Yesterday was VE Day except in the United States, where it was “Victory Day For World War II,” according to our president, who celebrated by posting this image of marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, a hill just west of Berlin that was named for German composer Johann Sebastian Suribachi. Or maybe, just maybe, […]
Aislin starts off our D-Day commemoration in part because the Canadians tend to get bunched in with the British forces in other commentaries I’ve seen, but mostly because he marks the day by remembering strong, young men while most others are depicting old guys in wheelchairs, sometimes saluting. Saluting happens in cartoons on military holidays: […]
(Banner by Johnny Walbridge, who, as noted yesterday, went on to be a Disney writer and animator.) We’ll start our look back at 1924 with a strip I didn’t know existed, possibly because it was only around for about three years. Ring Lardner was a popular writer and this was something of an extension of […]
New Year’s cartoons are a mandatory piece each January 1, and Alfred Brewerton didn’t try for anything breakthrough with this 1924 greeting for readers of the Atlanta Journal. I suppose that might strike some people as lazy, but I prefer to see it as an example of restraint, while the amount of detail — achieved […]
As you are reading this, I am en route to the AAEC Convention in San Francisco, which I will report on in the coming days. While you wait, and while I fly, here is what you’d have read in a California paper had you picked one up a century ago today. 1923 was a pretty […]
Christopher Weyant captures the moment in a way that, as the fellows say, seems a sign of how bad things have become. There have been a lot of “but I hate her” comments coming from the left about Liz Cheney’s past record, and they’re as much a sign of our societal cancer as those equally […]
Happy New Year 1897 There is an old tradition in New Year’s cartoons of looking forward to a more prosperous future, and it goes back at least 125 years to this piece from the Brooklyn Eagle, unsigned but credited to the New York Press, a crosstown paper whose writers, according to Wikipedia, came up […]
(Some thoughts about newspapers, while I take Mother’s Day off to go visit the Aged P.) Here’s the protagonist of an 1867 novel, “Ned Nevins, the News Boy, or, Street Life in Boston,” in which the plucky lad worked to rise above his grim surroundings, as plucky lads would in popular literature for the […]
One of the keys to looking up contemporary coverage of historic moments is that you really have to look at the newspapers of the next day, though if you look at June 6, 1944, the time difference between France and even the East Coast of the United States meant that morning papers who were on […]
One of these women is turning 94 today and the other is my great-granddaughter and thus her great-great-grandaughter. So, in honor of the occasion, here are some cartoons my grandfather might have read in the newspaper when he wasn’t pacing the floor on September 1, 1924, which is what expectant fathers did in those days. […]