Older Comic Art in America

Here are more cartoons from Comic Art in America by Stephen Becker. It's a book about the history up to that point (1959). I've been posting excerpts every Thursday, the previous installment is ""here where there's a hyperlink to the one before it which has the one before that and so on and so on an so forth.

The chapter before this, called Added Attractions just featured stills and model sheets from animated films so I won't bother with that. This is the next chapter, A Century of Magazines: From Corny Almanacks to The New Yorker. As the captions on the cartoons say:

”Dicky Colwell”, a drawing by JAMES ARKIN in 1808, when it was still practicable to quote Othello.

ALEXANDER ANDERSON's most famous cartoon, “Ograbme”, a sharp comment on the Embargo of 1813.

“Johnny Bull and the Alexandrians” by the great WILLIAM CHARLES, drawn in 1818.

An old CHIP BELLEW gag, which is practically a strip. BELLEW loved to draw dogs.

One of C. J. TAYLOR's he-she cartoons, done about 1907. From Judge

A fine HY MAYER from Puck, in about 1910.

A page is cut out here for some reason. I didn't print an ethnic stereotype cartoon they featured earlier so whatever was here must have been so much worse, If anyone else has this book and wants to send me copies or scans of pages 121-122 (and they're not so offensive), I'll post them.

Continuing with the captions:

There's no caption here. The cartoon is by T. S. Sullivant. Don't know the source or the year.

*Ahem* Continuing with the captions:

The primitive pun, by A.S. DAGGY, who was a popular cartoonist of the turn of the century. From Judge.

The Great ZIM (EUGENE ZIMMERMAN) drew this in 1908. After the first world war the Irishman ceased to be a victim of cartoonists, possibly because he was better assimilated. From Judge.

The next two cartoons are by JAMES THURBER in 1937, this and the rest (except for one) are from The New Yorker.

Helen Hokinson, 1926

PERRY BARLOW (mislabeled as Percy), 1954

MARY PETTY, 1940

RICHARD DECKER, 1958

OTTO SOGLOW, 1947

CARL ROSE, 1953

MISCHA RICHTER, from newspaper strip Strictly Richter

World Encyclopedia of Cartoons D-G

Gus Dirks, 1901


Boris Drucker, Saturday Evening Post.


Dr. Seuss before becoming a children's book author, doing a cover for Judge.


John B. Gruelle, Judge


Rose O'Neill, The Kewpie Korner


Kukrynisky, The Big Three Will Tie the Enemy in Knots. The top was cut off like that.


Albert Levering, Christmas page for Puck


Sandro Lodolo


Jacques Faizant


André François, Punch


Joseph Farris


Rube Goldberg, Foolish Questions 1912


Franz Füchsel, Hendes Verden. Füchsel was one of the cartoonists who drew the infamous Muhammad cartoons.


Alfred Freuh, caricature of Winifred Linehan as Saint Joan.


Orla Getterman (“Get”)

Cartoon Cavalade: World War I and the Impudent Decade

Clare Briggs, New York Tribune 1917


Eugene “ZIM” Zimmerman, Judge 1917


Torbell, Life 1917


Orson Lowell, Judge 1917


Thomas Starling Sullivant, Life 1918


Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, Des Moines Register 1918


Ellison Hoover, Life 1920


Clare Briggs, New York Tribune 1920


Here's a two-pager from Henry Mayo Bateman, Golden Book 1921



Thomas Starling Sullivant, Life 1922


McGurk, New York American 1922


James Robert Williams, The World 1924


“Marge” Henderson Buell, Saturday Evening Post 1925


Gluyas Williams, Life 1925

Cartoon Cavalcade

This book came out in 1943. It's mostly panels from the New Yorker but those are in print elsewhere so I'll skip them. I'll skip the strips that are in other collections. The stills from Disney cartoons can all be seen in other places in color. Even leaving out all that, there's still a lot in this 444-page collection covering the medium up until then. Even though it curtails the use of paper during wartime, it still uses more paper than books produced recently in which such sacrifices are not made.

In the introduction. Author Thomas Craven says, “The first consideration, in selecting the illustrations for this book, as I have pointed out in the text, was that the drawing must be funny. It was a long and complicated business involving both a sense of humor and that curious quality known as artistic temperament. Deceased cartoonists were well satisfied with the illustration in their name; but living cartoonists had their own ideas on which pictures represented them in a volume dealing not only with the course of laughter but the causes of laughter through the passing years. For the solution to the endless difficulties of selection, procurement, and appeasement, I am indebted to Florence and Sydney Weiss[...] I am particularly indebted to William Murrell's A History of American Graphic Humor, the only work of it's kind and a monumental contribution to Americana. Murrell's history, besides being invaluable for reference, has recalled to me the old artists and funny men whose cartoons were a part of my education”


The endpapers have the signatures of most of the (then living) cartoonists in this volume:


C.H. Ebert Scribner's, 1901


Carl Hauser, Fun for the Millions, 1900


Walt Kuhn, Judge 1908


George McManus, New York Evening-Journal 1904


Walt Kuhn, Judge 1907


Thomas Starling Sullivant, Harper's Weekly 1912


L. M. Blackens, Puck 1907


Thomas E. Powers, New York Evening-Journal 1907


Harrison Cady,Life 1906



George Bellows, The Masses 1911


Robert Minor, The Masses 1915


Crawford Young, Judge 1917