ABSTRACT
Alexander Sloper, F.O.M. (Friend of Man), was known as Ally for short and for good reason: fond of that quarter-day caper called the Moonlight Flit, he was forever sloping up an alley. Born on 14 August 1867, of mixed parentage (writer C. H. Ross, artist Marie Duval, Mrs Ross), he spent seventeen years in Judy strips before W. G. Baxter remodelled him for thirty-two more years as a cartoon in Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday. Here his hobnobbing with royalty reformed the ‘Old Rumfoozler’ as little as did his regular arrests by the peelers. If not the first ever comic strip hero, certainly the first ever anti-hero, Ally established the outlaw as everybody’s favourite funmaker. More, he operated in tandem with Isaac (Iky) Moses (Mo), thus establishing the double act, too.
