Below is an essay I wrote for my History of Graphic Communication class on the topic of editorial comics. Angela thought I should share it.
Abe
Editorial cartoons have a long and illustrious, some would say notorious, history in America, from the earliest wood and copper block prints, through weekly and daily newspapers and on into the present day. An editorial cartoon is typically a one-panel cartoon whose content focuses on current events or people. Editorial cartoons are also known as political cartoons.
Editorial cartoons typically employ a wide variety of attributes to communicate their purpose: Acerbic humor, questioning of authority, pointing out hypocrisy, lampooning the foibles of public figures, caricature and pointing out the disparity between different classes of society are all hallmarks of the political cartoon. This is in opposition to non-editorial cartoons, which are usually just focused on storytelling or gags.
Editorial comics rely heavily on the use of symbolism to convey their ideas. Characters that live to this day like Uncle Sam, Santa Claus, the Republican Elephant, and the Democratic Donkey were in political cartoons. For example, a highly symbolic comic by Boardman Robinson that was published in 1915 depicts the Kaiser of Germany stabbing a woman labeled "Peace" through the heart with a sword while a spectral "History" watches from above.
Another mainstay of Editorial cartoons is the use of stereotypes, often to point out the biases of the population as a whole but also to speak directly to those biases. A good example of this is the comic "Between Two Loves" by Syd B. Griffin which depicts a black man holding two large watermelons and staring wistfully at a chicken that is walking past him. Comics about black Americans in the 19th century often portrayed them as "...the artful idler, thriving through an innate instinct for subverting the work ethic."1
The Jews were also a common target of these types of comics as in F.M. Howarth's comic "Vulgar Display" which depicts a man named Rosenbaum commenting on how another man named Goldstein "Worships der almighty tollar!" while standing in front of a couch that is in the shape of a dollar sign. Jews are often portrayed as "An economic leech, personifying usury and modern capitalism."2 in editorial comics.
The absurd also plays an important role in Editorial cartoons. Attributes of the comics subject are often exaggerated or left out to allow the cartoonist to make his point more forcefully like in the comic "Army Medical Examiner", by Robert Minor, which depicts an army medical examiner standing before an enormously tall and muscled soldier who completely lacks a head while exclaiming "At last a perfect soldier!"
Most early editorial cartoonists were self-taught and a frequent critique of them was that their art was terrible. The weekly magazine, Nation, opined in an editorial about editorial cartoons, "...to every impossibility of attitude is added the aggravation of linear distortion."3 Nation didn't publish comics until after World War One!
The earliest editorial cartoons were hand-carved from wood blocks or copper plates. Benjamin Franklins "Join, or Die" cartoon, which depicts a snake cut into pieces that are labeled with the names of the colonies, is often identified as the first American political cartoon. The cartoon itself was a wood block cut and was printed in 1754. Paul Revere's "The Bloody Massacre", which purported to depict the Boston Massacre, is another very early editorial cartoon and was a copper engraving.
Copper and wood blocks took a relatively long time, and a degree of skill, to produce, and were worn out relatively quickly by the printing process, so the number of prints that could be made from a single block was very limited. These early political cartoons were usually pasted on walls in public places and were occasionally printed in newspapers.
Editorial cartoons remained relatively rare through the 1820s because of the previously mentioned issues. In the 1820s though, lithography provided a relatively easy way to produce and print images. Still, it wasn't until the 1890s that comics made daily appearances in print.
During the period of the 1820s to the 1890s comics were often re-used by newspapers with different captions and the artists were not paid for printings beyond the first use. Comics were also rare because most newspapers were printed with very narrow columns and it was time consuming to re-arrange the columns to allow a comic to be printed on the page.
Editorial comics became a daily staple of newspapers after the 1890 thanks to further improved printing techniques. And, as a result, the number of working cartoonists exploded. Through most of the 20th century nearly every newspaper in America employed an editorial cartoonist, even small regional and local newspapers often kept an editorial cartoonist on staff.
1. Roger A. Fischer, Them Damn Pictures, 1st ed. (North Haven: Archon Books, 1996)
2. Fredrik Stromberg, Comic Art Propaganda, 1st ed. (New York: Ilex Press Limited, 2010)
3. Donald Dewey , The Art of Ill Will, 1st ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2007)
