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One Hundred Years
of American Cartooning (October 17, 2002) No
list of the top cartooning achievements of the 20th century would be
complete without genuflecting in the direction of editorial cartoonists
and magazine cartoonists. The
former because they are the traditional touchstones of social respectability
for cartooning; the latter because they represent the most traveled
avenue of access to professional status for the cartoonist.
Moreover, the magazine cartoon—the single-panel gag cartoon—came
to maturity during this century; we can scarcely speak, then, of the
cartooning history of the last one hundred years without mentioning
gag cartoons. In a country like ours where a Puritan
heritage lies just a scratch beneath the surface everywhere, cartooning
has always seemed a somewhat frivolous enterprise. To the Puritan within all of us, nothing is
worthwhile unless it is serious. And
to the average citizen, cartooning makes a grab at seriousness only
when it gets to the editorial page of the newspaper. There, any practitioner seeking respectability
invokes the name of the profession’s patron saint, Thomas Nast, who
proved the social and political value of cartooning by driving the corrupt
Boss Tweed from power in New York City in the mid-1800s.
While nearly all editorial cartoonists
nod deferentially toward Nast, few are so baldfaced about their influence
as Doug Marlette. Asked once
if his art had ever attained any real societal significance, Marlette
reflected for a moment and then deadpanned, “Yes.
I ended the Vietnam War.” The fundamental seriousness of the
editorial cartoon’s function in American life is demonstrated for once
and all by its location in the newspaper.
These days, editorial cartoons are almost always published on
the editorial page of the paper. In
fact, when you flip through the paper, you know you’ve reached the editorial
page when you see a big three- or four-column cartoon at the top of
it. Thus, editorial cartoons act as flags identifying
the most serious page in the paper—the publisher’s opinion page, where
social change is effected, ships launched, and careers smashed. Only the staid (not to say stodgy) New York
Times has an editorial page without an editorial cartoon. (Editorial cartoons in the Times appear
on the facing, or “op-ed,” page.) It wasn’t always thus. At first, editorial cartoons appeared on the
paper’s front page, its most
entertaining page. The front
page is the page designed to attract the attention of prospective buyers
by screaming headlines at them from the newsstand.
Headlines and an editorial cartoon.
In this case, the editorial cartoon’s presence on the front page
was testimony to the economic importance of cartooning: cartoons helped
sell papers. The legendary crank, James Gordon Bennett,
Jr., was apparently the first to realize the marketing value of the
editorial cartoon. He founded
the New York Evening Telegram in 1867, publishing it on pink
paper and headlining gory murders and sexual exploits on its front page. But on Friday—every Friday—he ran a big editorial
cartoon on the front page. The
Telegram thus became the first American newspaper to regularly
publish editorial cartoons. Although editorial cartoonists as a
class might aspire to ending the Vietnam War and other such humanitarian
feats, on a daily basis, they aim more towards simply stimulating or
focussing the public debate on issues affecting the general weal. And they do so in a somewhat unabashed fashion. There’s nothing subtle about an editorial
cartoon. As Marlette observed,
“A cartoon cannot say, ‘On the other hand,’ and it cannot defend itself. It is a frontal assault, a slam dunk, a cluster
bomb.” While the impact of the bomb exploding
may not re-structure society, it can nonetheless contribute to change.
The most effective cartoons in this regard are those couched
with opinions already held by some segments of society.
The cartoon contributes to, or enhances, the general atmosphere
or climate of opinion, and the point of view espoused may by this means
come to prevail. At the very least, as Chief Justice
William Rehnquist noted in February 1988 (when ruling that Jerry Falwell
could not collect damages for a cartoon that Hustler published): “From the view of history, it is clear that
our political discourse would have been considerably poorer without
[cartoons].” As a general rule, the cartoons that
actually achieve change in any measurable way are those that concentrate
on local matters. (And here we
hasten to note that Nast’s campaign against William M. Tweed was a local
crusade, not national.) That
editorial cartoonists these days increasingly do not attend much to
local issues is cause for some low decibel alarm; the reasons lie in
the economies of national syndication, and that is a subject for a subsequent
installment of this column. At the moment, however, my purpose
is to identify a dozen or so editorial cartoonists whose work represents
the best of the profession’s achievement in the century just now lurching
to a conclusion. The criteria for selection are hardly
scientific. I looked for artistic
accomplishment rather than social impact.
And by “artistic” I don’t mean just pretty pictures or skillful
technique. The cartoonists I
anoint in the next paragraphs are those who were most influential on
the profession. They were pacesetters; others imitated them.
And they also demonstrated repeatedly a command of their medium,
welding word and picture in telling metaphor and persuasive image. I don’t expect that everyone will agree
with my roster of great editorial cartoonists of the twentieth century.
And in fact, I had a deuce of a time reducing the number to an
even dozen. My difficulty is
amply manifest in the names I mention here that I considered but finally
didn’t include among the top twelve. By way of providing an easily discovered way
of distinguishing the latter from the former, I’ve numbered the top
twelve. The numbering puts the
cartoonists in chronological (that is, historical) order; it does not
indicate their relative standing or merit.
Although I’ve tried to pin-point with
each cartoonist the basis of his selection, my annotations are, alas,
only cryptic indications of these cartoonists’ attainments. To begin, then: (1) John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949), who drew
for the Chicago Tribune for almost all of the first half of the
century, is here not for his longevity (which he cited as the sole reason
for his unofficial title as “dean of American editorial cartoonists”)
but for his having invented the “human interest” editorial cartoon.
