Crackers Issue Two

I'll take a short break from the series of Buster front covers and instead cover the second issue of Crackers (I covered issue one here). There's no point in me showing the text stories as when I take a photo of them the words are too small to read, so for this post I'll focus on the comic strips. The first comic strip to appear is on the very bright front cover - Artful Aubrey. I'm not sure of the artist, but I do recognise the style. At first I thought it might be Tiger Tim's artist because of the parrot, Julius Stafford-Baker, but comparing the two styles they just don't seem the same. Does anybody know who did draw it?

Most of the comic strips appear on the centre spread, you can find five there in total. The first is Sammy Smiles in fun at Folly Farm.

Sitting next door is Monty Mixup and His Happy Outlaws. I have no idea how the salesman didn't notice his watches hanging right in front of him, but a story's a story!

Next up is Wopsy and Popsy in Lively Larks Out Of School.

And the remaining two are Winkle and Binkle The Jolly Boys of Tophole College and Sunny Jim and Jolly Jeff The Merry Zoo Boys. All the titles these strips are given are way too long and wouldn't stick in mind like Dennis the Menace does.

There are two adventure strips, both of which are quite well drawn. The first is Trooper Tex on the Lone Trail...

...followed by The Call From The Wild!

The final strip appeared on the back page, and went by the name of Tubby and Trot, with the subtitle "Tramping The World for Fun!" As I said last time I covered Crackers, this was catching in on the popular fat and thin tramp theme started in Chips, with Weary Willy and Tired Tim.

If you're interested, Bruce Laing has covered a few pages from a later issue of Crackers over on his blog:

http://comics.brucelaing.id.au/crackers1940/

Back To 1929 - Crackers is Launched!

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.