War Crimes Edition

With self-styled Secretary of War Pete HIC!seth's Leave No Survivors rules of engagement in the present regime's gratuitous War in the Caribbean, Graphical History Tour takes a look at war crimes of the past.

"Das Ende" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Dec. 1, 1945

80 years ago on November 30, a German U-boat commander and two of his subordinate officers were executed for war crimes.

It was during World War II, in the South Atlantic. The German submarine U-852 under the command of Captain Heinz-Wilhelm Eck torpedoed the Greek-flagged ship Peleus on March 13, 1944.

The submarine commander Eck feared the steamer’s debris would be observed by a passing airplane, and give enough information to Allied reconnaissance to enable it to find his ship. He therefore surfaced and attempted to have the debris field eliminated by machine-gunning and grenading it into the watery deep.

Per German rules of engagement:

No attempt of any kind should be made at rescuing members of ships sunk, and this includes picking up persons in the water and putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats and handing over food and water. Rescue runs counter to the rudimentary demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews … Be harsh, having in mind that the enemy takes no regard of women and children in his bombing attacks of German cities.

"Spectator" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 3, 1945

The execution of Captain Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, August Hoffmann, and Walter Weisspfennig, was overshadowed by the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi high command, accused of the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and Socialists.

"Nuernberg" by David Low in London Spectator, ca. Dec. 2, 1945

The Nuremberg trials came to pass because the Allies were triumphant in the War. Germans did not bring the Nazis to trial. 

Nobody was put on trial for the carpet bombing of Dresden. Or for immolating the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rules of war were followed there.

"My Lai?" by Paul Conrad in Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1971

A generation later, in another war, the world was shocked by the March 16, 1968 massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians by U.S. soldiers in the Vietnamese villages of My Lai and My Khe. Expecting to find a Viet Cong battalion there, two Companies of U.S. Army soldiers gang-raped, mutilated, and slaughtered women and children when they couldn't find any men of military age in the town, then burned their homes to the ground. It was the largest confirmed massacre of civilians by U.S. ground forces in the 20th Century.

"Another Victim of My Lai" by William Roberts in Cleveland Press, March 30, 1971

The massacre had been documented in horrific photographs which were printed in national newsmagazines and on television.

The My Lai Massacre was an egregious, but not isolated case, according to an October, 1968 letter from Tom Glen, a 21-year-old soldier of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, to General Creighton Abrams:

"What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated."

"Guilty" by Don Wright in Miami News, March 30, 1971

The responsibility for the massacre was taken all the way up to an Army Lieutenant, William Calley, Jr.. Calley's court martial became national news after a whistle-blower's letter prompted Congress to open an investigation. Calley testified that he had been following orders from his superior, Captain Ernest Medina. One witness testified that Medina's orders were that "anybody that was running from us, hiding from us" was to be shot. 

"Murderer" by Leonard Borozinski in Wisconsin State Journal, March 31, 1971

Calley received a guilty verdict in March of 1971 and sentenced to life in prison; yet, as the above cartoons suggest, emerged as a sympathetic figure. He was paroled in 1974 to very little public outcry.

"Time to Come Out of Hiding" by Wally "Trog" Fawkes in Punch, London, April, 1971

Meanwhile, in separate courts martial, Captain Medina and Captain Eugene M. Kotouc were acquitted of all charges. Commanding officer of Americal Division, Major General Samuel W. Koster was charged with covering up the massacre and acquitted, but demoted to Brigadier General.

"It's Not So Difficult Once You Get the Hang of It" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, March 31, 1971

Before moving on, we would be remiss if we did not also remember U.S. Army pilot Hugh Thompson, Jr., who landed his helicopter between the villagers and the soldiers, interrupting the slaughter and evacuating some survivors to safety.