(Or, if he didn’t invent it, he popularized it.)
The first of these appeared in the spring of 1902:
dubbed “The Boy in Springtime,” it depicted the kind of kid McCutcheon
(and thousands of others in the midwest) had been, a carefree youth
going fishing on the first day of warm weather.
It was neither topical nor political, but in its portrayal of
a simple human condition it suggested another direction that editorial
cartoons could go in. Recognizing purposes for both serious
and humorous editorial cartoons, McCutcheon said he “always enjoyed
drawing a type of cartoon which might be considered a sort of pictorial
breakfast food. It had the cardinal
asset of making the beginning of the day sunnier.” Such cartoons set no prairies afire, McCutcheon
admitted; instead, “their excuse lay in the belief that a happy man
is capable of a more constructive day’s work than a glum one.” McCutcheon felt he could deliver stinging
cartoon rebukes when “some evil” demanded it, but he believed it was
“better to reach out a friendly pictorial hand to the delinquent than
to assail him with criticism and denunciation.”
And once McCutcheon broke ground in
this human dimension, others followed him.
Working for the midwestern newspaper with perhaps the largest
circulation in the region, McCutcheon is also here to represent whole
legions of regional editorial cartoonists who achieved fame in their
cities or states without benefit of syndication—Billy Ireland, James
Donahey, and numerous others. With Robert Minor, (2) Boardman Robinson
(1876-1952) established the grease crayon as a potent implement for
drawing editorial cartoons. Approximating
the soft-line multi-shade effect of lithography, the technique was immediately
adopted by such other cartoonists as Rollin Kirby, Clive Weed, and Oscar
Cesare. Robinson went to Russia
in 1915 with John Reed to view the Revolution, having left a remunerative
position with the New York Tribune. When he returned, he taught at the Art Students
League in New York, influencing another generation of cartoonists—Edmund
Duffy, for instance. (3) Rollin Kirby (1875-1952) at the
New York World was probably the most influential editorial cartoonist
of the 1920s, his creation of the funereal Mr. Dry, the black-clad crepe-draped
symbol of Prohibition, setting the style for the way of depicting the
decade’s villain and any other lip-pursing “anti-” crusader, of which
there were many during the turbulent Jazz Age.
Kirby was also the first editorial cartoonist to win three Pulitzer
Prizes (all in the 1920s). (4) Jay N. Darling (1876-1962) signed
his cartoons “D’ing” at first, abbreviating
his last name. By the time he
achieved his fame at the Des Moines Register in the century’s
first decade, he’d dropped the apostrophe, and Ding stood alone. Although he worked in New York briefly, the
experience confirmed his affection for the midwest, and he returned
to Des Moines, where he stayed for the rest of his life even after accepting
in 1916 a syndication deal with the New York Herald Tribune. He became thereby one of the first to
be nationally distributed—and famous from coast to coast—but he did
it from the middle of Iowa. Ding drew with a brush but he drew
very, very large, and the resulting pictures usually looked as if he
had penned them into existence. The
line was hectic and vitally alive, and it suited perfectly the bent
Ding frequently indulged for pictorial hilarity, rendering his figures
in such explosive motion that the cartoons seemed to quiver with laughter.
In this penchant for humor in his cartoons, Ding was nearly unique
in the first decades of the century. Succeeding Robert Minor at the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch in 1913, (5) Daniel R. Fitzpatrick (1891-1969)
became a power in the Mississippi Valley, like Minor, drawing with a
grease crayon, but Fitz applied the weapon in a dour shrouded style
that cast a pall of gloom over his subjects.
Fitzpartrick’s work was never funny, but his visual metaphors
were powerful and uncompromising. “I was always for the underdog,” he maintained. (6) Bill Mauldin (1921- ) created those
scruffy World War II “dogfaces,” Willie and Joe, with whom Mauldin successfully
captured the spirit of those times as no other cartoonist did (except,
perhaps, Milton Caniff in Terry and the Pirates). Willie and Joe weren’t just amusing, although
they were usually that; they were also editorializing about the war
and the solider’s life in it. Mauldin, whether he knew it or not, was
serving an apprenticeship in the medium that would, before long, claim
him for a career. Returning to civilian life with the first of his two
Pulitzers (1945) under his arm, Mauldin eventually inherited Fitzpatrick’s
chair at the Post-Dispatch, where he continued in the unflinching
manner of his predecessor. Later after he’d joined the Chicago Sun-Times,
Mauldin drew one of his most famous cartoons—the statue of Lincoln in
the Lincoln Memorial, head in his hands, grieving at the assassination
of John F. Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963.
Mauldin had left the office that day
at noon, his work for the week completed.
When he heard of the tragedy in Dallas, he went back to his drawingboard.
“I was amazed at how upset I was,” he wrote later.
“What to draw? Grief,
sorrow, tears weren’t enough for this event.
There had to be monumental shock.
Monument—shock—a cartoon idea is nothing more-or-less than free
association. Assassination. Civil rights.
There was only one statue for this.”
He drew the picture faster than he usually did, finishing in
about an hour. “I almost threw
it away because I couldn’t get the hair right.
No matter what I did with it, it looked more like Kennedy hair
than Lincoln hair. This might confuse some people who weren’t familiar
with the statue. Then I decided
that if they didn’t know the statue, they wouldn’t get the cartoon anyway.” The first edition of the paper hit
the street just before 5 p.m. with Mauldin’s cartoon on the back page;
later, he learned that most Chicago news dealers sold the paper with
that side up.
