''Big Budget'' was a British

comic a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia can indicat ...

and

story paper A story paper is a periodical publication similar to a literary magazine, but featuring illustrations and text stories, and aimed towards children and teenagers. Also known in Britain as "boys' weeklies", story papers were phenomenally popula ...

which ran weekly from 1897 until 1909.

History

Published by C. Arthur Pearson, ''Big Budget'' was first published on 19 June 1897. Initially comprising three eight page sections; ''The Big Budget'' (a comic), ''The Comrade's Budget'', and ''The Story Budget'', the latter two being text fiction sections. By 1898 the page count was reduced to 20 with all the sections merged into one comic. In 1905 it incorporated a

entitled, ''The Boys' Leader'' with the comic strips started gradually disappearing until it became a fully fledged story paper. Its title changed to ''The Comet'' in 1909 and lasted for just 14 further issues. Notable contributors include Jack Butler Yeats (''Signor McCoy the Circus'', ''John Duff-Pie'', ''Little Boy Pink'', and ''Kiroskewero the Detective''), and Ernest Wilkinson (''Doings of Von Puff, Von Eye, Iko Italiano and Von Sausage the Dog''),

C. H. Chapman Charles Henry Chapman (April 1, 1879 – 1972), who signed his work as C. H. Chapman, was a British illustrator and cartoonist best known for his work in boys' story papers such as ''The Magnet'' where the character Billy Bunter appeared. He l ...

, and Ralph Hodgson under the pseudonym "Yorick." It is also notable as the first publication to publish the work of cartoonist David Low, a three-strip cartoon in 1902, when he was aged only 11. ''The Big Budget'' was also the home of Kenyon Ford, 'the Up-to-Date Detective' created by Maxwell Scott. There were about forty Kenyon Ford tales in all, running from 1897 to 1902. Scott's other landmark contribution to the series was ''Hard Pressed'' one of the first football stories to run in a story paper. Scott drew from his cricketer and footballer days to inform theserial which ran in ''Big Budget'' #121-163 in 1899.

References

External links

Issues #119 of ''The Big Budget'' at ComicBooksPlus

Sources

* * 1897 establishments in the United Kingdom 1909 disestablishments in the United Kingdom British comics Defunct British comics Magazines established in 1897 Magazines disestablished in 1909 Weekly magazines published in the United Kingdom Magazines about comics {{comics-mag-stub