Many in the postcard world know Felix the Cat, who was the most popular film cartoon character in the 1920s before the arrival of Mickey Mouse. Felix was invented either by the American animator Otto Messmer or by the Australian-American producer Pat Sullivan for whom he worked at the time. The copyright for their creation, however, was obtained by Sullivan. Most of the Felix postcards that were published during the 1920s in Britain by Inter-Art, Woolstone Brothers, Bamforth and other firms bear a copyright notice. Yet the cards themselves are not signed, and I’m quite sure that they were not designed by Sullivan (or Messmer). Instead, permission must have been granted to use the character, and an artist was then commissioned to make the drawings. And judging by variations in style, it wasn’t always the same artist. The best of them, however, were, I believe, drawn by a man who was a well-known illustrator during and after World War One and most of whose considerable output of postcards was published by Inter-Art and Woolstone Brothers. This man was Dudley Buxton.

I was first alerted to the possibility that some of the Felix cards were drawn by Buxton by the very knowledgeable Australian collector Gary Davies, and have since become certain of it. However, I cannot prove it any other way than by asking the reader to do what I did, namely to carefully compare the Felix cards published by Inter-Art and Woolstone Bros. with those signed by Buxton. You can easily see the similarities. You can also see the dissimilarities between these cards and the Felix cards published by, e.g., Bamforth, which are much cruder. And once you have developed an eye for Buxton’s style you will have no trouble recognizing it also in other cards that are not normally attributed to Buxton, but to some other, much more famous cartoonist, namely Walt Disney. I’m talking about the Mickey Mouse cards likewise published by Inter-Art and Woolstone Brothers. Copyright was held by Mickey Mouse Films distributed in British Isles by Ideal Films Ltd., but there’s no doubt in my mind that these cards were also designed by Buxton. Again, compare the style if you find this hard to believe. 

There is another thing that lends strong support to the claim that, as far as British postcards are concerned, Felix and Mickey Mouse were both created by Dudley Buxton, and that is the fact that Buxton himself worked in the film business as an animator and director of early silent animated films. During WW1 he collaborated with Anson Dyer on John Bull’s Animated Sketchbook (1915/16) and on his own produced the war cartoons Ever been had? (1917) – which is, intriguingly, described by Giannalberto Bendazzi in his book Cartoons. One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (London, 1994) as “a work with an extremely elaborate plot for its time and a disturbing atmosphere (it features the ‘last man’ on the Earth, which has been burned by war, and a defeated England)” – and The Raid on Zeebrugge (1918). After the war he continued his film work with Philip Philm Phables (1920), Running a Cinema (Memoirs of Miffy) (1921), Bucky’s Burlesques (1922), and, last but not least, a series of films about Pongo the Dog, the first of which, Pongo Arrives, appeared in 1924, the same year as Studdy’s Bonzo the Dog. It was followed by Pongo Cleans Up the Goat Family and Pongo’s Day Out (both in 1924). Pongo was intended to be the British answer to Sullivan’s Felix the Cat cartoons but, unfortunately for Buxton, did not manage to gain the same popularity. Pongo’s success was in fact very short-lived and he seems to be completely forgotten today. I couldn’t even find an image of Pongo anywhere. 

Almost as much forgotten as Pongo is Buxton himself. Biographical details are scarce and very sketchy. As I learned from a family tree found on the internet, he was born in 1884 in Upper Holloway and another internet source (the very useful History of British Animation) states that he died in Richmond-upon-Thames in 1951. But what became of him once the pictures had begun talking remains unknown. What remains of him today are more than anything else the more than 500 comic postcards he designed. But what a rich legacy that is! He could certainly draw with the best of them. All his postcards are superbly executed, inventive, perceptive, and very, very funny. Many cards portray large-eyed, chubby-cheeked children, but they are never sweet, never idealised. These kids are very down-to-earth, strong-willed and tough. They don’t invite a cuddle, but are still loveable – from a distance. My favourite is the angry little girl who prepares herself for beating up a boy who she feels has insulted her, muttering: “The kid next door says I ain’t no lady, but I’ll show him I am.” Isn’t that a great line? Fat middle-class men and women are also quite common, often blissfully unaware of their own appearance. “I’d starve first!” exclaims the plump lady when she sees the sign asking for “girls to strip in a tobacco factory”. There are also many war cartoons that make fun of the Germans (and sometimes of the English as well), and plenty of well-rounded, rather stupid-looking and utterly harmless policemen. A stroke of genius is his series of “mental impressions”, in which he shows the world as it would look if it looked the way we felt it: how big and heavy the baby seems to be when you have to carry it around in the middle of the night or how monstrous cars can appear when you have to cross a busy road. And I just love his Christmas cards, which are great fun and as un-Dickensian as they can possibly be.