The device of this cartoon would be imitated again and again
in the years to come as we shuddered through tragedy after tragedy with
the deaths and assassinations of national figures. Three-time Pulitzer winner (7) Herbert
L. Block (1909-2001) at the Washington Post knit together a number
of historical graphic threads in his work. As a preamble, we should note that he admired
Edmund Duffy, whose anti-KKK and other cartoons of unbridled savagery
for the Baltimore Sun earned him not only a niche in the history
of the medium but three Pulitzers. Duffy
drew with a grease crayon in somewhat the manner of Kirby (and, hence,
of Robinson), and Herblock’s early work seems visually kindred.
By the 1950s, however, the Herblock style of drawing had mutated
into something that incorporated the more comic aspects of Vaughn Shoemaker’s
energetic and lively linework in Chicago (which, in turn, evoked Ding)
to set a new national fashion. Herblock rose to the fore during the
McCarthy Era, coining the term “McCarthyism,” and sustained his place
in the national firmament through the Nixon Years, depicting Nixon with
a disreputable five-o’clock shadow. Herblock, who waged his liberal
battle from the Post for over a half-century, was effectively
the conscience of the paper. But he spoke his own thoughts, and no one
at the Post had the power to silence him. (8) Pat Oliphant (1935- ), the Australian
who took over Paul Conrad’s spot at the Denver Post in 1964,
injected the first genuinely new blood into the medium. His cartoons were sharply pointed and hugely
funny, both at the same time. He drew with a juicy brush and his cartoons
were horizontal, not vertical. Before too long, he was being imitated
from sea to shining sea. He is, without question or quibble, the second
half of the century’s most influential editorial cartoonist (he prefers
“political cartoonist because the alternative title suggests that he
somehow shares an editor’s point-of-view). Oddly, as a testament to
the discernment of the Pulitzer committee, Oliphant has won the Prize
only once, in 1967. Meanwhile, (9) Jules Feiffer (1929-
) in his cartoons in the Village Voice (beginning in the mid-1950s)
used a narrative sequence of pictures in which, through revealing monologues,
the denizens of the artsy classes in Greenwich Village exposed themselves
as essentially hypocritical or self-delusional.
Following both his own instincts and the political ferment of
the Village, Feiffer was soon examining the landscape of public affairs,
skewering politicians as deftly as he did modern dance enthusiasts and
the would-be philosophers of Washington Square’s demi-monde. And editorial
cartoonists soon began using multi-panel cartoons occasionally, too,
imparting psychological insight to their views of public issues. When (10) Paul Conrad (1924- ) left
the Denver Post, he went to the Los Angeles Times and
became the sledge-hammer of the West.
Resisting even the slightest temptation to inject comedy into
his work, Conrad carried on in the flinty, unyielding Fitzpatrick tradition. Unequaled in the invention of visual metaphor,
Conrad’s powerful use of imagery achieved a particularly memorable brilliance
during the Watergate scandal. He
is one of only five editorial cartoonists to win three Pulitzer Prizes. Then along came (1l) Jeff MacNelly
(1947-2000) at the Richmond News Leader.
When he won a Pulitzer in 1972 (the first of his three) after
only two years on the job, it proved that even a young cartoonist at
a relatively small daily newspaper could cop the Prize.
Drawing in somewhat the manner of Oliphant at first, MacNelly
was soon the second most imitated of American editorial cartoonists. And when he launched a daily comic strip, Shoe,
in 1977, he set another pace that was followed by Brian Bassett (Adam),
Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grim), Doug Marlette (Kudzu),
Jack Ohman (Mixed Media), Jim Borgman (Zits), and several
other editorial cartoonists who doubled on the funnies pages with daily
strips. But not everyone drew like OliNelly.
In fact, recently a veritable flock of cartoonists like (12)
Tom Toles (c. 1951- ) draw in whimsical, distinctly individual styles—Signe
Wilkinson, Ann Telnaes, Tony Auth, Jack Ohman, Jeff Danziger, Ted Rall—making
their arguments as powerfully as their colleagues do drawing in more
traditional styles. Toles is on this list as much to represent these
eccentric drawing styles as for any other reason (and not, necessarily,
because he was hired by the Washington Post as its staff cartoonist
after Herblock died). Toles’
cartoons, unrelenting though they sometimes are, are no more so than,
say, Danziger’s or Telnaes’. I haven’t mentioned, yet, a number
of my favorite cartoonists (Steve Benson, Etta Hulme, Don Wright, Mike
Luckovich, and Milt Priggee, he of the inimitable nimble brush; and
I don’t want to forget the ineffable L.D. Warren, whose precise and
flowing line was the envy of everyone who beheld it, or Draper Hill,
whose puckish deployment of historical and literary allusion makes him
one of the medium’s most daring practitioners; there, now I’ve mentioned
them)—mostly because the kind of assessment I’ve committed here takes
time. More of it has to pass
us by. The perspective required for a career
evaluation needs the distance of history, and history is about the past,
not the present. Except for Toles
(who represents a category here rather than himself), the most recently
arriving cartoonist named above is MacNelly, who arrived 28 years ago,
so we’ve had a little past and a little perspective to muster judgement
in. We need another dozen years or so before we
can determine who might cast his or her shadow the length of the last
quarter of the century much as McCutcheon and Ding and Kirby did during
the first quarter. We face a somewhat different dilemma
with magazine cartoonists. The
time has already passed. Although
the magazine cartoon may fairly be said to have arrived at maturity
in this century, the genre has been weakened considerably in the last
thirty-forty years by the disappearance of the “general interest” magazines
that provided the greatest showcase for single-panel gag cartoons. In short, after the 1970s, magazine
cartoonists became such a rare breed that we can scarcely discern any
significant figures in the last couple decades.
