High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Alexander "Ally" Sloper is one of the earliest fictional comic strip characters. Red-nosed and blustery, an archetypal lazy schemer often found "sloping" through alleys to avoid his landlord and other creditors, he was created for the British magazine Judy, by writer and fledgling artist Charles H. Ross, and inked and later fully illustrated by his French wife Emilie de Tessier—a rare European-woman comics-artists of the time—under the pseudonym "Marie Duval" 1 (or "Marie DuVal"; sources differ). The strips, which used text narrative beneath unbordered panels, premiered in the 14 August 1867 issue of Judy, a humour-magazine rival of the UK`s famous Punch.