Rupert is 100!

Ten years ago I posted about the 90th anniversary of Rupert Bear. Well, it's now his centenary and there's an exhibition planned for 7th November in Canterbury, home of his creator Mary Tourtel. And Royal Mail has issued a special set of stamps.

I recently bought this artwork at auction. It claimed to be an original by Alfred Bestall, the artist who created the famous multi-layered format that I see as an information design archetype. I know it couldn't be, as it's dated 1994, and Bestall died in 1986.

It turns out to be artwork used when this particularly story was re-used by the Daily Express in 1994. It is a copy of Bestall's monochrome artwork which has been hand coloured for the republication. 

This information was very helpfully supplied to me by John Beck, Secretary of the Followers of Rupert Bear. He commented:

"An interesting item and the story is indeed Bestall's and the date noted above it is in the hand of Ian Robertson who was the Rupert Editor at the time this was reprinted in the Express.

The story is Rupert and Raggety and the reprinted story used 27 of the original 40 panels.

It would appear that the Express have used a b/w copy of Bestall's original artwork and someone has coloured it for reproduction in the newspaper. Who the colourist is I do not know but they were using Gina Hart as a colourist at the time so it could be she.

How this escaped from their archives I cannot speculate but it is an interesting and unique item."

I love that job title: Rupert Editor. 

Rupert Bear: the fan club grows

Thanks to Paul Morgan for a namecheck in a nice blog post about the Rupert Bear books, pioneer exemplars of multi-layered communications. Paul was Communications Director for SANE Australia (the mental health charity) for many years, but is now independent.

Celebrating Rupert's 90th

I have developed a minor obsession with the layout of the Rupert Bear annual, a favourite of my childhood. I've mentioned before the parallel layers that suit different readers (and I have written a short piece for Eye magazine to be published this month). Last year was the ninetieth anniversary of Rupert, and it's been marked by one or two publishing events.

The Life and Works of Alfred Bestall: Illustrator of Rupert Bear is the biography of the longest serving of Rupert's creators, by his god-daughter, Caroline Bott. His archives are going to the Bodleian in Oxford, who recently put some of the work on display. It is very much a biography of the man – very interesting, but Rupert is only part of the story, and little is revealed about the origin of the layout.

More informative about this is The Rupert Companion, by Ian Robinson, one of the last of Rupert's editors. This is a wonderful book, designed by Faye Dennehy in a generous format that allows the illustrations to breathe. It's very readable and takes us through the whole story from Rupert's originator, Mary Tourtel, to Bestall, and more recent editors and illustrators. I hadn't realised that it was the sale of the Daily Express, where the Rupert strip appeared, to Richard Desmond that finally did for Rupert in 2002, although old stories continued to be recycled.

The layout I've been celebrating dates from the Rupert Annual of 1936, and was the responsibility of the Daily Express's children's editor, Stanley Marshall. Mary Tourtel had written four lines of verse under each drawing, but Alfred Bestall found that rather challenging and moved the format of the daily strip to prose. This also meant he could develop better dialogue for the individual characters. But in the annuals Marshall included both prose and verse, now in rhyming couplets.

The Rupert principle

I sometimes find myself referring to a particular pattern of explanation as a Rupert, and this understandably puzzles people who didn't grow up in the UK at the time I did. Rupert Bear was a classic comic strip that was published in the Daily Express (and may still be, for all I know). It includes three parallel versions of the same story: a picture, a couplet, and a full text version. The combination allows different ways for children and parents to share the story, and is a classic pattern for information designers.
Here's what it looks like: