Jack and Jill was a British children's comics magazine published by Amalgamated Press/Fleetway/IPC between 27 February 1954 and 29 June 1985, a run of approximately 1,640 issues. In 1955, Jack and Jill absorbed the fellow Amalgamated Press title Playbox (launched in 1925).[1]
The title of the magazine was derived from the nursery rhyme of the same title but the characters Jack and Jill of Buttercup Farm were otherwise unrelated. Jack and Jill of Buttercup Farm was the cover strip for many years, originally drawn by Hugh McNeill and later by Antonio Lupatelli.
The stories of Jack and Jill were related in rhyming couplets, as were a number of other early stories, although by the end of the 1970s the stories were written in normal prose form. Others were told in captions below the illustrations or text comics, a style of storytelling common to pre-war nursery comic magazines such as Puck (published 1904–1940)[2] and The Rainbow (published 1914–1956).[3]
