Cartoon

• 1. Introduction

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  The cartoon began its life not in a newspaper or a children's Saturday morning lineup, but in Renaissance Italy, as a large, careful drawing on heavy paper, made to help a painter transfer a composition onto a wet plaster wall. The word itself comes from the Italian cartone and the Dutch karton, both meaning strong, heavy paper or pasteboard. For centuries, that was what a cartoon was: a practical tool, a preliminary sketch, not a finished work of art.

  Then, in 1843, a British humor magazine called Punch turned the word on its head. The magazine applied "cartoon" to satirical drawings in its pages, and the first of those images parodied the very preparatory drawings the word had always described. The cartoons mocked the grand historical frescoes being planned for the then-new Palace of Westminster. A word born in the studio became a weapon in the press.

  What follows is the story of how that transformation unfolded across centuries and continents: from the walls of Renaissance churches, to the offices of London satirists, to the courtrooms where politicians tried to silence the cartoonists who humiliated them.

• 2. A Tool of the Workshop

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  Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Francisco Goya all made cartoons in the original sense, and the works that survive from these painters are now highly prized on their own terms. The Raphael Cartoons, held in London, are among the most studied examples of this form. These were not idle sketches but precision instruments, made to translate a design across surfaces and materials.

  Frescoes presented a particular challenge. A large painted ceiling or wall was completed section by section, each patch on damp plaster needing to be finished within a single day, what was called a giornata. Cartoons helped painters maintain visual continuity across those sessions, ensuring that figures and architectural elements lined up correctly from one damp patch to the next.

  For stained glass and tapestry, the process was different again. The painter handed the cartoon over to skilled craftsmen who built the final work. Tapestry cartoons, usually colored, were placed behind the loom so the weaver could follow the design. Because tapestries are worked from behind, a mirror was sometimes placed at the back of the loom so the weaver could see how the front of the work was taking shape, and the cartoon was positioned behind the weaver rather than in front.

  To transfer a design from cartoon to wall, artists often used a technique called pouncing. Pinpricks were made along the outlines of the drawing, and a bag of soot was patted over the cartoon held against the plaster surface, leaving a trail of black dots to guide the painter's brush. Those faint soot marks were the invisible scaffolding beneath some of Europe's most celebrated frescoes.

• 3. Punch and the Press

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  John Leech was the cartoonist whose sketches gave the word its modern twist. In 1843, Punch magazine applied the term "cartoon" to his satirical drawings, borrowing the language of high art to describe work that punctured pretension. The target of that first cartoon was the preparatory drawings for the Palace of Westminster, which made the joke doubly pointed: a cartoon mocking cartoons.

  Sir John Tenniel joined Punch in 1850. He is remembered today as the illustrator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but over more than fifty years at the magazine he contributed over two thousand cartoons, making him one of the most prolific political illustrators Britain had produced.

  The single-panel gag cartoon, which became a staple of general-interest magazines, settled into a recognizable format: one drawing, a typeset caption below it, or sometimes a speech balloon within the image. Many consider New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno the father of this modern form, and Arno himself agreed with that assessment. The roster of magazine gag cartoonists who followed includes Charles Addams, Charles Barsotti, and Chon Day.

  Newspaper syndicates extended the reach of these drawings far beyond any single publication. Cartoonists including Mel Calman, Bill Holman, Gary Larson, George Lichty, and Fred Neher all had their work distributed to newspapers across the country. Richard Thompson illustrated feature articles in The Washington Post before building his own Cul de Sac comic strip. The path from staff illustrator to syndicated cartoonist became a well-worn one.

• 4. The Political Edge

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  William Hogarth's pictorial satire in 18th century England is regarded as the precursor to what political cartooning became. George Townshend pushed the form further, producing some of the first overtly political cartoons and caricatures in the 1750s. The medium found its great exponents in James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, both from London, who shaped its character in the latter part of that century.

  Gillray directed much of his work at George III, depicting the king as a pretentious buffoon, while also training his pen on Napoleon and the ambitions of revolutionary France. He has been called the father of the political cartoon. George Cruikshank succeeded Gillray as the leading cartoonist in Britain from 1815 until the 1840s, and built a career on social caricatures of English life for popular publications.

  In France under the July Monarchy, Honore Daumier took up political and social caricature, most famously targeting the rotund King Louis Philippe. In New York City, Thomas Nast demonstrated how techniques borrowed from German draftsmanship could reshape American cartooning. His 160 cartoons relentlessly exposed the corruption of the Tweed machine in New York City, and contributed directly to its collapse. When William Tweed fled, Spanish police identified him from Nast's drawings and arrested him.

  The legal boundaries of the form were tested as it grew. Lawsuits against cartoonists were rare, but in 1921 a significant case came before a British court. J. H. Thomas, the leader of the National Union of Railwaymen, brought libel proceedings against the magazine of the British Communist Party over cartoons depicting the events of "Black Friday," when he was alleged to have betrayed the locked-out Miners' Federation. Thomas won the case. The verdict illustrated how seriously political figures took the power of a drawn image to shape public opinion.

• 5. Comics, Strips, and Books

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  The Swiss comic-strip book Mr. Vieux Bois appeared in 1837, making it one of the earliest notable examples of sequential cartoon storytelling in print. The British strip Ally Sloper first appeared in 1867, and the American strip Yellow Kid followed in 1895, marking the form's arrival in the American press.

  In the United States during the 1930s, books collecting cartoons took the shape of magazine-format publications with original material, or reprints of newspaper comic strips, and these became known as American comic books. In Britain during the same decade, adventure comic magazines grew popular. The publisher DC Thomson sent observers around the country to speak directly with boys and understand what stories appealed to them. The answer was the glamorous heroism of British soldiers fighting wars that were exciting and just.

  DC Thomson issued the first Dandy Comic in December 1937. The publication had a design that broke from the broadsheet-sized, muted children's comics that had come before it. Thomson followed that success with The Beano in 1938.

  Comic strips acquired different names depending on where they were read. In the United Kingdom, they were called cartoon strips. In the United States, they were more commonly called comics or funnies. The people who made them, however, carried the same title in both countries: cartoonist. Among the notable creators of humorous strips are Scott Adams, Charles Schulz, E. C. Segar, Mort Walker, and Bill Watterson. The form also accommodated adventure and drama, not only humor, and the creators of comic books and graphic novels are likewise grouped under that same professional label.

• 6. From Page to Screen

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  Early animated films shared enough visual language with newspaper comic strips that the word cartoon migrated to cover both. Animation technically designates any style of illustrated images shown in rapid succession to create the impression of movement. In common usage, cartoon has come to mean specifically the films and television programs aimed at children, frequently featuring anthropomorphized animals, superheroes, or child protagonists.

  The term settled differently in different contexts. The animated cartoon and the gag cartoon now share a word that originated in an Italian craftsman's studio. The cartoonist who draws for a magazine and the animator who produces a children's television series both trace their professional lineage back to that Renaissance term for heavy paper.

  Scientific and mathematical circles have also found a use for cartooning. The cartoon xkcd is one recognized example of the form applied to science, mathematics, and technology. The cartoon Wonderlab examined daily life in a chemistry lab. Sidney Harris is one cartoonist noted in the United States for work in these fields. Gary Larson's cartoons are also widely recognized for their scientific orientation, a fact that places him in a line of cartoonists who have used the form to illuminate, rather than purely to entertain.