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Biased. Disrespectful. Offensive. All sterling job qualifications for any good editorial cartoonist. But “racist”? Whoa!
Thomas Nast was the granddaddy of the American political cartoon. And having lived in New Jersey, he’s been nominated for induction into the state’s 2012 Hall of Fame. But last month, legislators of both political parties fought to take his name off the ballot.
Caricature is oversimplification, a type of dehumanization for speedy communication. It’s also a tool of Nast’s trade which he vigorously practiced during the 1800s, most notably for Harper’s Weekly. For him, party Democrats were stubborn jackasses and murderous tigers. William “Boss” Tweed was a bloated bag of ill-gotten gains and his Tammany Hall cronies were predatory vultures. But some of Nast’s lesser-known works have been singled out as evidence that he was anti-Catholic and anti-Irish.
And while some of those images have been disseminated in the press, hardly any of Nast’s opponents have meaningfully dealt with their content in context.
Let’s look at one of the supposedly anti-Catholic Nast cartoons. “The American River Ganges” depicts an army of bishops crawling onto our shores. Their miters have transformed into crocodile mouths, as they prepare to devour young children.
As a Catholic … OK, ex-Catholic, I don’t see any problem here. “Ganges” isn’t anti-Catholic, it’s anti-Roman Catholic Church. Briefly stated, Nast was opposing state aid for parochial schools, and calling for church-state separation. And I consider his attack as justified as, for instance, contemporary editorial cartoons that condemn the Church’s countless pedophile priest coverups.
The other cartoons in question — and there are several — portray the Irish as a bunch of drunken, violent apes. As an Irishman, if I saw such stereotypes today, isolated from any explanatory indicators, I’d be highly insulted. But typically, Nast was criticizing specific groups of Irishmen, and for a variety of specific reasons. For one thing, he felt that their majority support of Tweed’s corrupt political machine in New York was foolish at best and downright stupid at worst.
As another example, in “The Chinese Question” he’s drawn a noose and a burning building behind an ugly Irishman leading a gang of ruffians. This was to reference the riots in which predominantly Irish American mobs protested President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by lynching blacks and setting fire to a Colored Orphan Asylum. That’s not racism on Nast’s part, that’s rage.
I’ve expressed my admiration for Nast in the past. And I really don’t know the depth of his alleged anti-Irish prejudice. His flattering depiction of an Irishman at his “come one come all, free and equal” table [see image below] is certainly cause for reflection. But I do know about his admiring and highly compelling portrayals of Chinese immigrants and other minorities. And his depictions of blacks, whether courageous Buffalo Soldiers or emancipated slaves, rank among the most exemplary graphic representations of a woefully underacknowledged part of our country’s history.
I also know that when many Southern blacks voted for corrupt administrations during post-Civil War Reconstruction, the same way the Irish had been voting for Tammany gangsters, Nast didn’t hesitate to savagely ridicule both those groups [see top image]. Totally unacceptable by today’s standards, most certainly, but typical of the visual parlance one and a half centuries ago.
And speaking of voting, let’s return to New Jersey. When the Hall of Fame winners are announced this month, I seriously doubt Nast will be mentioned, much less inducted. And it’s not just that his chances were undermined by negative publicity. It’s also that he was competing with names like Alexander Calder, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothy Parker, Joyce Carol Oates and even another cartoonist, Charles Addams. Whoa!
Nevertheless, as a fellow former resident of New Jersey and a believer in counterbalancing what I feel was unfair treatment, I decided to cast my vote this year for the disrespectful and distinguished Mr. Nast.
Note the Irish couple at the right end of the table. Click to enlarge.
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
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Illustration for Bloomberg View, 2011
The first thing you ought to know about Brendan Griffiths is this: Do not click on the exclamation mark.
The objectionable glyph follows the name of the 29-year-old’s firm, Zut Alors!, on its website, zutalorsinc.com. Griffiths joined the company of the founding partner, Frank DeRose, last May, after picking up his M.F.A. in graphic design from Yale. While still in New Haven, he helped develop the site into a statement of the practice’s principles, a statement that has proved to be “very polarizing,” according to Griffiths. “People either love it or hate it.”
That’s just the kind of response the partners were looking for. Since coming aboard ZA!, Griffiths had been turning out bracing, acerbic graphic work for clients such as Bloomberg Businessweek, as well as iPad apps for Condé Nast titles. “Whenever we hire Zut, we always get really wild ideas,” says Gary Fogelson, whose firm, Other Means, has commissioned illustration from the office for Bloomberg’s editorial page, Bloomberg View. Appropriating familiar images and pairing them with bitingly sarcastic text, Griffiths and Zut Alors! have articulated a distinct visual language; what it says, Fogelson says, is “fuck you.” It’s an attitude that gets attention, and if it gives the client some in-your-face cred, so much the better for them.