For the first fifty years, however, there are scores of candidates. Doing cartoons for magazines was once
a well-traveled route into the business.
You could do it from your kitchen table: draw up a dozen cartoons
and mail them off by the batch to prospective magazine buyers. You did as many as you had time for, and you
usually held down a paying job during daylight hours. Hundreds of would-be cartoonists took this route.
And over the years of magazine cartooning’s “golden age,” they
produced thousands of cartoons. We’re concerned here, however, with the cartoonists
who lasted, who made a living at it. The selection criteria are the same
as those I exercised for editorial cartoonists—with one addition. Volume of work. In one or two instances, the chief qualification
was the very profusion of published cartoons. Otherwise, I looked for milestones—cartoonists
whose work influenced the development of the medium or exploited the
nature of the medium most fully. In this country, magazine cartooning
is cartooning in its original state.
Editorial cartoonists achieved recognition and power in magazines
first, not newspapers. The success
of such weekly humor magazines as Life, Puck, and Judge
inspired newspapers to the ultimate form of flattery.
The Sunday colored supplements in which were born such comic
characters as the Yellow Kid, the Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan,
Buster Brown, and Little Nemo were concocted in direct imitation of
these weekly comic magazines (or “comics,” as they were sometimes called
with unwitting prescience). The daily newspaper comic strip was a logical
outgrowth of the Sunday pages. And
the comic book started as a vehicle for reprinting newspaper comic strips,
both Sundays and dailies. While cartooning was evolving in various
directions in newspapers during the first three decades of the century,
it was also changing in the magazines of its origins. By the 1920s, magazines had proliferated across
the land, multiplying the historic venue for cartoonists. With the increased number of outlets and practitioners,
the form mutated slightly and matured into the modern single-panel gag
cartoon—as we shall shortly see. Again, in this listing, I’ve numbered
the top twelve in chronological order, naming them roughly in the order
of their appearance on the scene. The dominant magazine cartoonist in
the first decades of the century was undoubtedly (1)
Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944), the most celebrated of the magazine
cartoonists who drew in the illustrative manner that prevailed through
most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.
Not only did he invent the Gibson Girl, whose face and form set
the fashion for female beauty for twenty-some years, but Gibson’s flourishing
pen inspired imitation by such notables as James Montgomery Flagg. As the humor magazine Life began to falter
following the 1918 death of its founder, James A. Mitchell, Gibson bought
the magazine and continued the traditions of 19th century cartooning
into the next decade. Among the things he perpetuated was
the “he-she” style of single-panel cartoon comedy in which the caption
consists of a playscript-style dialogue, or a series of verbal exchanges,
between persons depicted in an illustration surmounting the verbiage. Gibson’s star descended, however, as
the hems of skirts rose in America.
His decorous, almost matronly, ladies were no match for the exuberant
leggy flappers of (2) John Held, Jr. (1889-1958), whose cartoons with
their fragile lines and skillful spotting of solid blacks established
both lifestyle and fashion for actual flappers and their beaux of the
roaring twenties. Russell Patterson was almost as influential; and of
his would-be imitators, doubtless Jefferson Machamer was the most prolific.
Magazine cartooning began to change
with the success of The New Yorker, founded in 1925 by a one-time
hobo newspaperman named Harold Ross.
It was at Ross’s magazine that the single-speaker caption emerged
under the influence of (3) Rea Irving (1881-1972 ), Ross’s art director
in the magazine’s formative years, and (4) Peter Arno (1904-1968 ),
probably the magazine’s most successful practitioner of the new form.
Irving presided over the weekly “art
meetings” at which the magazine’s cartoons were selected, and he slowly
educated Ross in the finer points of art and cartooning. Thus, it
was Irving’s taste that determined the look and thrust of the magazine’s
pacesetting cartoons. Ross was a notoriously fussy editor,
and among his complaints were cartoons in which he couldn’t quickly
determine which of the characters depicted were speaking the lines of
dialogue that rattled off under the picture.
His chronic objection disappeared if there was only one speaker.
But his eccentric demand for a single speaker disguised his real campaign:
weary of the worn-out “he-she” dialogue style of cartoon, Ross was on
the look-out for “idea drawings”—those in which, as he dimly understood
it, the words and the pictures were interdependent, neither making complete
sense without the other. In short, he was looking for and thereby fostering
the modern, single-speaker captioned magazine cartoon. Single-speaker captions had appeared
elsewhere but irregularly. Cartoonists
discovered the enhanced comedic impact that such cartoons produced and
generated more of them as time went on.
But at The New Yorker, the occasional practice became
the prevailing mode—thanks, probably, to Ross’s quirk as well as his
prescience about how much funnier these puzzling pictures were: the
captions “explained” the pictures and vice versa, and understanding
came suddenly, in a flash, which released the laughter of comprehension
and appreciation at the trick. As other humor magazines—Life, Judge,
College Humor—stumbled in the twenties and failed in the thirties,
The New Yorker survived. It
even thrived. And since it was
the successful survivor, the style of its cartoons soon predominated
everywhere, and with that, the modern magazine cartoon achieved its
maturity. Arno’s boldly rendered, full-page cartoons
epitomized the new style of single-speaker captioned cartoon. In his cartoons, the picture made no sense ever
without the caption; the caption, no sense without the picture; but
together, they made a new kind of sense, their combined meaning springing
into a joke like a surprise party. Less than a decade after the launch
of The New Yorker, Esquire debuted, and (5) E. Sims Campbell
(1906-1971 ) came out of Harlem obscurity as the chief gag-writer for
the magazine’s cartoons, including the airbrush pin-up paintings of
George Petty as well as Campbell’s own famous harem cartoons.