"This in a Land Where One Humiliation Is Worth a Thousand Retributions" by Mark Streeter in Savannah Morning News, May 3, 2004

In 2004, the U.S. was embarrassed by its soldiers staffing the military prison at Abu Ghraib torturing prisoners of war. The soldiers had even posted photos on the internet of themselves humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners, chaining them like dogs, and piling them up on top of each other. The most widely circulated photo was of one hooded prisoner standing on a box with arms outstretched while hooked up to electrical wires.

Punishment was limited to the lowest level grunts.

"Chain of Command" by John Sherffius in Boulder Daily Camera, August 20, 2004

What the Dubya Bush administration learned from this fiasco was to rely more and more on outside contractors, like Blackwater, whose civilian paramilitary employees massacred 17 Iraqis at a traffic roundabout in 2007. Said employees were not invited to the Blackwater annual Christmas party that year.

Two years later, the outside firm was ArmorGroup, hired by the U.S. State Department to provide security at the American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. CBS broke the story that ArmorGroup guards and supervisors engaging in what can only be described as a combination of the worst fraternity hazing with spring break at Fort Lauderdale.

for Q Syndicate, Sept., 2009

Hazing victims included Afghan nationals employed at the base, according to a Sept. 1, 2009 letter from Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: 

"There is also evidence that members of the guard force and their supervisors have drawn Afghan nationals into behavior forbidden for Muslims. For example, photographs show guards posing with Afghan nationals at the U.S. facility at Camp Sullivan as both the guards and nationals consume alcoholic beverages in scenes that suggest drunkenness, and one photo shows a near-naked U.S. guard who appears to have urinated on himself and splashed an Afghan national."

And again, there were plenty of photos, posted to the unit's social media page. It's always the pictures that get people into trouble.

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War crimes have been committed by many countries other than the United States. Is it even possible to have a crime-free war, fought strictly according to the Geneva Accords? 

Seemingly not. That, however, takes us into Current Events, which are not in our Graphical History Tour's itinerary.

Not yet, anyway.

Curtain Call at the European Theatre

Graphical History Tour steps back eighty years to the aftermath of V-E Day as seen by American editorial cartoonists. (If you're interested in their immediate responses to the Allies' victory in Europe, we visited them on their 75th anniversary.)

"Down Through the Third Reich's Thousand Years" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., May 22, 1945

As the Allies closed in on Berlin, their discovery of Nazi Germany's extermination camps for Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and communists shocked and horrified Western readers. Descriptions in newspapers and on radio of emaciated prisoners and mass graves would soon be followed by graphic photographs in magazines such as Life and Time.

The Russian photojournalism magazine Ogonek had published photos of German atrocities much earlier, but had been dismissed in the West as Soviet propaganda.

"The Same Old Dagger Trick" by Hugh McM. Hutton in Philadelphia Inquirer, May 31, 1945

Hitler came to power capitalizing on the "stabbed in the back" myth created to explain Germany's defeat in World War I. Militarists, nationalists, monarchists, and populists blamed Jews, communists, liberals, and homosexuals for having conspired with the enemy, wittingly or unwittingly, to weaken the spirit of the German people.

Hugh Hutton was not alone in anticipating a repeat of such excuses from the German high command. The trials of German war criminals were meant to demonstrate to the German people the culpability of their political, military, and law enforcement leaders down to the soldiers and petty officers below them.

"I'm No War Criminal" by Fred Ellis in Daily Worker, New York, May 13, 1945

Fred Ellis, in the communist Daily Worker, lent no credence to German militarist protests that they had nothing to do with their fascist politicians. His was a view shared by most citizens of Allied nations.

"When a Feller Needs a Friend" by Burt Thomas in Detroit News, ca. May 28, 1945

The caption to Burt Thomas's cartoon riffs on a well-known cartoon series by Clare Briggs. Here the Big Three have their separate ideas on how to raise the Post-war World.

Uncle Sam represents the U.S. in Thomas's cartoon, and John Bull represents Great Britain, whereas the U.S.S.R. is personified by its actual head of state, Joseph Stalin. The U.S.A. had a brand new president, Franklin Roosevelt having died a month earlier; and Britain's wartime coalition government was heading for overdue elections.

