Fred Basset Fred Basset Fred Basset is a comic strip about a male basset hound. The cartoon was created by Scottish cartoonist Alex Graham and published first in the "Daily Mail" on 8 July 1963. It has since been syndicated around the world. Fred's cartoon strips are renamed as "Wurzel" in Germany, "Lillo il Cane Saggio" (Lillo the wise dog) in Italy, "Lorang" in Norway, "Laban" in Sweden and "Retu", "Pitko" or "Koiraskoira" in Finland. "Fred Basset" has been published in the United Kingdom newspaper "Daily Mail", and latterly "The Mail On Sunday", from 1963 to the present. Alex Graham based Fred
Daily Mail and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals. The planned issue was 100,000 copies but the print run on the first day was 397,215 and additional printing facilities had to be acquired to sustain a circulation which rose to 500,000 in 1899. Lord Salisbury, 19th-century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, dismissed the "Daily Mail" as "a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys." By 1902, at the end of the Boer Wars, the circulation was over a million, making it the largest in the world. With Harold running the business side