Campbell thereby helped to establish not only Esquire
but the pin-up. Moreover, he
created the cartoon mascot for the magazine, the bug-eyed roue called
Esky. A friend had told Campbell early in
his career that if he specialized in rendering the curvaceous gender,
he’d always find work. Campbell
obviously took the advice to heart.
His cartoons appeared in magazines other than Esquire,
but his specialty was beautiful women, and beginning in 1943, he did
them in a syndicated newspaper panel cartoon called Chorus Cuties.
Esquire, meanwhile, having discovered in their 25th anniversary
album of cartoons that Campbell had been present in every issue for
a quarter of the century, set about making sure that every subsequent
issue also contained a Campbell cartoon and did so until he died. Perhaps the most manically inventive
of the verbal-visual blending style of gag cartoonists was (6) Virgil
Partch (1916-1984), the fabulous VIP (or, at True magazine, “the
Vipper”). In fact, I have suspected for a long time (without
having actually researched it much) that VIP may have been the second
dropped shoe of which Arno was the first—turning the modern mag cartoon
into that perfect verbal-visual blend that finally transcended the he-she
style of the earlier decades. If
VIP didn’t accomplish that, exactly, he surely demonstrated beyond quibble
that a good single-panel cartoon needed more than just a witty caption. Few, if any, of his cartoons can be understood
without seeing the picture as well as reading the words. Among the most prolific of the magazine
cartoonists during the heyday of the genre (roughly, the 1940s and 1950s)
were (7) Robert Day (1900- ) and (8) Chon Day (1907- ). You saw their work everywhere—Saturday Evening
Post, Collier’s, True, Look, The New Yorker, American Magazine, Saturday
Review of Literature, and so on and on. Chon Day (who was christened Chauncey Addison)
was born in New Jersey and never strayed far to find a career in making
the rounds every Wednesday to magazine editors’ offices in New York
(where such offices abounded in this “golden age”). His mature style was distinguished by a simple
tremulous line and open, uncluttered pictures, devoid of all shading
save a gray tone. Robert Day,
on the other hand, developed no distinctive style and, in fact, often
worked in different styles. He
came to the New York scene by way of California, where he was born. Workhorses Day and Day (they aren’t related)
are here to signal all those who probably made a living at magazine
cartooning, whose prodigious output was evidenced on the pages of most
magazines of the period. The New Yorker cartoonist most
published in the magazine was Alan Dunn, whose total was 1,906, but
his work didn’t appear elsewhere as frequently.
Those whose work appeared most
often in the nation’s other magazines include: Ralph Fuller (from
early in the 1900s until the 1930s, when he started doing a comic strip,
Oaky Doaks), the great
T. S. Sullivant, whose anthropomorphic animals and impertinent Biblical
characters had such great charm in the pages of the old Life
and Judge humor magazines; and then there were Ned Hilton and
Nate Collier, whose signatures appeared on cartoons in magazines for
decades; and Stan Fine, Syd Hoff, B. Tobey, Ted Key, Reamer Keller,
Carl Rose. Appearing perhaps less frequently are
some that remain my favorites—John Gallagher, who drew memorable flat-footed
lanky bulb-nosed characters; Tom Henderson, always a far-out visual-verbal
blend with big-nosed bald guys and plump women; Paul Webb, who did those
picturesquely lazy hillbillies in Esquire; Richard Taylor, who
produced heavy-lidded ladies and gents in The New Yorker and
elsewhere; Sam Cobean, who died too young but who established “the naked
eye” of Cobean; Gluyas Williams, he of the crisp solid blacks, simple
linework; George Booth, whose spastic comic characters matched those
of George Price, another New Yorker cartoonist of comparable
insanity. I loved Slug and Butch, Larry Reynolds’
burglars in Collier’s; the manic kids from the pens of Stanley
and Jan Berenstain; Ed Nofsiger’s animals—a real zoo keeper, that Nofsiger;
Abner Dean’s naked people and Robert Osborn, whose stylistic influence
shaped UPA animation for a decade. And
Burr Shafer’s bold brush stroke in Saturday Review cartoons. Prolific though all these cartoonists
were—and despite the great affection I hold them all in—they didn’t
shape the medium as much as those whose names I’ve numbered, fore and
aft. Of the New Yorker cartoonists,
perhaps (9) Charles Addams (1912-1988) had most influence outside the
magazine. He first achieved notoriety
with the publication (in The New Yorker for January 13, 1940)
of a cartoon showing the parallel tracks of a skier leading directly
up to a tree and then going around it, one track on either side. No caption.
Addams admitted that he never quite understood the cartoon himself,
but he was delighted that a Nebraska mental institution used the drawing
to test the mental age of its patients.
"Under a fifteen-year level, they can't tell what's wrong,"
Addams said. Addams specialized in a bizarre brand
of comedy founded upon the inexplicable in nature and the anti-social
in mankind. Holding up for examination
all sorts of morbid and vaguely sinister curiosities, his cartoons evince
the repressed violence that lurks within normal people everywhere. Writer Wolcott Gibbs saw Addams' cartoons as
"essentially a denial of all spiritual and physical evolution in
the human race." Addams
maintained that he arrived at his aberrant ideas simply by observing
people. Addams' sense of humor was so distinctive
that an Addams cartoon could achieve its comic effect just by being
an Addams cartoon. In one such
production, a man is watching television and drinking from what seems
to be an ordinary soft drink bottle.