"The Bear's Revenge" by Harold “Tom” Carlisle in Des Moines Register, ca. May 19, 1945 

One could still find positive cartoons of Stalin in the American press such as this one by Harold Carlisle, acknowledging that the war could not have been won without the Soviet Union's participation, and the heavy cost its citizens paid repelling the German invasion of their country. 

If Carlisle's style looks suspiciously like that of John "Ding" Darling, it is likely because Carlisle worked under Darling as inker, and was here filling in while Darling took a day off.

"The Liberator" by Joseph Parrish in Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1945

Taking a decidedly dimmer view of our sometime ally in the war, Joseph Parrish notes that on the Soviet Union's way to Berlin, Stalin had installed puppet governments in the Baltic states. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia would be absorbed into the U.S.S.R., while Poland would retain its independence, if only in name.

My source for this Parrish cartoon was in grayscale, but it appears to me that the Chicago Tribune took to printing its front page editorial cartoon in full color sometime in 1943, until dropping the front page cartoon in 1970. I've re-colored the flags held by the Baltic nations, but I didn't want to venture guesses on the clothing and shadows.

"Hard on a Nervous Old Girl" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, May 21, 1945

The Entente Powers had promised Austria-Hungary's Adriatic coast to Italy as inducement to get Italy to join their side in World War I. The Treaty of Versailles awarded the city of Trieste to Italy, which was less than the Italian government wanted.

Since Italy was on the losing side of World War II, the question of whether Italy should have to give up any territory in Europe arose. The late President Woodrow Wilson's position that borders should reflect the populations within them (rather than what regent had inherited what property) had gained followers since World War I, but Trieste and environs were populated by both Italians and Slavs. Drawing ethnically considered borders there would have required exacting precision.

(Europeans were much more careless about drawing borders in Africa and the Mideast. That's another story entirely.)

"The Phoenix" by Roy Justus in Minneapolis Star-Journal, May 17, 1945

I would like to have included a cartoon about Norway's arrest on May 10 and subsequent trial of its Minister President, Nazi collaborationist Vidkun Quisling. After all, his name entered the English language as a spineless traitor. 

This Syttende mai cartoon by Roy Justus, whose Minnesota readers might have appreciated the date, will have to do — although surely there must be an appropriate allusion to Norse rather than Greek mythology.

"It's Time We Got Started on a New Model" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Daily Star, May 24, 1945

Turning back to those British elections: it was generally expected that Winston Churchill would not remain Prime Minister, and would have to turn the government over to Labour leader Clement Atlee.

"It's Going to Be Hard to Explain" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, May 27, 1945

Even if Americans didn't understand why Britons would be so ungrateful.

Or how cricket is played.

"Same Old Monkey Wrench" by Harold Talburt, May 21, 1945

Turning to domestic politics here in the United States, Republicans in Congress wanted to return to the Smoot-Hawley brand of tariff policies that had precipitated the Great Depression. Protectionist tariffs were central to Republican administrations from the end of the Civil War and onward, popular with Wall Street, but controversial in the Midwest, West, and South.

Woodrow Wilson, facilitated by the 16th Amendment making federal income taxation constitutional, drastically reduced tariffs, only for Republicans to raise them again in the 1920's. FDR policies then focused on a mix of income taxes on the upper class and deficit spending, first to lift the nation out of the Great Depression, and later to finance the war effort.

"The Shape of Things" by Cal Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 31, 1945

Lastly, to get hyper-domestic about things, Cal Alley wondered what the future would hold for Rosie and her fellow riveters.

Hold My Hand And I'll Take You There

Welcome aboard today's Graphical History Tour, offering a self-serving selection of my own cartoons from Mays in years ending in -five.

