Ally Sloper

Ally Sloper — a shabby, scheming, red-nosed idler forever dodging the rent and the landlord — first appeared in the British humor magazine Judy in 1867, the creation of writer Charles H. Ross and the artist Marie Duval, the pen name of Ross's wife, Isabelle Émilie de Tessier. What makes Sloper pivotal is not any single drawing but his persistence: he came back, episode after episode, a continuing comic personality rather than a one-off joke. That recurrence is why he is so often called one of the first regular characters in comics — a figure readers followed and recognized, the ancestor of every serialized strip hero. His popularity grew until, in 1884, he lent his name to Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, among the earliest periodicals built around a single cartoon character. Duval's role also marks her as one of the earliest women known to have drawn a successful comic character. In Sloper the British tradition contributes the crucial ingredient Hogarth and Töpffer had not quite supplied: the beloved recurring star around whom a comic could be built again and again.