Kim, Cyril Price (1905-1970)

Cyril Gwyn Price 'Kim; original cartoon artwork

Cyril Price, also known under the pen names of 'Gwynne', 'Kim' and 'Spike', was a Welsh artist, an ex-miner who, when the mines closed, began contributing drawings to the Bristol Evening World. From the 1930s he was a front page and interior artist for the comic weeklies of the Amalgamated Press and worked on titles such as Illustrated Chips (Private Potts: 1934), Comic Cuts (Quip and Cranky: 1934), Joker (Bert and Daisy: 1937), Jolly (1938) and Butterfly (The Jolly Days: 1939). Later he worked for the Daily Graphic and his work for this was collected together for The Whisker's Annual (the editor called Cyril Price "the foremost animal artist for children in the country"). From 1944, the Daily Sketch published Price's political cartoons, who signed them Kim, and in the following year Kem Marengo took the paper to court. Four years later the case reached the House of Lords, where it was decided that there had been a "reasonable possibility of misrepresentation." The result went in Marengo's favour, and "Marengo v. Daily Sketch and Sunday Graphic Ltd [1948]", set a precedent for civil litigation. However, it may also have contributed to Marengo's subsequent loss of work in the British press.