Since Grifter-in-Chief Donald Frequent Flyer Trump has just returned from the Arabian peninsula with his very own private pleasure dome in the sky, our first stop is deep in the heart of Texas, twenty years ago:

for Q Syndicate, May, 2005

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah visited President George W. Bush at his Crawford Ranch (in April, actually), and Americans were taken aback seeing our president holding the crown prince's hand as they walked to Casa de Dubya.

This was less than four years after 9/11, and it was well known that several of the terrorists who took over the planes were Saudi nationals. But the Bush administration had committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and needed acquiescence of the other powers in the region.

It Abdullah, who reigned as the Saudi King from August, 2005 until his death in January of 2015, is an uncle of the present Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., May 2, 1985

Skipping back another twenty years: West Wing staffers regard meetings with foreign heads of state as an opportunity to burnish a president's stature as a world leader. But even carefully planned events can misfire.

President Ronald Reagan had come under criticism after a meeting of the G-7 in West Germany. To mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Chancellor Helmut Kohl persuaded Reagan aides to schedule a side trip to a cemetery in Bitburg where some 2,000 German soldiers were buried. Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff made a preliminary visit to the cemetery in February, where he failed to notice 49 grave markers for members of the Waffen-SS.

Politicians and Jewish leaders in Europe and the U.S. urged Reagan to cancel the Bitburg trip; instead the White House added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Reagan's itinerary. A spokesman for children of Holocaust survivors, Menachem Rosensaft, spoke for those not mollified: “By entering Bitburg, [Reagan and Kohl] desecrate the memory of all those who were murdered by the SS, and of all those whom they pretended to commemorate here at Belsen.”

By the way, the "584" marker by my signature was my mistake. May is kind of late to still be writing the previous year on cartoons, checks, and other documents — especially since I didn't have old age as an excuse forty years ago.

Let's come forward to 1995 and some domestic issues:

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, May 4, 1995

Politicians have been telling us for more than thirty years that Medicare and Social Security are heading to hell in a handbasket. The Republican plan has been to get rid of them entirely without getting rid of them at all — basically by making the benefits from them smaller and smaller and more difficult to get.

At the same time, they stoke seniors' resentment of paying taxes for schools well after their own children have walked away with diplomas funded by senior citizens of earlier generations.

for bergetoons.blogspot.com, the internet, May, 2015

Jumping ahead to May of 2015, we return to the Lone Star State, where conspiracy fabulists were all hot and bothered about a U.S. Army training exercise called "Jade Helm" — which apparently enlisted Walmart basements in a secret government plot to overthrow the government of Texas. Accordingly, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor and report the nefarious activities of them darn Yankees.

At the same time, the Texas legislature passed a law preventing localities from regulating fracking, but what is really at issue here is this: Governor Abbott has had ten fracking years to get to the bottom of this "Jade Helm" conspiracy, most of them with the full backing and support of Republicans and Qanoncompoops in charge of the federal government.

And somehow he has failed to reveal anything about the Jade Helm Conspiracy.

Which can only mean one thing: Texas Governor Greg Abbott is himself part of the Jade Helm Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Texas!

More on this story as it continues failing to develop.

Churchill: A Life in Cartoons

This week's Graphical History Tour is yet another book report: just in time for the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth, cartoon historian Tim Benson offers over 300 editorial cartoons from the British wartime leader's career in Churchill: A Life in Cartoons.

Back in October, I was curious about an Arthur G. Racey cartoon from 1924 that held up Churchill's propensity for wearing hats as something out of the ordinary, even though just about everybody wore hats in those days. The mystery is explained in Benson's introduction to the book: at the dawn of Churchill's career, cartoonists thought that unlike his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, he lacked "the features which lent themselves to easily recognisable conventional treatment" (— cartoonist Francis Carruthers Gould, August, 1904). 

Benson writes that heeding the advice of Gould and other cartoonists,

"Churchill started wearing a variety of hats, all of which were distinctive in that they were too small for his head. Churchill once claimed that this was a deliberate strategy, beginning in 1910 when he caused a stir by donning a felt cap several sizes too small in front of photographers."

