For those of you interested in pre-war comics Wonderfully Vulgar is an excellent website to visit. It is a virtual exhibition put together by Kevin Carpenter using some of the 5000+ comics housed in the Library (BIS) of the University of Oldenburg in Germany.
There are many scans of comics on the site of comics from 1873 - 1939, both of front covers and inside pages, plus a few extra items too. One of those extra items is the incredibly rare advertising flyer for The Kinema Comic from 1920, which was set up as a sister publication to Film Fun in hope to take in all the readers interested in film stars in comics and put off other companies setting up rival comics.
Also up there is the Big Budget Summer Number from 11th July 1903. Often publishers would produce special editions of their comics at certain points of the year, summer being one of those. Of course, they would later evolve into summer specials which were seperate publications from the weekly comics.
Another nice piece is the 1890 Grand Xmas Number of Comic Cuts, the first Christmas edition of the paper. Alfred Harmsworth managed to double the page count to sixteen but still keep the comic at the halfpenny both him and his papers were famous for.
And finally, here's a square edition of Comic Life. It is such a strange shape because of the paper restrictions caused by the First World War but would return back to its normal size on 14th April 1917.
As always, click on the above images to view them in full size.
It's nice that such a collection like this is so readily available online, and for free! To read them at the British Library is a bit of a hassle and it's unknown whether they all survive outside of these collections. Be sure to visit the website and look around:
http://www.wonderfullyvulgar.de