Zut Alors! website ,2011
Yale Graphic Design M.F.A. 2011 website, with Juan Astasio Soriano and Brian Watterson, 2011
Paperweight for senior thesis, 2011
The message comes through in infographics, bookmaking, and typography, but perhaps nowhere more so than on the firm’s website, full of blind alleys and blinking icons. This iconoclastic approach matches Griffith’s own. At school, he and a group of colleagues created the Book Trust, a theory-minded but tangible design catalog in which other artists could purchase “shares”; they peddled it — in full corporate drag, name tags and all — around the New York Art Book Fair.
The Book Trust Prospectus, published by Investment Future Strategy, Ltd., with Benjamin Critton, Harry Gassel, Zak Klauck, and Mylinh Nguyen, 2012
“Almost all of graphic design is very commercial, including a lot of work I make,” Griffiths says. Alternating satire with confrontation, he is trying to work his way out of the design-world straitjacket, even as he’s piecing together how to operate a professional partnership. Griffiths says, “We’re just figuring it out as we go along.”
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I bet many of you don’t know what the Michelin Man, also known as the Bibendum, is made of. Take a wild guess! French cartoonist Marius Rossillon, also known as O’Galop, created the prototype for a Munich brewery (he was holding a glass of beer and quoting Horace’s phrase “Nunc est bibendum” — now’s the time to drink). It was rejected. But the Michelin brothers saw the image and suggested replacing O’Galop’s man with a figure made — yes indeed — from tires. Voila! The Bibendum is now one of the world’s most recognized and collected trademarks in the world.
Concocting trade characters from the products or the things they represent derives from a long tradition — dating back to medieval trade markings and up through the golden age in the early 20th century (and beyond).
French designers were indeed quite fond of playful mnemonic manipulation, as the examples here for steel wool cleaners, pots and pans, teas and coffees from the 1920s and ’30s attest. The characters are quite surreal yet none so abstract that the message is lost. Made from the packages or from the products themselves, these characters are not as cuddly as Speedy Alka Seltzer or the Mt. Olive Pickle man, but they do have an artful presence and charm.
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England has a long tradition of dystopian prophecy in literature and cinema. The likes of H.G. Wells, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Ridley Scott all seem to revel in presenting doomsday scenarios. Films such as 1961′s “The Day the Earth Caught Fire,” and the 1965 BBC docudrama “The War Game,” depicting a Soviet nuclear strike on England, as well as books like Raymond Briggs’ “When the Wind Blows,” a deceivingly innocent tale of untold horror, are among the works that underscore the British fascination with and fixation on nuclear devastation.
Fascination? More like well-earned trepidation. After all, during World War II, London was blitzed nightly by German bombs and rockets, its citizenry enduring what most civilized beings could barely imagine. If Hitler had developed the atomic bomb, England would have suffered the same fate as Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
England was forced to develop a sophisticated civil-defense apparatus, which included publishing cautionary guides like this handbook “Advising The Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack.” With the same kind of low-key narrative that a “householder” might read on how to survive a bug or rodent infestation, this “training publication for the civil defense, the police and fire services” addresses protective measures, needed equipment, what to do after an attack, and how to “manage” life “under fall-out conditions.” The text is reservedly quaint, underplaying the tragic impact of nuclear war, and the illustrations lack the slightest hint of horror. Indeed, by Jove, it is actually kind of comforting.
Similar handbooks in the United States were shrill by comparison. While they suggested that survival was possible, the magnitude of a nuclear attack was never minimized.
This handbook was republished by the V&A in 2008—for what purpose, other than nostalgia, is unclear. I reproduce it here as a curio from a time when our biggest enemy was the Soviet Union. With all the natural and man-made potential catastrophes at our doorstep, one almost longs for those days.
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“When did music become so important?” That’s Don Draper from last week’s “Mad Men,” set in 1966. Later in the episode he turns off “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from the Beatles album “Revolver,” and walks out of the room.
art: Rick Griffin
There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is — do you, Mr. Draper? One year later, Rolling Stone magazine will make its debut, followed soon by “Rock and Other Four Letter Words.”
“Rock,” a 250-plus-page Bantam paperback, was published in January 1968 and subtitled “Music of the Electric Generation.” It was one of the first books of its kind, chronicling a cultural revolution that was still in the midst of its own creation. Crammed with black-and-white portraits of bands and musicians, it’s part oral history, part visual LSD trip. One of its fold-out spreads has an intricate, circuitlike diagram that connects over a hundred names, from the Butterfield Blues Band, the Beach Boys, and the Byrds to Busby Berkeley, Brubeck and Bach.
The editor-designer was a writer named J Marks. The photographer for most of the images was Linda Eastman, who went on to work for Rolling Stone and — oh, yes — marry Paul McCartney.
By the sheer force of its graphic presentation, ”Rock and Other Four Letter Words” conveys the mid-1960s music scene’s spirit, vitality and relevance.
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Memory is evanescent. I can’t recall where I made the purchase; perhaps it was during an elementary-school or Cub Scout trip. Nor do I remember my exact age; it was anywhere between 8 and 10. What I do remember vividly is the visceral experience: the feel and smell of the paper as I unfurled it. The sense that I was both witnessing and experiencing history, which I then held tangibly in my hands. In the morning of that day, my mother had given me some small change for the day’s trip, and I spent it on a reproduction of the Declaration of Independence. It was printed on a rough-hewn, yellow paper stock with stains on both sides, and it had a rigidity that made it hard to open (it was folded in quarters). The reproduction possessed a distinct smell, and the texture was coarse, as if it was once damp and left to dry. “Onion paper,” my mother explained when I got home. It sounded exotic. Sadly, I’ve forgotten the whereabouts of that formative piece of paper, but the power of the experience has remained.
