George Fyffe Christie, aka G.F. Christie, isn’t going to be a comic creator many will have heard of, despite his long career in creating humorous cartoons for over fifty years.
Partly, that’s because his comics career appears quite short, largely confined to the late 1940s, much of his career spent working in other media – illustrating postcards and children’s books – before drawing British superhero comics in the 1940s.
Born in Glasgow in 1878, George Fyffe Christie was a freelance commercial artist whose career seems to have taken flight thanks to demand for art for postcards, which were introduced to Britain in 1870.
Among postcard collectors, he’s known for example, for his art for the “Popular Songs Illustrated” series, published by the Glasgow-based postcard publisher William Lyon, early examples dated to 1903. The company’s “sing-a-song postcards” were inspired by the lyrics of popular songs, some, presumably, music hall hits.
Bob Teevan, a self-described “eclectic collector of vintage postcards”, fascinated by the stories their messages tell, notes in articles for the Postcard History website that William Lyon founded his company when he was only 23 years old. It prospered, and by 1885, there was the shop at 385 Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, a printing works nearby, and a retail branch in the Argyll Arcade.
The company’s most popular products were the above mentioned “Popular Songs Illustrated” and “Popular Novels Illustrated” series.
Other artists contributed to the range, too, including George Belcher, one of Britain’s most loved cartoonists, who drew in a similar style.
Fyffe also created postcard art for another Scottish postcard publisher, the Wholesale Stationers and Printers William Ritchie & Sons Ltd., founded in 1892, examples online of his work for them in a more painted style. Clients also included E.T.W. Dennis and Misch & Stock (on their “Addled Ads” and “Comic Cricket” series, for example), and, later in his career, Photochrom Co. Ltd.
Bob notes that Christie was living in Bushey, Hertfordshire, when he met and married Ethel. A photograph of a Captain G.F. Christie, who served in the Royal Garrison Artillery during World War One, is held by the Imperial War Museum, and seems to fit with the artist’s timeline, but we cannot, as yet, confirm this.
George and Ethel’s first son, Fyffe Christie, was born in 1918, who would go on to be known for his own work as a British figurative artist and mural painter.
When Ethel died around 1930, the family moved back to Glasgow’s Pollokshields district to live together with relatives. (Their second son, Andrew, died young, in the early 1930s. Was the loss of Ethel and Andrew connected?).
A Wikipedia page about Fyffe Christie (who served in the Scottish Rifles 9th Cameronians in World War Two) notes that, as a commercial artist, George may have been attracted to Bushey by its closeness to London and the town’s reputation as an artistic colony, as previously established by the artist Hubert Herkomer.
In comics, George Fyffe Christie had some commercial success with his creation of the cartoon strip “Scottikins O’ the Bulletin” in the Glasgow newspaper The Bulletin, founded in 1876, published and printed by George Outram & Co, who also published The Glasgow Herald, The Evening Times and a number of weekly periodicals.
Sadly, Christie struggled financially during the pre-war Depression years, and, unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s noted he discouraged his son’s artistic ambitions. (His son also had his “lean” years, but his surviving work, including his “Glasgow Murals”, are quite an artistic legacy in themselves).
He later worked for the American-style comics published in Scotland by Cartoon Art Productions (a company initially known as International Comics and then became Transatlantic Comics), which operated out of several locations in Glasgow from the mid-1940s until at least 1950, including Razzle-Dazzle (1946-47) and G-Boy Comics (1947).
In an article for Pop Junctions, as previously noted on downthetubes, Professor Chris Murray notes Glasgow was a natural home for Cartoon Art Productions, as there was a significant American naval base nearby and American comics often found their way into the hands of children on the West coast of Scotland via that route. The company reprinted American material, but also produced some original material that attempted to mimic the American style.
“One of their first attempts was Dynamic Comics (1945) which featured a superhero called Mr Muscle by a young Denis Gifford,” Murray notes. “The influence of American wartime propaganda comics like Captain America is clear. By 1946 the company had changed its name to Cartoon Art Productions, and was sometimes referred to as CAP-toons.”
Head downthetubes for…
• Postcard History: “Bow Wow” article by Bob Teevan
• Postcard History: “Musicians” article by Bob Teevan
• Postcard History: “Sandpaper Soap” article by Bob Teevan
• Postcard History: “A Week on the Coast” article by Bob Teevan
• The Postal Museum: The History of Postcards
Cartoon Art Productions
• Chris Murray revealed the largely unknown and rather surprising history of the British superhero in his book, The British Superhero, released in paperback in 2019 by University Press of Mississippi
Fyffe William George Christie Links
• Gerber Fine Art: Fyffe Christie Profile
• Wikipedia: Fyffe Christie Profile
With thanks to Barrie Marshall, who sent me down this rabbit hole of discovery
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John  is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of  comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
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