Here's a comic you might not have heard of before - Crackers. It was launched this week all the way back in 1929, and came with some sort of free gift, although whatever it was is now long gone. For 2D you got 12 pages, with a full colour front cover, and a red back cover and a red centre spread.
The comic is tabloid so won't fit into my scanner, but hopefully these photos are readable. The first two pages consisted of long text stories, which were hugely popular up until the 1950's, and take up a vast majority of the comic. Unfortunately the text is too small to be readable from photos, but here is a photo of four of the six text pages.
Crackers replaced Lot-O'-Fun, which folded after 1,196 issues. The competition results from a previous Lot-O'-Fun issue featured in this issue.
This appeared above a letter from the editor.
The centre pages featured a collection of humour strips. These were - Sammy Smiles in fat at Folly Farm, Winkle and Binkle - The Jolly Boys of Tophole College, Monty Mixup and His Happy Outlaws, Wopsy and Popsy in Lively Larks Out Of School and Sunny Jim and Jolly Jeff - The Merry Zoo Boys. All of these had very old-fashioned names - "larks" and "jolly boys" aren't phrases we'd tend to use today!
There were also two adventure style strips inside the comic; the first was Trooper Tex On The Lone Trail! ...
Followed by The Call From The Wild or The Jungle S.O.S!
The back page featured another humour strip - Tubby and Trot - Tramping The World For Fun. This strip was cashing in on the popular fat and thin tramps theme, which started with Weary Willy and Tired Tim in Chips!
My copy of this first issue is falling apart, so I thought I'd get the pages preserved online before it crumbles into dust. I'm also lucky enough to own the second issue, which I may cover some other time - possibly next week.
I'm not sure how many issues Crackers ran for, although I do know it lasted at the very least for 165 issues as I've seen a run of eight issues for sale from 1932.
2 comments:
Crackers ran until around 1940, when paper rationing killed off the title altogether.
I have two issues in my collection from 1940. I might scan one of those for a post sometime next week.
Thanks for that - if you do share them I look forwards to seeing them!
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