As I remember it. Every defect was a hidden treasure.
Around that same time my father came home with a present for me. It was a ream of blank newsprint paper. He was a transit worker, and he explained that someone had left it behind on the subway. For me it became a treasured gift, as the paper looked exactly like the paper of the comic books I so fervently read. With the paper as my narrative canvases, I began producing my own comics by the score: Dr. Sol, The Crusaders, The Saturator, Gas-Man! et al.
Page from The Saturator, created when I was 11. At long last, I could produce comic books that looked like comic books.
Cut forward to 2001 when I first began to go through the Woody Guthrie Archives, located in Manhattan, to explore whether it was possible to make a book of his artwork. (It was.) Peering through his drawings and journals, I had the same experience I had as a child, although this time the documents had authentically aged: The years had added a yellow patina to many of these pieces, despite the fact that they were stored in a climate-controlled environment. This was the first time I was confronted with the question of how best to reproduce this work. Does one attempt to imagine it as it was when originally created, with pristine white backgrounds and colors that have not yet faded? Or reveal it as it exists today, less vivid but with the stains of time present? Since the former was impossible to know, I came to the conclusion that only the latter made sense.
I experienced this again a few years later with Louis Armstrong’s collages, which he “laminated” with Scotch tape. With these collages there was no question about heading back in time—the dried tape was as much a part of the collages as every photo was.
Woody Guthrie’s journals gain gravitas with the patina of passing years.
In Armstrong’s collages, yellowing tape adds to the experience.
Which brings me back to comics. One of the first collections I ever purchased, in the 1980s, was Bill Blackbeard’s oversize “Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics,” first published in 1977. Within the anthology, “Hogan’s Alley,” “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Buster Brown,” and myriad others were lovingly and photographically reproduced with great detail on a paper stock closely akin to newsprint.
Imagine my surprise when I began to explore hardcover anthologies of comic books from DC and Marvel, released in the same era. “DC Archives” and “Marvel Masterworks” could not have been more different from Blackbeard’s groundbreaking accomplishment. They were garishly colored on high-gloss white stock; I had the sensation that I would need sunglasses to read them. I soon learned that since the original comics were unavailable—as were photostats—and the original artwork had been lost, destroyed, or scattered, the reproduction involved hiring present-day artists to trace and recolor the comics. The final effect was not so much of a black-and-white MGM classic colorized by Turner but rather like Gus Van Sant’s frame-by-frame remake of “Psycho,” starring Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates.
A page from Bill Blackbeard’s seminal work on newspaper comic strips, beautifully photographed in the pre-scanning days.
A side-by-side comparison of the original Fantastic Four #4 comic and a Marvel Masterworks “recreation.” Not only are the tracings inaccurate, the coloring does not adhere to the original.
The first time I became aware that change was in the air was when DC released “Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 1. “Here, an off-white paper replicated the look and feel (although happily not the fragility) of newsprint, and the line art was reproduced from the original stats. Fortunately, DC has employed this technique for other releases, although Marvel has opted for the strategy of tracing and reproducing on bright paper.
Smaller publishers like Fantagraphics followed Blackbeard’s lead, and since the advent of digital scanning, many others have chosen similar tacks: Abrams, IDW, Dark Horse, Titan, and Yoe Books all beautifully reproduce from the source. Still, two schools of thought have emerged about how best to achieve an optimum reading experience, both utilizing matte paper. One approach keeps the yellowing borders intact, while the other involves removing the borders and enhancing the colors, as if the comics had originally been printed on white, higher quality stock.
The DC release Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 1, successfully replicates the look and feel of the original comics.
In the next month, two books of comics reprints I’ve edited will be released, showcasing both techniques. “Golden Age Western Comics,” published by powerHouse Books, reproduces the original pages whole cloth, although the blacks and colors have been enhanced to replicate how they would have appeared before fading. In addition, we made minor touch-ups. Up until this point, this generally would have been my preference, as I prefer the viewing experience to be as close to reading a 60-year-old comic as possible; these comics were never printed on white paper to begin with. However, Fantagraphics has removed the borders and all signs of aging on our Mort Meskin book of reprint stories, “Out of the Shadows.” Comparing the two releases, I’ve come to appreciate the advantages of both approaches. As a genre, Westerns are mired in nostalgia, having long since been replaced by other action tropes in modern-day entertainment. With that in mind, a book as object set in a distant time and place seems appropriate. For the Mort Meskin collection, we hoped that a contemporary audience would rediscover him; Fantagraphic’s fresh, newly minted approach goes a long way toward achieving that.
A page from Golden Age Western Comics, published by powerHouse.
A page from Out of the Shadows, released by Fantagraphics.
(Credit: Thomas Nast) 
