British Comic Strip Alex 1987-2025
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The British financial-centric comic strip Alex by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor has ended after 38 years.
Alex is a satirical daily comic strip set mostly in the financial world. Its eponymous (anti-) hero is a cynical, materialistic, status-obsessed banker. The strip (and he) casts a cynical eye over news stories, politics and corporate life, combining social commentary with an ongoing narrative about the characters’ personal lives; their marriages and affairs, their children and their business setbacks. The strip also documents technological innovations as they happen.
From Alex gagman and writer Russell Taylor:
It’s been more than thirty-eight years of doing this and we realise that we really have been very fortunate in this increasingly homogenised, corporatised, globalised world to have had a platform to create non-standard, sometimes risqué humour with a properly British sensibility, and to have been able to express our point of view and our outlook without (too much) interference or censorship. We hope others will come up behind us and be afforded the same opportunity. We wish them good luck.
Though Alex will no longer be appearing in the pages of a national newspaper in the foreseeable future, he is definitely not retiring (or not for long anyway). There are still stories in our vaults and jokes we are halfway though crafting. And as long as the financial world keeps messing up, plenty of subject matter to write about too. In the meantime, some of our unpublished and rejected ideas may appear here on this page, now that we are free from the editorial veto.
The Alex cartoon site has a history of the strip by decade and some articles of special interest.
Alex started life in 1987 in the London Daily News: a Robert Maxwell-funded newspaper that was designed to be a rival to the London Evening Standard.
The day before the paper’s launch they discovered that there was already a comic strip character called “Alec” so they changed his name to “Alex”. This first strip (and the only one in which he was called “Alec”) ran in the dummy edition of the London Daily News on February 17th 1987.
There were things that the strip got wrong. The figure quoted for Alex’s salary was ludicrously low. Charles and Russell, being humbly-paid arty types, simply had no idea what bankers earned.
Alex was perceived to be one of the few successful features of the Daily News and Charles and Russell were asked to produce an extra strip for Saturdays. Charles had the bright idea of not asking to be paid for this extra cartoon, but instead requesting to be given an official letter saying that if the Daily News went bust then the rights to Alex would revert to its authors. The paper’s editor, Magnus Linklater, assured them that the paper would never go bust. Charles said “All right. So you won’t mind putting it in writing then.” Magnus did. The London Daily News folded six weeks later. It had lasted five months.
… So it was that on September 1st 1987, on a slow news day after the August bank holiday the front page of the Independent reported a riot at the Notting Hill Carnival, the SDP voting on whether to merge with the Liberals, an Iraqi air strike against Iran and, in a small panel, that something called “Alex” was due to start on page 14.
… But [the Alex] authors had always resisted the lure of more money, out of a sense of loyalty to the vision behind the Independent. It was not a loyalty that was repaid however. When no pay rises were forthcoming and the newspaper refused to even give Alex any free adverts a chance meeting with a senior person from the Telegraph led to a new offer to jump ship being made and accepted.
Alex signed off from the Independent at the end of 1991 with a rather cheeky strip. However as the newspaper hadn’t informed its readers of Alex’s impending departure the irony of the cartoon was lost on most people.
Alex began life at the Daily Telegraph on January 20th. Amid all the excitement and embarrassment of the switch Charles and Russell had omitted to think of any new jokes. They elected to start off at the Telegraph with a story about Alex bedding his Essex-girl secretary Wendy, on the premise that their new employer was unlikely to fire them in their first week at the paper … The Telegraph’s editor Max Hastings claimed he received sackfuls of mail over the following weeks complaining about the graphic nature of the opening story.
On April 4, 2025 Alex ended its run in The Telegraph.
From the Australian Financial Review (or here):
The four-panel strip first appeared in a British newspaper, The London Daily News, in February 1987, and made its debut in The Australian Financial Review that October. Its eponymous protagonist – Alex Masterley – may be British and fictional, but he has been one of this newspaper’s most enduring features. For 38 years, he has appeared day in, day out, year in, year out.
He has married, had kids, had affairs, been fired and rehired, run for parliament, endured the GFC, Brexit and COVID, and recently launched his own banking boutique. The coterie of City characters in his milieu has multiplied. But now, the time has come for a somewhat reluctant Taylor and Peattie to hang up their creation’s pinstripe suit and send him off to the golf course.
Readers of The Daily Cartoonist will recognize Alex as an occasional guest in Mike Peterson’s CSotD columns.
An afterword from the creators.
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