Hogmanay, the world's first comic, and why it went unnoticed.

Imagine a celebration of Hogmanay whereby a boozy meal with plenty of flirting, precedes a drunken punch-up, to be capped off with a night in the cells? A contemporary night out, perhaps as retold on Still Game? No, it is 1826, and a feature in the pages of the Northern Looking Glass (previously called the Glasgow Looking Glass), number 14 of 9 January, the publication now recognised as the world’s first comic.

What was this satirically brilliant thoroughly modern publication that seems largely to have gone unnoticed? It was the creation of caricaturist William Heath (1795-1840, although there is some possible doubt) who came up from London to create a panorama—a sort of latter-day IMAX—of the Battle of Waterloo on Buchanan Street, and maybe also to dodge some drinking debts. His new publication was sponsored financially by Thomas Hopkirk (1785-1841), the mastermind behind the new Botanic Gardens, and John Watson (active 1821-1826), a genius of the printing trade whose shop on George Street used the very latest image technology, namely lithography. The Glasgow Looking Glass first saw the day on 11 June 1825, and contained a mixture of mocking portrayals of society, image narratives—basically what we now call comics—and informational titbits.

It seems that the publication was circulated in the drinking houses of Glasgow, as the wine stains on one surviving copy might confirm, and it had the ‘citizens in roars of laughter’, to cite one near-contemporary account. Despite its success, it only lasted for seventeen issues, before Heath abandoned ship and fled back to London, again, it would seem, due to drinking debts. By dint of the storytelling that mixes pictures with text, for example in The Story of a Coat from numbers 4, 5 and 6, as well as the use of speech bubbles and the enticing wording ‘to be continued’, the Glasgow Looking Glass is now seen as the world’s first modern comic (i.e. publication), containing within its pages the world’s first modern comic (i.e. strip). ‘Modern’ is of course key because we might argue that image stories can be traced as far back as cave paintings, but John Watson’s technology meant that this ‘comic’ could be mass produced, distributed, and even thrown away, just like more recent Scottish examples of the phenomenon, The Beano or The Dandy. 

Surprisingly, perhaps, this cultural first for a format that is increasingly part of everyday culture, for many years, indeed decades, or even two centuries, passed largely unnoticed. A reprint was produced in 1906, but generally overlooked. In a 2007 article in The Drouth John McShane did tell us that the Glasgow Looking Glass was the world’s first comic. A 2016 Glasgow Hunterian exhibition, Comic Invention, had it as centrepiece, alongside artworks by Hogarth, Picasso, Lichtenstein and Frank Quitely. And then in 2025, the Looking Glass’s bicentenary year, the Mitchell Library mounted a display to celebrate this important Glasgow first.

But why did it take so long? The nature of the publication, and of Heath’s antics, are such that much of its history is covered in mystery. In Glasgow University Library, for example, it has often been classed amongst the local history holdings (specifically the Murray Collection), with understandably no thought that it might have had significance, due to its format, beyond Glasgow. Furthermore, it is very much an artefact of the pre-internet age. When, in the 1990s, scholars were turning their erudite attention to the history of the comic form, primary sources were sought in the card-catalogues of the libraries in Paris, New York, Geneva or London. Who would have thought that the collections of a working-class city famed for its shipyards and its whisky—both incidentally feature in the pages of the Looking Glass—would hide the world’s first comic? 

As has previously been said in another comic format, Glasgow is now miles better. The Mitchell display linked in with a witty reprint and rebirth, the New Looking Glass. And at the conference of the International Bande Dessinée Society in Brussels in July 2025 enthusiasm was shown for a complete digital reissue of what is now accepted to be the world’s first modern comic. The Looking Glass reflects Glasgow of 1825, but also, as we approach Hogmanay 2026, world culture and scholarship over two centuries later.

University of Glasgow blog on Glasgow/Northern Looking Glass, June 2005

National Library of Scotland blog in Scots

Podcast: University of Glasgow Stories from Glasgow (2022)

Kickstarter: Glasgow Looking Glass - 200th anniversary comic

John McShane (2025) Celebrating 200 Years of the Glasgow Looking Glass

Glasgow Herald (2025) Glasgow 'first' as city marks 200 years of world's original comic