About Big Budget

Big Budget

Big Budget was a British weekly comic and story paper published in London by C. Arthur Pearson Ltd. It was first published on 19 June 1897 and ran weekly until 1909, reaching a total of 614 issues. Its title promised value for money, and its original format delivered it in an unusual way: a single purchase contained three separate eight-page sections, one comic and two devoted to text fiction.

Over its twelve years Big Budget changed character more than once. It began as a combined comic and story paper, became a merged comic by 1898, absorbed a boys' story paper in 1905 and gradually turned into a story paper itself, before its title was changed to The Comet in 1909 for a final short run. Its pages are notable for early work by Jack Butler Yeats, for some of the first football fiction in a story paper, and for the first published work of the cartoonist David Low, who was eleven years old at the time.

Launch by C. Arthur Pearson

Big Budget was published by C. Arthur Pearson, the company founded by Cyril Arthur Pearson, one of the most energetic British publishers of the 1890s and a rival to Alfred Harmsworth in the market for cheap periodicals. Pearson launched the paper on 19 June 1897, in the middle of a boom in weekly comics and story papers aimed at young and family readers.

The paper's original structure was its selling point. Each weekly number comprised three eight-page sections: The Big Budget itself, which was the comic; The Comrade's Budget, a section of text fiction; and The Story Budget, a second text fiction section. A reader therefore received, in effect, three papers in one, which justified the name Big Budget.

From three sections to one comic

The three-section format did not last long. By 1898 the page count had been reduced to 20 pages and the separate sections were merged into a single comic. In this form Big Budget competed directly with the other weekly humour comics of the period, combining picture strips and jokes with a diminishing amount of text material.

The balance continued to shift. In 1905 Big Budget incorporated The Boys' Leader, a story paper, and from that point the comic strips gradually disappeared until the publication had become a fully fledged story paper, its content dominated by prose fiction rather than pictures. The transformation reflects the changing economics of the market, in which boys' story papers and comics were increasingly distinct products.

Jack Butler Yeats and the artists

The most distinguished artist to work for Big Budget was Jack Butler Yeats, brother of the poet W. B. Yeats and later one of Ireland's most celebrated painters. For the paper he drew several comic series, including Signor McCoy the Circus, John Duff-Pie, Little Boy Pink and Kiroskewero the Detective. His work for Pearson's belongs to the early, commercial phase of his career, before he devoted himself to painting.

Another regular artist was Ernest Wilkinson, whose series recorded the doings of a comic group of characters, Von Puff, Von Eye, Iko Italiano and Von Sausage the Dog. C. H. Chapman, later famous as the long-serving artist of Billy Bunter in The Magnet, also contributed to Big Budget, as did the poet Ralph Hodgson, who wrote under the pseudonym Yorick.

David Low's first publication

Big Budget holds a small but genuine place in the history of British cartooning as the first publication to print the work of David Low. In 1902 the paper published a three-strip cartoon by Low, who was then aged only eleven. Low, born in New Zealand, went on to become one of the most influential political cartoonists of the twentieth century, famous for his work in the Evening Standard and for creations such as Colonel Blimp.

That his first appearance in print came in a children's comic is a reminder of how the cheap weekly papers served as a training ground and an open door for young talent, accepting contributions from child readers and artists who would later work in very different fields.

Kenyon Ford and Maxwell Scott

On its fiction side, Big Budget was the home of Kenyon Ford, described as an up-to-date detective, created by Maxwell Scott, the pen name of Dr John William Staniforth, who also created the better-known detective Nelson Lee. Around forty Kenyon Ford tales appeared in the paper between 1897 and 1902, making Ford one of the regular attractions of its story sections.

Scott's other landmark contribution was Hard Pressed, a serial about football that ran in Big Budget issues 121 to 163 in 1899. It was one of the first football stories to run in a story paper. Scott drew on his own experience as a cricketer and footballer to inform the serial, and its success pointed the way towards the enormous popularity that sporting fiction would enjoy in British boys' papers over the following decades.

Becoming The Comet

By 1909 Big Budget had completed its evolution from comic to story paper, and Pearson marked the change by retitling it The Comet. Under the new name the paper lasted for just fourteen further issues before closing. The retitle brought the Big Budget name to an end after 614 weekly issues, though bibliographers treat The Comet's brief run as the continuation of the same publication.

The story paper era

Big Budget's history spans a transitional period in British popular publishing. When it was launched in 1897, the mixed comic-and-story weekly was a familiar format; by the time it closed in 1909, the market had separated into humour comics for children and text story papers for boys, each with their own conventions. Big Budget lived through that separation in its own pages, its strips slowly giving way to prose until nothing of the original comic remained but the title, and then not even that.

Its absorption of The Boys' Leader in 1905 was typical of the consolidation of the period, as publishers merged weaker titles into stronger ones to preserve their readers. That Big Budget was the survivor of that merger, rather than the victim, shows the strength the title still possessed eight years after its launch.

Legacy

Big Budget is remembered today chiefly by comics historians and collectors. Its significance rests on four points: its unusual original three-in-one format; its association with Jack Butler Yeats at the start of his career; its publication of the eleven-year-old David Low's first cartoon; and Maxwell Scott's Kenyon Ford stories and the pioneering football serial Hard Pressed. Surviving issues, including bound volumes from the 1890s, are traded by collectors, and the paper is documented in the standard references on British comics and story papers.

Survival and collecting

Surviving copies of Big Budget are actively traded among collectors of British comics, and bound volumes from its earliest years are among the more substantial artefacts of the 1890s comic trade. Individual issues from the turn of the century can be identified by volume and number, such as volume 11, number 268 of 2 August 1902, a sixteen-page black-and-white issue in the large format typical of the period's comics. The paper is documented in the standard references on British comics and in publisher histories of C. Arthur Pearson, which list Big Budget among the comics with which Pearson challenged the Harmsworth papers in the late 1890s. Its afterlife in the collecting world rests on the same features that interest historians: the Pearson imprint, the Yeats and Low connections, and its long weekly run of 614 issues, which gives collectors a substantial and well-defined series to pursue.