Perennial Caption Contest Winner

D.D. Degg at Daily Cartoonist yesterday dug up what may possibly be the first example of a Cartoon Caption Contest.

The contest appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal of January 6, 1913 and was won by a certain W. H. Crossland of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who submitted the immortal side-splitter, "A Fool There Was."

Honorable mention went to Wilbur Eitbach of New York, Wisconsin.

(Just kidding.)

Trending 150 Years Ago Today

In case you missed it yesterday, here's what was trending across the nation 150 years ago today:

Now let's see if I understand Garry Trudeau's theory of satire correctly...

If a cartoonist for one of these papers drew a "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play" cartoon, that would be punching up against the Powers That Be, and that would be okay. But a cartoon showing John Wilkes Booth making his grand entrance at the Gates of Hell would be punching down at a defeated Victim of History, and you shouldn't do that.

Heck, just settle for Our American Cousin shedding a single tear, then.

100 Years On

One hundred years ago today, a limousine came to a stop in front of a scrawny little man with a gun, and the world was changed forever.

37 million died on three continents. Empires crumbled. Royalty became an anachronism. The Soviet empire was born. New York supplanted London as the center of world finance. Spanish influenza circled the globe. Europeans drew the borders of Iraq.

Toon: On Wisconsin!

This is one of the preliminary sketches I made before deciding to go with a different idea for this week's Q Syndicate cartoon. I figured that outside of the state of Wisconsin, few readers would recognize our state seal.

It's just as well, since I see that the Wisconsin State Journal's Phil Hands has drawn more or less the same cartoon today. He's printed in papers around the state, and I'm not. The nearest papers running my cartoons are in Iowa and Michigan, two states whose state seals I couldn't describe without Google Imaging them.

Before seeing Hands's cartoon, I decided to go ahead and finish my sketch anyway. So here it is, for what it's worth. Enjoy.