THEORY OF DESIGN, TECHNIQUE AND MATERIALS The word cartoon will no doubt be associated mainly and last ingly with such drawings as have a political or social significance and which, unlike the ordinary run of picture comicalities, stimu late thought on public affairs.
Forain in his early work was another master of brevity, though he used a fine brush much as one would use a pen (see ART, FAR EASTERN METHODS). Some cartoonists play sketchily with the pen, while others prefer a rigid outline. Caran d'Ache drew pen and ink outline cartoons that strongly resembled the lines made by an etching needle on copper plate. On the other hand Heinrich Kley of Jugend tossed his pen lines like a juggler, making gestures as if about to miss, but always impressing one with his facility in creating amazing fantasies of nudes and animals. Charles Dana Gibson uses the pen as if cutting his way through his composition, the lines falling casually all about ; many go part of the way only, leaving the rest to the imagination of the observer.
Two political cartoonists, Tenniel of Punch and Nast of Harper's Weekly, produced much of their work on wood-blocks. When it was later discovered, however, that a cartoon drawn on paper could be photographed on the wood, paper was used almost exclusively. Wood-cut cartoons were line drawings executed with a pen or sharp pencil, the latter quite similar to a pen point. Both Nast and Tenniel, who were contemporary, put a good deal of shading on their drawings. Nast used the cross-hatch abundantly, a method of shading produced by drawing a lot of more or less parallel lines and then going over them with other lines at right angles. Tenniel cross-hatched sparingly and shaded faces less than Nast. Tenniel had more knowledge of accurate draughtsman ship, whereas Nast had a clumsy way of drawing all his own. Much of his work was comedy, but he had a biting satire and naturally the Democratic press sometimes referred to his work as "those nasty cartoons." What cartoonists draw with or what they draw on is of course not so important as what is drawn and how well it is done. A real artist can produce very good results with an old piece of charcoal on a barn door, but to have his work widely circulated, and that after all is what a cartoonist desires, he has been led to many experiments in reproduction. Daumier was doing his political car toons and caricaturing life all about him, on stone; Cruikshank, at the same time, was producing his pictorial satires on copper and steel plates, ploughing through the lines of his drawing with an etching needle, making him both designer and engraver. William Blake at an earlier date did most of his work in the same way. Both processes have long since fallen into disuse except for ex clusive reproduction. A remarkable facility was acquired by these artists on wood, steel and stone, in spite of the fact that mistakes made on these surfaces were hard to correct. However, the wood could be dug out and another piece glued in, the metal could be burnished and the stone could be scratched, but ob viously with tedious effort and loss of time.
Most cartoons seen in the publications of the loth century are drawn with a black crayon pencil or pen. Some cartoonists use both instruments on the same drawing. A brush is sometimes used for ready distribution of blacks. When the crayon pencil is em ployed the paper used has a surface similar to the lithograph stone, to all appearances quite smooth, but with a slightly rough surface (in the technical term, a "tooth" to it). Both pen drawings and those drawn with a crayon lend themselves to that most widely used process of engraving called zinc-etching (q.v.). This is also called the direct process as distinguished from the half-tone process, which is the popular way of reproducing drawings having soft gradations of light and shade, executed with a brush and water colour or rubbed in with the thumb or cloth. Zinc-etching is the universal process for making plates ready for printing car toons done with a black crayon or pen and ink (see PRINTING).
Dore was one of the most dramatic draughtsmen of any period of art. Had he succeeded Daumier as a cartoonist instead of be coming the illustrator of literary classics there can be no doubt he would have been an extraordinary propagandist, a great portrayer of affairs, for in the realm of both tragedy and comedy and in composing pictures that get "over the footlights," his work was always "cartoony." The public will not admit that an actor can be both a tragedian and a comedian, but they expect this duality in a cartoonist. Keppler, Tenniel, Nast, Daumier, Dore, Steinlen, Felicien Rops, John Leech and many other draughtsmen of the past were skilful in depicting both humorous and serious ideas. The ideas of these early notables in black and white drawing, with few exceptions, also reveal minds with cultural backgrounds. Most of the political cartoonists of the r9th century, especially Tenniel, Leech, Nast and C. G. Bush of the New York World, often illustrated ideas that were suggested by their reading of Shakespeare, Greek mythology, Aesop's Fables and other classics, which were made analogous to situations in the English parliament, the U.S. Con gress, or other seats of legislation.