"Our Choice of Political Leaders" by Victor Weisz in News Chronicle, London, Nov. 23, 1945

He later adopted the cigar (never smoked down more than an inch) and the V symbol for the same reasons, although by then cartoonists had sufficiently honed their caricatures of the man that they really didn't need the extra clues. But, as Donald Trump is always drawn with an extra-long red tie, the cigar was de rigueur in any Churchill cartoon.

When I ordered this book, I expected it to be full of David Low cartoons (like the one on the cover), but Benson has deliberately sought out cartoons which, according to the back page, "have not seen the light of day since they were first published." Low is not overlooked entirely, but you'll find many more cartoons by George Whitelaw, Victor "Vicky" Weisz, Clive Uptton, and Leslie Illingworth.

There are also plenty of cartoons from the United States, Germany, Italy, Australia, and the U.S.S.R.; even a few from Brazil, India, South Africa, Netherlands, and Mexico. What struck me, having just read and reviewed a book about Canadian editorial cartoonists, is that there is only one cartoon in this book from Canada. (The book has no index; if anyone finds a second Canadian cartoon in there, please let me know.)

"Das Alte Lied" ("The Old Song") by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Sept. 12, 1943

The cartoons published in nations that were Britain's enemies, such as this one by Arthur Johnson (sadly, not in color in Benson's book) in which it's the U.S. flag that Churchill is obliged to carry, serve as a welcome counterpoint to the patriotic wartime cartoons from the homeland. Benson notes as an aside that this is one of the few German cartoons that alluded to Franklin Roosevelt's polio — an absolute no-no in U.S. and allied cartoons, photographs, and reportage. 

If I have any complaint about the book, it is that there are a few cartoons that, when printed two per page, include print that is too small for these old eyes to read. Typically, that involves labels identifying politicians who are long forgotten or simply unknown this side of the pond. Since the text accompanying every cartoon does a more than adequate job of explaining their context and external references, my not being able to identify the Labour councilman from Westgloughingham is a very small point.

Churchill: A Life in Cartoons helps greatly in the understanding of the two World Wars from a British point of view (especially as distinct from the U.S. perspective). With a half century of cartoons dating from 1904 to 1954, including a number drawn by cartoonists who have graced our Graphical History Tour over the years, Benson's is a remarkable and praiseworthy contribution to the celebration of Churchill's sesquicentennial.

Now, I'm not one to tell you to run right out and buy this book. But Christmas is right around the corner and you might have someone in your life who is interested in cartooning, or history, or England; and perhaps that is something they would tell you.

It's Always Something

Every once in a while when I'm cyberleafing through old newspapers in search of a topic for these Saturday posts, I run across a cartoon that makes me stop and wonder what could possibly have been in the cartoonist's mind.

"Jimmy Earl Carter's Camp David Quiz Show" by Pat Oliphant in Denver (D.C.) Star, April 1, 1978 

Well, this is not a post about that. (It's April Fools' Day. What did you expect?)

This is, instead, a book report on the latest addition to my library.

I found this 2020 book in the U.S. History section of my local Barnes & Noble. Liberally illustrated with Bill Mauldin's original artwork, pencil edits and all, from the Pritzger Military Museum and Library, the first half of the book consists of separate essays about Mauldin's life and work.

There is some overlap in subject matter in these essays, although each approaches the subject from a different angle.

Taken together, the essays take you from Mauldin's hard-scrabble youth in a classically dysfunctional family and his early attempts to sell his cartoons, through parlaying his fame and fortune drawing for Stars and Stripes into a storied career in St. Louis and Chicago. 

Many of the cartoons in this book are taken from the original drawings rather than the published product, so you get to see the edits and compositors' markings along the way. Some captions got tweaked here and there; at least one was changed completely from the original concept.

