Funny magazine cartooning goes way back, maybe to the 18th century. If I wanted to include funny pictures from other sources like books and pamphlets I could have gone farther back than that.Here are the earliest funny magazine drawings that I have. They're from a bound collection of Punch, the British humor magazine. The date is 1842. They're still a bit primitive and they're not as funny as Punch would print only a few years later, but they beat most of what you can find now. Click to enlarge.
Man, looking at these makes me want to draw something with a coquille pen! You know, the kind of pen that has tiny, cylindrical tips with flexible points.
How do you like those thin, horizontal lines?
I wonder why there are no refillable coquille pens? Wouldn't it be great to have a pen like that when you're out sketching? You'd be all ready when you encounter people like the ones above.
This (above) is Punch's spot illustration style. The pages are full of funny little drawings like this one.
Here's a nice one that emphasizes foreground/background contrast. The original was reproduced tinier than what you see here.
Just for contrast, here's a strip, as much of it as I could fit on my scanner, from last week's Sunday Comics section in The Daily News. What a difference 165 years make!
15 comments:
wow those are awesome! Usually I cant stand the whole 19th century lithograph/woodcut style but those punch drawings are a huge exception.
The born loser isnt even drawn by the original creator, he died like 20 years ago and its being drawn by his son. Its the same with hagar beetle bailey blondie etc. Its like theyre factories that get handed down through generation to generation, of course seeing as being syndicated in 1500 papers means about 800 grand a year you cant exactly blame them
i just bought the huge freakin' re-release of nemo in slumberland. that guy's stuff completely destroys today's comic artists, both on the level of detail in his drawings, but also on heart and imagination. just looking though it makes you excited. you don't even have to read it and you feel like it's time well spent.
the words are another thing. nowadays, you drop down 4 bucks for a comic, which is supposed to be a story told through a combination of pictures and words, and get gypped on both. this guy's book, however, has beautiful drawings, and chock full of story.
sometimes, 50-100 years ago seem like they woulda been better times to live in. i guess we have the advantage now of having all of that stuff at our disposal whenever we want it.
I found an issue of JUDGE from 1903 yesterday that had some super early George Herriman in it. On the subject of Puck cartoonists, what do you think of Fredderick Opper?
What a contrast. It's as if we've passed from an age in which everything is hand-made to one in which even things that are still hand-made (eg., drawings) look like they were made by a machine.
Staggering! The level of funniness and overall refinement of cartooniness is far more worked through than I ever expected! Some of the caricatures are almost Walt Kelly-ish in line control.
Infact that last one, the foreground-background contrast one there reminds me of a very meticulous Jenny sketch style. (like from here and her blog Jenny)
I can't believe that comic strip.
People read that every day?
It's the end of the world.
That last one made me depressed! That's what people look at???!!!!! I haven't looked at a modern comic in a newspaper/magazine in a while- this is why. Outrage.
There's a second-hand bookshop near me with loads of old Punch annuals- I might pick some up. I first saw the old Punch cartoons in Year 10 (American 9th grade?) History lessons, and we had to study George Cruikshanks' political cartoons. The amount of effort that went into them was insane. I never really got the jokes, but just looking at them was enough to amuse me. The pictures of Mr. Punch himself are particularly strange.
Punch was still being sold up until the nineties over here, but it sort of died of death.
Eddie, you're an experienced cartoonist with an impressive resume and you're funny as hell. Why don't you submit a few strips to all the big syndicates. It wouldn't hurt!
Bears mentioning...
marmadukeexplained.blogspot.com
It solved a lot for me. Someone should do one for Ziggy, the Antichrist!
I miss Bill Watterson.
I have roughly 50-60% of the Punch volumes issued between its debut and its centenery in 1941 (including the very difficult to find volume with the Jack the Ripper cartoons by Sir John Tenniel). Quite a bit of what you see is obscure, even if (like me) one has a moderate familiarity with 19th century British politics. After the first few years or so, when Punch took off and began to be a success, the quality of the draughtsmanship took off. The quality of the jokes in the cartoons was another thing, as George du Maurier et alia liked to have captions the size of paragraphs.
Reading the World War I era punches gives you a pungent flavour of how wartime propaganda could really be put up to full pitch; by contrast, the World War II cartoons are more sedate.
Punch, after one last blast under Malcom Muggeridge in the 1950s, began to slide, and by the 80s, had become a shadow of its former self, with the drawings dropping off drastically in quality. (Amazingly, David Langdon was still drawing, 45+ years after he started with Punch.) They tried two different revivals, one funded by the owner of Harrod's, and neither "took."
I'm still buying my missing volumes, when I get the chance. Worth it, and I agree with Eddie about the great interest of even the very early ones, drawn at the dawn of the Victorian Age.
This is really quite depressing, actually; another reason why I usually get rid of the comic section when I read the daily newspaper, because it makes me depress than giving me a good chuckle.
It's a good thing that reprints of older newspaper & comic strips are widely available, such as the excellent Fantagraphic Dennis or Popeye, or the recent recollections of the Fantastic 4 or The Amazing Spider-Man (The Jack Kirby and Stan Lee runs, mind you.)
Man, that Born Loser strip is boring. I could do better than that. Maybe a few years from now I won't have to worry about trying to get a job as a comic strip artist, it would be a cinch.
However, since comic strip sizes are shrinking, maybe they could make em' really small and then people could use a magnifying lens to read the comics. All the size and fun in a
5X20 cm. strip.
I should check out this "Punch Magazine" though, see if I can find more of it.
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