His wife, who has just returned home and is standing in the doorway
to the room, has asked a question to which the man replies, "I
got it out of the refrigerator. Why?" The mere fact that Addams concocted this cartoon
suggests that the bottle must contain something more depraved than a
soft drink. His contribution to the century’s cartooning
is outlined elsewhere in these pages. Here, let me make the added observation that
macabre humor of the Addams sort can be found in the work today of Gahan
Wilson (q.v.) and, for a while, in Gary Larson’s Far Side newspaper
panel. (10) Eldon Dedini (1921- ) is one of
a very few cartoonists to appear regularly in both The New Yorker
and Playboy, the last bastions of high-class cartooning; but
just as significantly, he was an influence at Esquire in the
forties. In 1946, while Dedini
was working at Disney and freelancing magazine cartoons in his spare
time, David Smart, publisher of Esquire, phoned him and offered
to double his salary if he would work exclusively for the magazine,
generating ideas for the other cartoonists as well as being featured
himself. When the arrangement
ended in 1950, Dedini started selling to The New Yorker. About 1960, he heard from another cartoonist
who had just sold a cartoon to Playboy and had been advised by
editor Hugh Hefner to apply color “in the Dedini style.” Said Dedini: “I figured that if they were going
to teach people to work in my style, I’d better get in on some of it.”
And so he did; most issues of the magazine feature a full page
color Dedini cartoon. In (11) Jack Cole (1918-1958) we have
another sort of genius altogether. Before
he was done, he had proved himself a surpassing master of three of cartooning’s
forms—comic books, magazine cartoons, and newspaper comic strips. Had
he quit cartooning after doing Plastic Man comic books, Cole’s place
in the pantheon of cartoonists would be secure; but he also created
a remarkably innovative newspaper comic strip in about 1958, just before
he took his own life (in one of cartooning’s most exasperating mysteries:
why did he do it?). And before
that, he changed his drawing style from hard-edge linework to masterful
watercolor in order to do full-page color cartoons for Playboy
in that magazine’s first years, setting the pace for his fellow contributors
for decades to come. His work, in fact, might well be the benchmark
Playboy cartoon: ever after, the rendering of the full-page color
cartoons has always measured up to purely painterly standards of excellence
quite apart from their humorous content. Finally, there’s (12) William Steig
(1907- ), who began as a cartoonist then transformed himself into a
satirical commentator by producing expressionist abstractions of homo
sapiens and their preoccupations and then, in yet another turn, took
up children’s book authorship. His
earliest success was at The New Yorker with cartoons about precocious
kids that ran under the heading “Small Fry.”
His manner of drawing these was not particularly distinguished,
but when he abandoned the more-or-less conventional cartoon style of
rendering for a more expressive, primitive style, his humor was marked
more by the pure whimsicality of its graphic manner than by punchline
comedy. Even though others had
done all this before him, Steig proves (again) that cartooning is a
high art. And that’s my double dozen. It came as no surprise to me to realize
that half of my roster is made up of New Yorker cartoonists:
as I’ve said, Ross’s magazine set the pace for the modern magazine cartoon,
so if we are collecting the names of those who most influenced the medium,
many will have appeared in The New Yorker’s pages. I’m a little bemused, however, by the
prevalence in this listing of cartoonists whose claim to fame was drawing
women—five of the twelve. Given
my own penchant for a curving line, perhaps this outcome was predictable. But I hope not. I hope, rather, that this result is
a consequence of human nature in general and the history of magazine
publishing in particular. One
of the five is Gibson, after all, and although his Gibson Girl was a
pin-up, he could scarcely be described as a “girlie cartoonist.”
Of the remaining four, one (Held) is
noted for the over-all ambiance of his work not just for pertly sexy
women in short skirts, and another (Dedini) is also a New Yorker
cartoonist; and two (Campbell and Cole) are associated with the successful
launching of different magazines, each of which provided amble berths
for magazine cartoonists. For that reason alone, the magazines themselves
deserve mention in this listing, and the only way to recognize them
is to attach to them the names of cartoonists whose efforts helped assure
their success. Other magazines that published cartoons
regularly were not as readily identified with the work of particular
cartoonists as were Esquire and Playboy. Ted Key was a notable contributer to Saturday
Evening Post with his Hazel cartoons, but neither Key nor Hazel
can be said to have contributed in any substantial way to the success
of the magazine. Campbell and Cole, on the other hand, were vital
ingredients in the fortunes of their host journals. Whether history’s fate or my forte is responsible, cartoonists
who draw shapely women, as Campbell’s friend told him, are always in
demand. So I guess we shouldn’t
be surprised to see several of them on this list—particularly since
the list itself spans a sexist century. And since it was, indeed, a sexist
century in which, for at least the first part, a woman’s place was in
the home, it should not be surprising that my lists include no women
cartoonists. It’s not because there weren’t any. There were.
