Charles Dana Gibson was the grandmaster of magazine illustration by the time the first wave of Pulitzer and Hearst’s cartoonists disrupted the media universe after 1895. And from the beginning, it was clear that newspaper artists, even those that migrated from the humor weeklies, were stretching both the form and subject matter of caricature beyond the genteel sensibilities of Puck and Life. The line was becoming more elastic, the expressions more animated and emotive, the action more extreme. Magazine humor was witty but remained politely seated in the middle-class parlor. Newspaper humor was raucous and usually situated out of doors, where just about anyone or anything could happen. For their part, magazine editors knew a cultural and economic threat when they saw one. Many magazine columnists and editors denounced Pulitzer and Hearst as vulgarians actively debased the culture with sensationalism. But the comic strip in particular was singled out for celebrating violence and appealing to juvenile sensibilities.

The humor weekly and urban daily occupied the same modern city space but saw that world through different class and aesthetic lenses. This contrast between that older world of magazine illustration and the emerging one of daily cartooning became clearer to me as I was reviewing a collection of Gibson’s work. Two images struck me as so similar in subject but different in tone from some of my favorite early comics that I couldn’t resist a side by side comparison. Gibson’s “The Family Below” just begs to be compared to one of George Herriman’s first serials, “The Family Upstairs.” Both depict the commonplace of city life, the noisy neighbor. Gibson was a master of minor facial expressions pregnant with repressed sentiment and the tiny visual details that tell a story. Wife and Hubby, distracted from their reading, are indignant but contained. She has a grimace etched down to her chin; he feigns actions by sitting up and redirecting his rage in a clenched fist. The comedy comes from the servant and even pets mirroring their masters’ shock. But in Herriman’s hands the same situation is all about the physicality. E Pluribus Dingbat explodes from his chair. The fist is not a focus of repressed anger but a potential weapon. And of course he springs into action. Gibson’s scene is set by the detail and sophistication of the genteel world disrupted by a ceiling thump: the decorated mantel and artwork, a couple dressing even for dinner at home, the fully set table, the orderliness even of a cat and dog poised at their side. While Gibson leaves the disturbance inferred, Herriman cracks the ceiling and shakes the lamp. And unlike the illustrator’s devotion to detailing the mateiral objects that define middle-class existence, Herriman defines the space in cartoon shorthand with only the key details of Dingbat’s less opulent apartment: sofa, shaking lamp, hanging pictures to demarcate a wall.

Gibson’s image of New York City life, “On the Ferry” highlights the tedium of urban life – waiting and a kind of weariness. The ferry gate signals the containment of crowds and the necessary order of shuttling thousands of people around a teeming city. But here it is expressed on tired faces awaiting the ferry to land. Even the boy has a blank face. And while Gibson invokes a sense of diversity in the different class, age, gender and social types he presses against the gate, the social range is remarkably narrow. More to the point, they all seem to be expressing the same emotion.cBut Gibson’s framing is what gives the illustration its power and meaning. The gate itself is the focal point. By using it to define the full length of the image and flattening his cast against it, Gibson effects that feeling of containment but of people who are not even that eager (or energetic) to break out.

In almost every way, Walt McDougall’s “Familiar Sights of a Great City” (The New York Journal, Jan. 9 1898) works in exactly the opposite way to create the opposite take on the essence of urban life. Rather than flattening his characters, he stages them explosively, in deep perspective. The symbol of law and regimentation, the cop on the beat, is the source of chaos not order. Far from weary, his city-dwellers are energized, frantic, at the sight of a cop who routinely rousts unauthorized street peddlers. In communicating the antic, comic energy of the urban street, McDougall’s imagery is as effective in its own way as Gibson’s is in communicating the weary aspects of city experience.

McDougall, by the way, is a criminally unheralded early master of the cartoon form as well as an arch observer of urbanization. We also looked at “Familiar Sights of a Great City” in greater depth several years ago. McDougall mentored many early cartoonists and was socially and politically well-connected, associations he reported in a name-dropping autobiography, This Is The Life! (1928). Fans of early strip will recognize him as the artist behind L. Frank Baum’s strip, Queer Visitors From The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904-05) and the strip version of Peck’s Bad Boy.

It is revealing to compare and contrast Gibson’s mastery of middle class sensibilities and circumstance in the magazine medium with the riotous sensibilities of the newspaper cartoon. The are rendering the same rapidly changing America at the same time and place but from acutely different angles. It underscores how dramatically the growth of mass-circulated newspapers were registering this upending of the social order for readers in such compelling ways. The heavily illustrated national humor magazine would diminish quickly in the face of newspaper cartooning. They would not disappear by any means. College humor magazines picked up the genre, and of course the single panel cartoon would remain a mainstay of the wordier weeklies and monthlies like Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, The New Masses, and of course The New Yorker. In the 1930s the now forgotten progenitor of MAD magazine, George Delacorte’s Ballyhoo (1931-39) revived the cartoon humor magazine and inspired a fleeting surge of lesser imitators. But the persistent and regular use of caricature to address everyday life in a changing America had been effectively transferred to the newspaper medium by the time of WWI.