Winter is here, and the birds are flying south. This steel engraving by George Cruikshank is taken from The George Cruikshank Table-Book, Bell and Daldy, London, 1869. Please click to enlarge. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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Shorten the Classics is now available from Black Scat Books! This book reduces 52 great works of literature to one cartoon page apiece: not by summarizing them, but by cutting them off early. See what happens when Helen rejects Paris, the acorn misses Chicken Little, Adam and Eve eat the serpent, Leopold Bloom sleeps in, […]

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The 23rd issue of Black Scat Review is now available! It’s devoted to “wordplay,” and includes several pages of Doug Skinner: my translations of two poems by Raymond Queneau (depicted on the cover) and four pages of my upcoming comic book Shorten the Classics. Also on board are the stellar crew of Mark Axelrod, Tom Barrett, […]

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Rube Goldberg’s cartoon panel “Foolish Questions” followed a simple formula: an idiot asked an obvious question, and received a sarcastic answer. And yes, Al Jaffee did appropriate the idea for his later feature “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” Sometime around 1912, the Wallie Dorr Company published a card game derived from it. The game was […]

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I recently picked up a copy of a book called End Papers, by a certain A. Edward Newton, who apparently accumulated a famous book collection in the ’20s. It’s a selection of literary essays and book reviews, published by Little, Brown, and Co. in 1933. I was surprised to find in it a couple of […]

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The Army Navy Hit Kit gave soldiers and sailors a folio of popular songs, in piano arrangements. It began in 1943, and was published monthly. It was never sold, and, for some reason, had no standard size. I’ve seen copies that indicate a month and year; these are identified only by letters (P, S, and X). The […]

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Yoyo, or, to give it its full title, Tales n’ Tails for the One n’ Every Yoyo, was published in January, 1972, in NYC. It advertised subscriptions, but this seems to have been the only issue, cheerily numbered 00. It was published and edited by the painter and cartoonist Gerard Millan Perichon, who usually drew […]

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Here’s another postscript to my recent book, 100 Cartoons from Le Chat Noir. I was surprised to find that some of the cartoons in this quintessentially Bohemian paper were reprinted by the old firm of Pellerin, in Épinal, as “Images d’Épinal” intended for children. Here are a couple of them. The Chat Noir cartoons were […]

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As a postscript to my book 100 Cartoons from Le Chat Noir, here are some illustrations by Théophile Steinlen, one of the paper’s more prolific artists. That is, by the way, his art on the cover. A brief bio from the book: Steinlen, Théophile Alexandre (1859-1923): Born in Lausanne, Switzerland. Contributed to Le Rire, Gil Blas, Les […]

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From about 1887 to 1899, Francis Gilbert Attwood contributed a monthly page to the magazine Life. (This is, of course, the old humor magazine, not the later one.) He seems to be forgotten now, probably because he died so young, at 44 (1856-1900). According to the brief introduction to Attwood’s Pictures, published by the Life […]

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