Last Saturday's post looked back on my abortive attempt to add a little character in my editorial cartoons giving postscriptive commentary on the topic of the day. Although I didn't keep it up, such characters are a longstanding tradition that dates back at least to the marginalia in medieval manuscripts, if not to paintings on cave walls.
In editorial cartooning, they're called dingbats, after the typesetters' term for non-alphanumeric characters used for everything from bullet points to paragraph dividers to space filler.
The best known of these in the present day was Puck, the little penguin Pat Oliphant drew at the bottom of his editorial cartoons from his early days Down Under with the Adelaide Advertiser until his retirement in 2015.
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| "Here I Am, the Last Livin' Person in Ireland..." by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, ca. Feb. 18, 1973 |
Puck came into being after a colleague at the Adelaide Advertiser brought a penguin in a paper sack to the newspaper office. The 20-something Oliphant, whose political leanings were well to the left of his editors and the publisher at the Advertiser, began adding Puck to his cartoons as a way of sneaking his true opinions past those editors. By the time they caught onto this device, Puck's popularity with readers ensured that the penguin would continue whether the editors liked it or not.
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| "Now Is the Time to Save Gas" by Fred Seibel in Richmond Times Dispatch, Feb. 18, 1943 |
I also mentioned Fred O. Seibel and his crow last week. The crow also had a name, but sources disagree whether it is Moses or Jim. Since I have not been able to track down an origin story for him, I'll leave both names here with the caveat that I found him named Jim in a contemporary source, Moses in an article written long after Seibel had died.
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| "Alas Poor Yorick" by Fred Seibel in Richmond Times Dispatch, Feb. 18, 1933 |
Getting his start in upstate New York in 1908, Seibel was the editorial cartoonist at the Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch 1926 to 1968. Representing oneself with a crow named Jim would hardly raise an eyebrow at the start of his career; by 1968, and certainly by 2021 when the above-linked article was written, there was nothing quaint or cute about "Jim Crow."
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| "No Trespassing" by Bob Satterfield for Satterfield Cartoon Service, ca. November, 1914 |
Bill Rowell might have confused Seibel's crow with Bob Satterfield's bear, whose name was Moses according to Cartoons Magazine.
The bear's name might also have been Bizzy, however. Satterfield also drew comic strips, including one starting in 1903 starring a bear named Bizzy. A typical episode of the strip, titled "Oh, Thunder," consisted of four square panels showing the bear and perhaps another cartoon animal with a four-line poem. It ran until at least 1933.
Sat's Bear (yet another of its names) was inspired by the popular tale about Teddy Roosevelt declining to kill a bear cub brought to him to shoot at. The incident inspired a famous cartoon by Clifford Berryman, and the more enduring teddy bear dolls. Berryman's bear reappeared once in a while, whereas Satterfield's bruin was a daily constant.
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| "Advice from One Who Knows" by Bob Satterfield in Detroit Times, ca. July, 1916 |
In 1914, another cartoonist we've featured here from time to time, John Baer, offered Satterfield $1,000 for the rights to use the bear in his cartoons. Satterfield turned down the offer, writing, “He has become an indispensable and highly honored member of our firm, and I assure you that his place could not be successfully filled by anybody else.”
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| "When Doctors Disagree" by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, Dec. 27, 1898 |
If you've been following my blog long enough, you are familiar with the work of Minneapolis Tribune cartoonist Rowland C. Bowman, and his little dog.
When Bowman died in 1903 at the age of 32, the Tribune article eulogizing him explained that the dog had originally appeared as one of many characters in a Bowman cartoon celebrating a Minneapolis baseball team winning a pennant. Something about the dog appealed to readers, so Bowman kept bringing it back again and again.
The dog never had a name as far as I've been able to ascertain, and never spoke a word of dialogue. Occasionally, he would be hidden in the cartoon, peering out from behind a fence for instance, resulting in letters to the editor from readers who couldn't find him, or were proud of themselves that they could.
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| "Willie Bryan Starts in Early" by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, Feb. 18, 1903 |
A dingbat we met just last month was William K. Patrick's wise-quacking duck.
Patrick's duck originated in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, and when the Times-Democrat merged with the New Orleans Daily Picayune in 1914, the duck took over as the dingbat in charge of reporting the weather. This put the Picayune's weatherfrog out of work after 20 years of faithful service to the Big Easy.
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| "Meanwhile, the Value of the Eggs" by William K. Patrick in Fort Worth Star Telegram, Feb. 1, 1923 |
After Patrick left New Orleans for Fort Worth, taking his duck with him, New Orleanians were left with no weathercritter telling them whether to bring an umbrella to work. That is, until 1952, when Times-Picayune editors enlisted Walt Kelly's Pogo to take the job.
The paper's readers, however, would have none of the out-of-state Okeefenokian marsupial, and voted to give the job back to the old frog, who continues his frognostications to this very day.
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| "What Does His Birthday Mean to You" by Wm. K. Patrick in Fort Worth Star Telegram, Feb. 22, 1923 |
All of which is a round-about way of telling you that I don't have any interesting tidbits to pass along about the duck itself, save that a whimsical 1918 article in Cartoons Magazine cast Patrick's duck as the colonel in charge of a convocation of cartoon dingbats assembled to pledge their support to the war effort.
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| in Cartoons Magazine, Chicago, August, 1918 |
Alas, none of us are including those beloved dingbats in our editorial cartoons any more. (Unless you count Stan Kelly.)
Perhaps that what's ailing our profession these days...
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