Julius Stafford Baker

For the American flautist, see Julius Baker.

Julius Stafford Baker (1869–1961) was an English cartoonist.

Born in Whitechapel, East London, Baker was the nephew of John Philip Stafford (1851–1899), a theatrical scenery painter who also worked as a cartoonist for the magazine Funny Folks. Stafford taught the young Baker to draw, and he went on to specialize in cartoons. From 1902, Baker's Casey Court strip was a long-running success, and he became the creator of several more of the best-known children's cartoon characters of the Edwardian era, including Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys. The Tiger Tim character was so successful that in 1920 it gained its own children's paper, Tiger Tim's Weekly. Tim then proved to have a sister, in the shape of Tiger Tilly, who appeared in Tiger Tilly and the Hippo Girls. However, Baker was eventually dismissed from the strip for having a style which was "too American", when it was taken over by Herbert Sydney Foxwell (1890–1943). Tiger Tim and his friends continued to appear in the weekly paper Jack and Jill from 1954 until 1985.

Baker should not be confused with his son Julius Stafford-Baker (1904–1988), who became a later artist of the Tiger Tim comic strip and a Second World War war artist and his son, Julius 4th, who went on to found the Happy Dragons' Press.