapter discusses the continuing reciprocity that bound newspapers and their strips to wider popular cultural processes. Starting by examining the swift extension of popular newspaper’s promotional and communicative strategies into the realm of the picture postcard, the use of W.K. Haselden’s Daily Mirror work in Alfred Harmsworth’s Soap Trust campaign of 1906 is first considered. The chapter then considers how Haselden’s characters of Big and Little Willie and Joy Flapperton became absorbed into the wider vernacular of the British war experience during the 1914–1918 war as the characters were extended into a variety of new media and popular cultural contexts. The chapter also covers some of the distinct genres and forms of British comics that started to emerge in the postwar period, discussing some of the key genres and creators and their relationship to the broader popular publishing context.