Awarded the Pulitzer at the age of 23 for his cartoons of infantry men in World War II (the youngest Pulitzer winner ever), Mauldin risked peaking early and fizzling out. Retooling his Willie and Joe grunts for a postwar gag panel lacked the qualities that made the characters so special. But he rediscovered his passion in politics, returning to cartooning after an unsuccessful run for Congress.

His cartoons argued forcibly for the rights of Japanese-Americans, Black Americans, and women (also gay rights, although that is missing from this book), earning him his second Pulitzer in 1958. The Chicago Sun-Times gave the cartoon he drew immediately after Kennedy's assassination the entire back page of the Extra edition, and many outlets sold that paper with the back page up instead of the front page.

His later years are more tragic; an essay by Charles Schulz's widow, Jean, describes how his fellow cartoonists stepped forward when, as featured speaker at the 2003 National Cartoonist Society convention, he was too drunk to take the podium. Hers is a sympathetic account; colleagues I've spoken to who were there recall the episode with some sadness.

(Many of us at last year's convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists were brought to tears watching the 2021 documentary about Bill Mauldin's life and work, If It's Big, Hit It. Alcoholism and Alzheimer's Disease in his last years should have been awful enough, but having a jeep fall on his drawing hand and his later suffering third degree burns from his habit of relaxing in a hot bath left him withdrawn and uncommunicative. The film doesn't end with that, so neither will I.)

One chapter that stands out from the typical book of any given cartoonist's work is Christina Knopf's "Bill Mauldin's Legacy in Military Cartooning," which profiles soldier/sailor cartoonists from the Vietnam War to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some of the cartoonists in this chapter were inspired by Mauldin; one admitted never having heard of him. The works illustrating the chapter include one direct reference to one of Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons.

Mauldin's classic cartoon shows a cavalry sergeant about to shoot his own jeep to put it out of its misery because it has a flat tire. The tribute cartoon by Steve Opet depicts a soldier about to do the same to a computer because it's showing an "access denied" screen.

by Mill Bauldin in St. Louis Sun-Times, Sept., 2002

The same cartoon inspired one of mine occasioned by the financial controversies that terminated Palotta Works "AIDS Ride" fund raising bicycle marathon. I kind of screwed up, however, by drawing Mr. Palotta on the left side of the cartoon and his bike on the right — and the western garb took the whole idea back to the practice Mauldin was riffing on of shooting a wounded horse.

The other two times that I've referenced Mauldin's cartoons, I made more of an effort to mimic the source material.

by Dan Liliblum in Chicago Highways Stripes, November, 2016

So when the 2016 election inexplicably went to Donald Berzelius Trump, my cartoon based on the one Mauldin drew after JFK's assassination was in grayscale except for the barf bag and my signature, two items that didn't belong in the original. My medium was india ink rather than charcoal and grease pencil, but I deliberately tried to draw every line just the way Mauldin had.

The only other major difference was that his cartoon was portrait oriented whereas mine had to be landscape oriented.

by Ludmilla Nib in Arizona Post-Dispatch, March, 2021 

I decided to go ahead and add color to this 2021 cartoon. The Mauldin cartoon I based this one on is not in Drawing Fire; the original had the crow perched atop the flagpole and the eagle demanding his "seat back."

Using landscape orientation afforded me plenty of room to add the elephant to the scene. It did, however, force me to draw the eagle smaller than I would have liked.

Well, it wouldn't be fair of me to tease you with my own cartoons and not include any of Mauldin's, so I want to leave you with this one from toward the end of his career. He drew it at the outset of Bush the Elder's Iraq War, and although the book doesn't say so one way or the other, I think this is how Mauldin imagined Willie and Joe would look 45 years after returning stateside.

"Inside It Says the Pentagon Doesn't Want a Lot of Fuss" by Bill Mauldin in Chicago Sun-Times, January, 1991

Meet the Dingbats

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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

"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.

"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.”

"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.

"Castro Thinks the Venezuelan Trouble Is a Fuse" by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, Feb. 5, 1903

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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

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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