JAMES GILLRAY: FATHER OF THE EDITORIAL CARTOON

British artist James Gillray is considered by many to be the father of the editorial cartoon.

Gillray worked in the late 18th and early 19th century, the age of Napoleon. He attacked the French relentlessly, and went at his own countrymen with equal ferocity.

My favorite Gillrays are his fashion parodies (above). Even men went for the wasp waist look, and everybody wanted to appear taller than they were.

Geez, I wish these pictures were bigger. The picture above won't enlarge, but about half of the others will, so give them a try.

He was a terrific caricaturist (above). and you know he would have been a good animator because he loved to caricature walks as well as faces.

It would have been fun to go with Gillray on his sketching tours of the parks (above). His focus was always on the people who visited the park, and not on the trees.

There must have been a lot of fat rich women (above) in Gillray's time.

Fat men, too.

Gillray wasn't the only British cartoonist of his day. Cruikshank and Heath (that's a Heath above) were contemporaries. You can see the influence that Heath had on Edward Lear, who came later.

This (above) is a beautiful picture when you see it large. It's full of movement and nice line. Gillray was an expert at etching, so he didn't have to pass his drawings on to an engraver the way some other artists did.

Haw!

He could be downright hilarious (above) when he wanted to be.

The Prince of Wales is said to have disliked this picture (above) so much that he paid to have the plates destroyed. It's beautifully composed.



More fashion caricatures (above). Is this picture by Cruikshank or Gillray? The two did park pictures that are almost interchangeable.

Anyway, catch the padded jacket and knee-high boots on the guy on the right. Wouldn't you like to see him do an animated walk?

Boy, Gillray caught that gloomy look that some Englishmen have. The pants of that day framed the crotch like a puppet theater and he caught that, too. But what's with the dainty little shoes?

Here he depicts a wealthy mother (above) who takes two minutes out of her busy schedule to breast feed her child.

Unbelievable (above)! This guy is SO funny!

Poor Gillray. for years he lived happily and prosperously with the woman who published his pictures... then his eyesight began to fail. When he found he couldn't work any more he made a botched suicide attempt which left him with injuries which may have driven him insane.

CARTOONING'S "GREAT EXTINCTION"

I've heard that geologists believe there were at least two great extinctions on Earth, one caused by an asteroid collision and the other by a volcano. I believe I can point to a third one, one that decimated funny cartoonists in the late 1920s and early 30s.

Don't believe me? Look at Lantz's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (above) which I assume is close to the design Disney used when he invented the character in the 20s. It's a bit flat but it has guts and looks like it can sustain comedy. I can imagine this guy putting a hot iron in his girlfriend's underpants.

Here's (above) the same character years down the line. It's overdrawn, grotesque and definitely not funny. I can't even imagine pulling off a gag with a character like this. John thinks the studio mindlessly shot itself in the foot by attempting to copy Disney. Steve Worth thinks Lantz might have been a victim of his own success. Maybe he had so much work to get out that he had to hire a lot of unfunny people.

Here's (above) another version which is cuter and more appealing. You can do some gags with a character like this but only some. The design emphasizes charcter and dimensional animation possibilities, not comedy. This was the era of the Great Extinction. If you were funny and worked at one of the big cartoon studios then you probably kept your jokes to yourself... that is, until Tex and Clampett came along.

Print media underwent a similar extinction. Opper (above) was doing funny cartoons in 1903. Somewhere in the 20s a lot of the Opper-types were weeded out and a new species replaced them (below)...

...the designers! One of the best designers was George McManus (that's his strip above). His stuff is beautifully drawn but it's not exactly funny. Mc Manus could be hilarious when he wanted to be but during The Great Extinction funny artists had to keep a low profile. Exceptions can be found: Milt Gross, Segar, Goldberg and De Beck; nevertheless, open any newspaper cartoon anthology from this period and you'll have to look hard for the practitioners of funny.

Eventually the writers (including artist/writers) took over. Little Orphan Annie (above) had so much dialogue that the charcters must have become stoop-shouldered. Newspaper strips of this era were READ, just like a novel. Eventually a counter-revolution was mounted but that's another story. The Great Extinction in print media raged for decades and it's still with us, even today.