Among magazine cartoonists, for instance, Helen Hokinson is usually
numbered with the top four New Yorker tooners—Arno, Addams, and
Price; but just as I do not number Price (a personal favorite of mine)
among the dozen most influential or inspired of magazine cartoonists
of the century, I do not number the gentle Hoky. Barbara Shermund was prolific but not
as prolific as, say, Ned Hilton or Stan Fine. Dorothy Mckay was a regular contributor to Esquire
throughout its first decades, but her work there did not shape the cartoon
history of the magazine as much as Campbell’s did. Alice Harvey (no relation) contributed regularly
to the old Life in the twenties, but good as her work was, it
was not in any pacesetting category (despite the stellar gleam of her
last name). It was not for lack of talent that signatures
of female cartoonists do not show up very frequently in the nation’s
magazine cartoons over most of the last one hundred years. The plain fact is that female cartoonists were
not numerous in a sexist society because that society kept them busy
in other roles—when it was not actively preventing them from becoming
cartoonists, that is. And since
most women were pretty well occupied in other (probably more important)
activities, they didn’t do much cartooning except, probably, on a part-time
basis. And on that basis, they were not likely to re-define
the medium or marshal hosts of imitators. In editorial cartooning, the situation
was somewhat different but not much.
Several women produced editorial cartoons in the closing years
of the nineteenth century and in the opening years of the twentieth—mostly
for women’s suffrage publications, which, although influential, were
of limited circulation. Lou Rogers
was perhaps the first American woman to do cartoons on suffrage. Others as productive include Nina Allender and
Blanche Ames. But my favorite representative of this
breed is Edwina Dumm, who was doing editorial cartoons for a general
circulation newspaper, the Columbus Monitor in Ohio, by 1916. In one of the most delicious of ironies, she
was producing cartoons on political issues of the day before she could
vote! Edwina eventually journeyed
east to New York, where she was soon conducting one of the longest-lived
syndicated newspaper comic strips, Capp Stubbs and Tippie, about
(another irony) a veritable boy’s boy and his dog. But until Etta Hulme wound up at the
Fort Worth Star Telegram over twenty-five years ago, I don’t think
there was a woman editorial cartoonist of any note on the staff of a
daily newspaper anywhere in the country.
(Hulme, by the way, while a staunch advocate of women’s issues,
told me she doesn’t feel that she herself was particularly discriminated
against at her paper because of her sex.
But Kate Salley Pamer, once of the Greenville (SC) News,
might have a different tale to tell.) In any event, naming women on either
of my top cartoonists lists will not make them top cartoonists, however
much we might want them to be—however brilliantly they worked on the
modest scale a sexist society afforded them.
Numbering one of them here won’t make up for decades of second-class
citizenship in either the society or the profession, a stunted status
that denied them the opportunities which would have made possible achievement
on a grander scale. And to name
any woman to a slot on these rosters solely as a way of recognizing
that women did work as cartoonists would be intellectually dishonest
as well as condescending, neither of which I relish becoming. So I’ll say no more about it (except
to assert, unequivocally, that the next century’s listing will probably
begin with Hulme and Wilkinson and Palmer and Telnaes, leading the charge
of the gender onto the editorial pages of the nation’s papers). By way of completing this roll call
of the century’s great cartoonists, I want to pause for a few paragraphs
to remember a man who established a considerable reputation in both
editorial cartooning and magazine cartooning.
Art Young. He could be on either list. Or maybe on both. He’d be there with McCutcheon and Gibson: he
was precisely contemporary with them:
born in 1866, he died in 1943. Young grew up in the midwest, worked
on the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Tribune (briefly),
went to New York and the Art Students League, then to Paris to study
at the Academie Julien. Stricken
with pleurisy, he returned home to convalesce, then back to Chicago
in 1892 to work for the Inter Ocean, for which he produced the
region’s first daily front-page editorial cartoon.
Then that fall, Young participated in another historic event
when he drew pictures for the Inter Ocean's Sunday supplement,
the nation's first newspaper Sunday supplement to be printed in color.
(Yes, I know: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World is supposed
to be the first to publish a Sunday supplement in color.
But it wasn’t.) By 1895, Young was drawing for the
Denver Times in Colorado, and while there, he heard lectures by
Christian Socialist minister Myron Reed and British labor leader Keir
Hardie and began to question the social justice of the capitalism.
In the fall of 1895, he went to New York where he freelanced
cartoons to Puck, Judge, and Life.
In 1902, Young returned to Wisconsin to lend his pen to Republican
Progressive Robert La Follette's campaign to be re-elected governor. But by 1905, Young had rejected the Republican
politics of his heritage (including "all bourgeois institutions")
and had resolved never again to draw a cartoon whose ideas he didn't
believe in. In 1910, he realized that he belonged
with the Socialists "in their fight to destroy capitalism";
late in the year, he joined others in launching The Masses, a
radical magazine to which he regularly contributed (without pay) "pictorial
shafts" against the symbols of the corrupt system—chiefly, financiers
and politicians. In 1912, he
accepted a remunerative assignment with another radical publication,
Metropolitan Magazine, to produce in words and pictures a monthly
review of governmental action in Washington, D.C., to which he made
regular trips for the next six years while continuing his other work
in New York. Said he of the assignment: “Congress is the
best show in the country for a cartoonist.” His mature drawing style was distinguished
by its relative simplicity at a time when most of his colleagues embellished
their work with extensive crosshatching. Working in bold line, Young created visual impact
with solid black shapes contrasted against the open white areas of his
pictures; sometimes, he shaded boldly with grease crayon. He crusaded against sweatshops, firetrap
tenements, child labor, racial segregation, and discrimination against
women as well as the traditional industrial and political foes of Socialism.
