Comic strip - European History, Art, & Culture: The first recurrent British comic characters, after Ally Sloper appeared in the 1870s, were those in Jack Yeats’s Conan Doyle burlesque The Adventures of Chubblock Homes (published in Comic Cuts, begun 1893) as well as Tom Browne’s tramps Weary Willie and Tired Tim. The latter strip was sponsored in 1896 by the publisher Alfred Harmsworth and was originally intended for the newly literate and semiliterate masses, but it developed into children’s fare. Distinctive British contributions were the magazine of strips designed for preliterate children, such as Tiger Tim’s Weekly, which carried Tiger Tim (1904–80), the oldest and longest-lived of British