About Judy (satirical magazine)

Judy (satirical magazine)

Judy was a British satirical humour magazine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published weekly in London, England. Its full title was Judy; or the London Serio-Comic Journal. The first issue was cover-dated 1 May 1867 and the last 23 October 1907, giving it a forty-year life as one of the best-known rivals to Punch. It is a different publication from the twentieth-century girls' comic of the same name, and the two should not be confused.

Written in the past tense because Judy closed in 1907, this profile focuses on the magazine's most enduring claim on history: in its issue of 14 August 1867, only months after launch, it introduced Ally Sloper, one of the first recurring comic-strip characters anywhere, who later became the first such character to have a regular weekly magazine of his own.

A rival named from the puppet booth

The name Judy was a deliberate challenge. It referred to Punch and Judy, the traditional puppet show, and alluded directly to the magazine's more established rival, Punch, which had been founded in 1841. Where Punch took the male puppet's name, the new journal took his partner's, signalling that it intended to occupy the same serio-comic territory — humour with a serious edge, as its subtitle declared — from a slightly different position.

Judy is generally described as the less politically orientated companion or rival to Punch. Both magazines took their names from the seaside puppets, both commented on contemporary life through cartoons and humorous articles, and both lampooned political figures, parliamentary debates, fashion and social issues of the day. Punch was the older, more satirical and more familiar title; Judy built its own audience over four decades alongside it.

Editors, publisher and contributors

The magazine's editor in its formative period was Charles Henry Ross, who was both editor and writer and, before Judy, had been a writer of penny dreadfuls. Gilbert Dalziel was its publisher for much of its later nineteenth-century life, and the Dalziel name is closely associated both with Judy and with the Ally Sloper spin-off publications.

Its notable contributors included illustrators William H. Boucher — who also illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow and Kidnapped for their first appearances in Young Folks — Alfred Bryan, Adelaide Claxton and John Proctor, as well as Ross himself. In September 1895 Dalziel sold the magazine to Gillian Debenham. She became its literary editor, with R. A. Brownlie acting as art editor, a change of ownership that carried Judy into its final decade.

Ally Sloper makes his debut

Ally Sloper first appeared in the 14 August 1867 issue of Judy, in a story concerning the mysteries of loan and discount. Alexander “Ally” Sloper was a red-nosed, blustery, archetypal lazy schemer, often found “sloping” through alleys to avoid his landlord and other creditors — his surname came from that slang image of slipping away down an alley to escape the rent collector. He was one of the first, possibly the first, recurring comic-strip characters; by comparison, the American Yellow Kid, often cited in comics history, was not published until 1895, almost three decades later.

Sloper was created by Charles H. Ross and drawn at first by Ross himself. The artwork was then inked, and later fully illustrated, by his French wife Émilie de Tessier, working under the pseudonym Marie Duval. The strips used text narrative beneath unbordered panels, a text-comics format characteristic of the period, and included Sloper's companion Iky Mo in early appearances.

Marie Duval and a disputed credit

The division of credit between Ross and Duval became a subject of later scholarly recovery. Ross was long credited with the Sloper drawings while Duval was relegated to the role of inker. Research by the comics historian David Kunzle and others argued that Duval developed the character from 1869 until the rights were sold in 1883, and that her signed cartoons appeared in Judy from 1869. Dalziel, for his part, insisted in print that Ross was the inventor of the character and that the drawings were signed by Ross, while conceding that Duval's artistic help had been used.

Modern accounts credit Duval with real visual innovation: lines indicating motion or vibration, expressive, almost pre-cubist renderings of figures, and, when Sloper was placed within a border, characters who existed both inside and outside the visual frame. Historians of comics now mark Sloper's appearance as a founding moment for British comics as a distinct form of illustration, and Duval as a woman who, in an era when work beyond motherhood was often stigmatised, independently produced graphic art of lasting cultural importance.

