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That’s King Edward VII, whose primary job responsibility, it seems, was greeting child tourists boarding busses. You’ll notice in the drawing a gentleman with a glowing crown above his head. He was kind of like the Diddy of turn-of-the-century newspaper cartoons. Actually, there’s a note from Outcault at the bottom left which explains that the image was drawn from a photograph, but that he didn’t have time to draw in all of the ads on the bus. The artist, Richard Outcault, tried to fit more words in the frame, but it wasn’t physically possible. Image reproduced from The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics under fair use and / or public domain.īuster Brown, later a shoe salesman, visits Great Britain. His bald, big-eared mug was used to promote any number of products – and why wouldn’t he be? Who wouldn’t buy something with that charmer festooned upon it?
#NEWSPAPER FUNNY PAGES SKIN#
(In this case, his shirt reads “Yez kin see it’s my deal – if I win one more pot Liz gits a new seal skin sack an dat goes”. In addition to hanging out with various offensive racial caricatures and writing his every thought on his shirt, he was one of the earliest stars of newspaper comics. That gentleman in the middle? That’s the Yellow Kid, though he didn’t get that name until Hogan’s Alley made him famous. Not all of them are in the public domain.
![newspaper funny pages newspaper funny pages](https://media.salon.com/2014/06/dear_mr_watterson2-620x412.jpg)
So print these out and give them to some kid, will you?* But there is something remarkable about having an entire sheet of cartoons delivered to your house every day of your childhood – something that a majority of kids born this decade will probably never experience. Kids today can grab a laptop and get online for entertainment (if they even do anything else).
![newspaper funny pages newspaper funny pages](https://assets.rbl.ms/14686022/980x.jpg)
This is by no means a comprehensive, academic study – just a taste of what was created in the first half of the 20th Century, before you were likely to have been paying attention. We’ve culled (primarily from the copy of The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics I bought on Alibris a few years back) a selection of classic comics, with commentary about the cartoon, the newspaper and the time period, hoping to give a sense of the world in which these remarkable and often artistic pieces appeared. We come here not to praise the new cartoon, however, but to eulogize its predecessor. But the Internet may also be the cartoon’s salvation – from Dilbert (likely the first and last major cartoon to jump from the Internet to newsprint) to XKCD to Penny Arcade to Cyanide and Happiness, cartoons are flourishing online. Their entertainment value had already been supplanted before the Internet eviscerated their delivery mechanism. Most of my knowledge of the impeachment of Richard Nixon and the Cultural Revolution is filtered through the pen of Garry Trudeau.Īs newspapers continue to meet the fate of the Rochester Times-Union, which was folded into the D&C in 1997, the fate of newspaper comics is uncertain, but guessable. These, frankly, baffled me – expecting some sort of humor and instead being treated to dry quips about Duke dropping acid (whatever that meant) on the Great Wall. Likewise at my house, my parents had a collection of Doonesbury from the mid- to late ’70s. Whenever we had library time, there was a dash for that area, to be the lucky kid who got to paw through the same tired Nermal jokes for the 20th time. Our school library in fourth and fifth grades had a secret stash, in a far corner, of Garfield books. Then there are those collections of cartoons bound into books. It’s hard to imagine the world that opened up for a kid in the nineteen-teens, opening the Sunday paper and seeing, for example, a full, color page of Little Nemo in Slumberland. Before television, before radio, people explored fantasy, crime, humor and romance on newsprint. My eyes were opened I renewed that book at the library every month for a year.Ĭartoons have been in newspapers since the late 1800s. I believed that, I should say, up until my sister brought home from the library a massive tome called The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics for a school report. (With the exception of Family Circus.) While my parents read their sections, I read mine.īeing a kid, I assumed that the contents of the comics page were static and everlasting that my parents in their youth had enjoyed the subtle Christianity of B.C. The cartoons were almost never funny, and rarely even amusing. Joes two five-minute stretches to peruse the funny pages. I took it for granted that everyday I’d work into my schedule of goofing around and melting G.I.