Carl Giles
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Ronald "Carl" Giles, best known by his last name only, was a British cartoonist best known for his long running eponymous strip in the London Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. He started working in 1937 for the Reynolds News, but moved to the Daily Express in 1943 and remained there until 1991.
The format of Giles, the strip, was a single panel, illustrated with astonishing amounts of detail. In addition to the main joke, there were often numerous sight gags in the elaborate backgrounds. The strips were usually topical, relating to current news stories. The cartoonist's most famous creation was the Giles Family, a large family presided over by a tyrannical matriarch known simply as Grandma.
Carl Giles provides examples of the following tropes:
- Celebrity Endorsement: Every annual collection started with an introduction by some famous (and sometimes important) guest celebrity.
- Evil Matriarch: Maybe not evil, but Grandma was all powerful and certainly very scary.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: Giles loved tormenting his editors by sneaking "French packets" into his detailed panels.
- Print Long Runners: The first Giles cartoons were about the Second World War. Among his last was one about the First Gulf War.
- Stern Teacher: Chalkie is somewhere between this and Evil Teacher.
- Those Wacky Nazis: Although the tone changed once the Allies began to liberate the concentration camps, Neo-Nazis and other British fascists were usually treated with contempt after the war.
- Wartime Cartoon: Early Giles cartoons were usually about the Second World War.