Later the ideas, especially in America, became less "high brow." Ideas that were supposed not to be "above the heads of the people" were thought by editors to be more popular. As if the common man had to know all about Macbeth before the cartoonist could dress up a politician in a Macbeth costume and put a Macbeth quotation underneath his picture! Once the cartoonist has decided on his idea, then comes the composition of the car toon. Good composing also is something one must feel, as there are no set rules. But just as in literature and all of the arts, to compose well is to feel a balanced harmony or completeness, which means that the cartoonist has relegated to second place the less essential features of the scene and stressed the most impor tant, that he is alive to the value of contrasts and above all knows when it is time to leave off, having said enough. How much caricature or exaggeration to put into one's cartoon is also a matter of individual preference. What might be called the ex cessive grotesque appeals to some cartoonists. Others incline more toward a slightly emphasized naturalism, for example Braakensiek of De Arnsterdammer.
If a public man is fat and his nose is long, good caricature in the opinion of some caricaturists is to magnify these character istics very much—to pile Pelion on Ossa. To others the natural is almost funny enough and needs but a subtle emphasis.
In Australia, where Phil May started his career and that droll caricaturist Hopkins, "Hop," was a pioneer, the production of cartoons has been mostly in black-and-white. However, the ten dency of these later years on the weekly humorous magazines is the use of one or two colours over pen and ink or crayon cartoons —the result of which is posterized attractiveness. Steinlen was one of the first draftsmen to use red as an accompaniment to black crayon drawings. Wilke, Heine, Thony and others of Simplicissimus use flat colours, as do other cartoonists of Europe, especially in Russia. In Mexico also much of the cartooning is simply coloured.
The coloured cartoons of Keppler, like Gillam's and others on the staff of Puck, were drawn on and printed directly from the stone. The first printing, in black ink, was called the key-plate. Then followed the printing on this key-plate impression from other stones to register reds, blues and other colours in facsimile to the cartoonist's water-colour design. The decline of the coloured political cartoons and weekly cartoon magazines in general was due, no doubt, to the fact that daily newspapers had begun to employ cartoonists (this was about 189o) and to print coloured comic supplements. These supplements were "thrown in" for the price of the newspaper. This innovation in newspaper publishing was ,made possible by the invention of the fast multi-coloured printing press. In the beginning, these supplements sometimes printed coloured political cartoons in imitations of those in Puck and Judge.
As a result of all this the principal humorous weeklies of that day were not so much in public demand. But just as interest in the wood-cut and the lithograph is being revived, so the political cartoon in colours may have another day. The cartoon magazine Life was born a decade later than Puck and Judge. It opened a somewhat different field for artists. This magazine never had a staff in the sense that Punch and Puck were produced by a staff of artists regularly employed. John Ames Mitchell, the founder and first editor, was an artist himself, and in the first numbers of the magazine can be seen his pen and ink drawings. However, he is better known as an author. Life was not as political as its older contemporaries and was printed for many years without the use of colour. It indulged mostly in ridicule of social foibles and surveyed the American scene from the editor's amiable viewpoint, but not without occasional thrusts at the evils of commercialism, the law, the medical profession and other institutions.
While the Latin Quarter artists of Paris issued protesting maga zines in the beginning of the present 2oth century, it is generally conceded that one of the most artistic and at the same time shocking magazines was published in America. The magazine was called The Masses, the first number appearing in 1910 and the last in 1918. Its existence was due largely to one fact : an artist is an individualist ; he wants to express himself in his own way. Many artists who believed that the sordid and the vulgar, the cruelties and hypocrisies that manifest themselves in this age of the industrial machine, should be ridiculed and caricatured without stint, joined the staff of The Masses. Then, too, the conventional magazine with its trite and formal make-up and its many taboos, was sooner or later doomed to become a target for the iconoclast artists. The pretty girl cover w as the vogue when The Masses was started. One of its earliest cover designs was a picture of two poor, homely girls. One of them is saying: "Gee, Mag, think of us being on a magazine cover." On the art staff of The Masses were John Sloan, George Bellows, Charles A. Winter, Cornelia Barns, Maurice Becker, Glenn O. Coleman, H. J. Glintenkamp, K. R. Chamberlain, Boardman Robinson and Art Young.
With a natural aptitude for pictorial expression, with patience and hard work, the cartoonist creates ideas, composes pictures and puts exaggeration or mere emphasis where he thinks they belong. But a cartoonist cannot produce convincing cartoons that will live, more than an author can produce good books, unless he feels the truth of his work. (See also CARICATURE; COMIC STRIP; PEN DRAWING; PENCIL DRAWING; ILLUSTRATION.) (AR. Y.)