Inspector Jellicoe’s Casebook is a humorous strip, the text story is told in a
straight forward style, whilst the humour is visual. The villains and the odd pompous person are all drawn in a caricature fashion
for example, exaggerated noses, weird hair styles and so on. Jellicoe, other policemen and innocent bystanders have their
features drawn as normal people. The visual humour can also be found in the background of some of the panels. In the
episode below lookout for the scene in Jellicoe’s office and when the villains are on the double decker bus.
It’s then that the reader realises that there is more to this strip than he/she first thought.
It would be interesting to know if the writer wrote each episode as a straight story and then left it to the artist to
provide the visual humour or whether the writer and artist was the same person. If it was two people, they would appear
to be operating as a ‘Morecombe and Wise’ team. The straight man being the writer and the comedian the artist. Or maybe
the writer provided notes for the visual humour he/she wanted incorporated into each episode.
Other strips that this artist worked on include Harry the Hitch, Send for Sid, The Colorado Kid,
and others for The Hornet.
© Adrian Banfield, 2008.