A Word about Content
This project focus on formal matters, but an equally long paper could – and should – be devoted to the content of British comics at the fin de siècle. In this era, before the popularization of the Sunday comic strip, comics came in a variety of styles, aimed at a vast array of audiences. Interestingly, they were primarily intended for an adult audience, although boys’ and girls’ magazines would occasionally include comic strips, too. Most comics were satirical in tone, inviting the reader to laugh at the foibles of the characters. A common trope, traceable to the
Ally Sloper strips, involves a mischievous lower-middle-class cad who attempts a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme, only to have it backfire on him in the final panels. This particular type of humor seems geared toward the average middle-class male, who might cherish a laugh at the expense of a social inferior. However, any generalizations about the content of comics at the end of the nineteenth century will run into a horde of counterexamples. Since comics was a relatively new medium, it had not yet settled into its ways, so strips tended to be as diverse as the publications that ran them.
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