What Is So Rare as a Ding in June?

I had originally intended to post this a couple weeks ago, but other things kept coming up. Better late than never:

The editors at Colliers Magazine carved out a bit of space in their issue of June 10, 1922, to highlight J.N. "Ding" Darling, their regular weekly editorial cartoonist:

A clue to Darling's fame here is that he never signed his cartoons for Colliers with his nickname; yet I'm sure that all of his readers knew exactly whom this paragraph was about before reading a word of it. Of the other editorial cartoonist "classics" cited in the article, Nast and Davenport were dead and gone, but McCutcheon was very much still active at the Chicago Tribune.

Before launching this weekly Graphical History tour half a dozen years ago, I was familiar only with Darling's pen-and-ink work for the Des Moines Register and New York Journal, so I find his wash work for the national magazine interesting. I suspect cartooning afficionados will, too, so today's installment shares his Colliers cartoons from June, 1922.

"Two Miserable Extremes" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Colliers, June 3, 1922

The percentages cited in Ding's June 3 cartoon are more or less the same now as they were at the start of the Roaring Twenties (we can ask Sen. Bernie Sanders to confirm the figures for us). The 1% these days, however, are crying not just all the way to the bank, but all the way to outer space.

"Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Colliers, June 10, 1922

Some things do change over time. Nowadays, hardly anybody is going to be familiar with Longfellow's poem about the village blacksmith. Heck, do today's millennials even know what a blacksmith was?

"The Modern Generation..." by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Colliers, June 17, 1922

Speaking of millennials — or centennials as you might have called them then — we're back in familiar territory with this cartoon. Ding is commenting on the national coal miners strike more than on flappers' manners

"Rearranging Pa's Things for Him" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Colliers, June 24, 1922

Ding's output in this period is pretty impressive: he drew these weekly cartoons for Colliers in addition to his seven cartoons a week for the Des Moines Register, plus the occasional local cartoon for the New York Tribune.