Sloper becomes a star in his own right

Sloper's popularity outgrew Judy. The stories were first filleted out into collected books, beginning in 1873 with a moral-lesson volume, and seven Judy spin-off books followed in all, consolidating his reputation as a star in his own right by the later 1870s. One, a guide to the Paris Exhibition of 1878, parodied the tourist guides then popular and showed Sloper being expelled from the exhibition by a gendarme for bad behaviour.

In 1884 Sloper became the first comic-strip character to get his own regular weekly magazine, Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, whose first issue was cover-dated 3 May 1884. The “half holiday” of the title referred to the Victorian practice of letting workers home at lunchtime on Saturday. That magazine, also published by Gilbert Dalziel, ran until 1916 and 1,679 issues, long outliving Sloper's appearances as a Judy feature, with artwork after Ross and Duval by William Baxter, W. Fletcher Thomas and later C. H. Chapman.

Merchandising, song and film

Sloper was heavily merchandised for a nineteenth-century fictional character, and he may have been the first comic-strip character featured in a popular song — “Ally Sloper's Christmas Holidays” in 1886 — or adapted to film, in 1898. Those firsts, even when qualified by historians, explain why Judy occupies a place in comics history out of proportion to its general fame beside Punch: the machinery of the modern recurring comics character — the weekly appearance, the spin-off title, the collected books, the merchandise, the song and the screen adaptation — was assembled around a character born in its pages in 1867.

Possible influences suggested for Sloper include Dickens's Mr Micawber and the cockney figures of Punch, but the character soon developed his own conniving charm and became, by contemporary and later accounts, the most popular feature of Judy itself.

The serio-comic journal at work

Beyond Sloper, Judy was a weekly serio-comic journal of cartoons and humorous writing. Its motto, Prodesse Delectando, taken from Horace's Ars Poetica, expressed the injunction that poetry — and by extension the journal — should both instruct and delight, reflecting its subtitle. Its cartoons addressed the public figures and preoccupations of Victorian and Edwardian London, and surviving bound volumes are now marketed and studied as a snapshot of the period through political cartoons and humorous articles, wordplay and visual art.

A frequently reproduced example is a cartoon from the 1 December 1886 issue lampooning the aesthetic dilettante of the Wilde type, in which a gentleman returned from a congenial gathering complains chiefly that there had not been dinner enough for all the great painters, authors and tragedians present. Such items show Judy engaging with the artistic and social fashions of its moment, not only with party politics.

Final years under new ownership

After the sale to Gillian Debenham in September 1895, Judy continued as a weekly for another twelve years, with Debenham as literary editor and R. A. Brownlie as art editor. By then its most famous creation had long since migrated to his own magazine, and Judy competed in a crowded market of comic and satirical papers that had multiplied since 1867. Advertising had become a major source of revenue across such publications, to the point where, on some covers of the period, it threatened to swamp the editorial artwork.

The last issue was dated 23 October 1907. No revival followed, and Judy passed into the hands of collectors, reprint publishers and scholars, with bound volumes such as Volume 16 regularly reproduced as culturally important artefacts in the public domain.

Two magazines called Judy

Disambiguation is part of Judy's modern history. The name was used again, quite independently, for the DC Thomson girls' magazine published from 1960 to 1991, and for a Japanese manga magazine of the same name. Reference works therefore list Judy (satirical magazine) and Judy (girls' magazine) as separate entries, and this directory follows that practice. The Victorian Judy's dates, 1867 to 1907, its editor Charles Henry Ross and its publisher Gilbert Dalziel distinguish it clearly from its twentieth-century namesake.

Legacy

Judy's legacy rests on longevity and on a single transformative creation. Forty years of weekly serio-comic publication made it one of the durable institutions of Victorian popular print, a genuine if lesser-known rival to Punch. But its permanent place in cultural history was secured in its first summer, when Ally Sloper sloped into print on 14 August 1867. Through Sloper, Judy stands at the origin of the recurring comic-strip character, of the character-led comic magazine, and of the modern understanding that a drawn figure could become a star independent of the journal that created him.