One of his most reprinted cartoons depicts two slum urchins staring
up at the night sky, one declaring:
"Chee, Annie—look at the stars, thick as bedbugs." In 1918 during World War I, Young lost
his berth at Metropolitan because it was pro-war and he wasn’t.
In the same year, the cartoonist and several Masses contributors
were charged under the Espionage Act with "conspiracy to obstruct
the [Army's] recruiting and enlistment" by objecting to the war.
In one editorial cartoon labeled "Having Their Fling,” Young
depicted an editor, capitalist, politician, and minister dancing with
joyful abandon to the music played by an orchestra of canon and other
weapons under the direction of Satan. Called to the witness stand and asked why he
drew anti-war cartoons, Young responded with simple eloquence, "For
the public good." The trial
ended in a hung jury, a circumstance repeated at a second trial. The Masses had been suppressed
in 1917, and over the next several years, Young and several Masses
alumni attempted to revive it under other names. Young helped found Good Morning, a weekly
with a radical sense of humor. Within
five months of its debut, Young had become editor and publisher—and
the chief contributor of both words and pictures—in which capacities
he continued until the jovial little magazine expired in October 1921.
Throughout the decade, Young contributed
to several other publications, including Life, The New Yorker,
and The Nation; and his cartoons were fixtures in the pages of
The New Masses, born in 1926.
Although most of his magazine cartoons were not, strictly speaking,
editorial cartoons, they nonetheless betrayed a satirical bent that
had social reform as its object. Young
successfully combined both comedy and editorializing. By the way—but not at all incidentally—among
the most adept at combining comedy and political crusading was Ollie
Harrington, one of the five greatest Black practitioners of the artform
and one of the most powerful of all American cartoonists, regardless
of race. George Herriman is doubtless the most
sublime artist in this quintet, his lyric Krazy Kat having ascended
to metaphysical poetry. Matt
Baker is probably the best draftsman in this company, particularly in
rendering the beautiful women with which he populated his funnybook
pages. Jackie Ormes, like Harrington, was a crusader
cartoonist, particularly in Torchy Brown strips. And we’ve already met E. Sims Campbell. Harrington was never as financially successful
as any of these—nor as visible on a national scale. But he was a heroic figure in the history of
cartooning. In the 1930s, he was living in Harlem,
immersed in the storied cultural Renaissance, and getting cartoons published
in the leading Black newspapers in the region. At the end of 1935 in a panel cartoon called
Dark Laughter, Harrington introduced a heavy-set bald Black man
who soon took over the feature. This
was Bootsie, and Harrington would draw him for the next thirty years. In 1942, Harrington was doing editorial cartoons
for Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s weekly newspaper, The People’s Voice. For the Courier in Pittsburgh, he created
a Caniff-like adventure strip, Jive Gray. After World War II, Harrington joined the
staff of the NAACP and was highly critical of U.S. Justice Department’s
failure to convict anyone accused of lynching or other crimes of racial hatred. Then in 1950, fearing that he would
be caught up in the anti-communist nets of McCarthyism for his criticism
of the government, Harrington left the country and went to Paris, intending
to stay only “until this thing blows over.”
By chance, when the Berlin wall went up in 1961, Harrington was
in East Berlin, meeting with a publisher.
He was trapped. For the
next thirty years, he lived and worked in East Germany, continuing to
send cartoons to papers in the U.S.—sulphurous political cartoons attacking
institutionalized racism, mindless imperialism, self-serving politicians,
poverty, homelessness, and bloated capitalists, all drawn in a gritty,
ragged-line coarse-hatched style perfectly suited to the raw and painful
bitterness of his ironic assault. By the early 1990s, Harrington was
able to return to the U.S., but he continued to make his home in Berlin,
where he died in 1995. His impact
in American cartooning is profound but focussed.
One time I asked Black cartoonist Brumsic Brandon, Jr., whose
Luther comic strip that started in 1968 was one of the first
efforts with Blacks as protagonists, who his role models were.
“Ollie Harrington,” he said.
And he said no more. Art Young, too, had an influence that
was powerful but not widely felt. By
the 1930s, plagued by the infirmities of old age, he was producing much
less work, and he was occasionally supported financially by his friends. A portly and rumpled figure with wispy white
hair and a shiney red “light comedy nose” (his description), Young was
a familiar sight in Greenwich Village, strolling the streets with his
walking stick. At his death, the New York Times
noted editorially that "he was a lovable soul in spite of his sometimes
heterodox opinions" in the advocacy of which "he had sacrificed
the chance to accumulate a fair share of this world's goods." That he was a kindly, thoughtful man, selfless
and sincere, with simple but firmly held convictions is borne out by
every page of his two autobiographies.
Observing that "in his crusading, he was in deadly earnest,"
the Times called him "a good American" whose calm voice
"will be missed." Still true today, I’d say. Art Young and Ollie Harrington were
perhaps not giants of cartooning by reason of their having shaped the
medium or influenced generations of their colleagues.
But they belong with any summary of the century’s cartooning
achievements nonetheless because they were great cartoonists. And they were great cartoonists because they
had great hearts, and they lived and drew by their beliefs. For other greats—the cartoonists who
shaped the comic strip and those who did the same with the long form,
the comic book—you’ll need to dip into one or two of my books, The
Art of the Funnies for the former, The Art of the Comic Book
for the latter. Analytical histories of the medium in these two forms,
the books are previewed (and mercilessly plugged) elsewhere at this
website; to get there, click here.
And stay ’tooned. Footnote:
The foregoing essay is a slightly modified recycling of a Comicopia
column published several years ago in The Comics Journal. |
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