A Tale of Two Comics: Gibson vs. The Comic Strip

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.

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Charles Dana Gibson Educates Mr. Pipp

For comic strip devotees, Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) is often treated as a sidebar. And yet in the last decade of the 19th and first of the 20th Centuries he may have been the most famous and recognizable cartoonist in America. Best known for his “Gibson Girl” idealizations of middle class feminine youths, he worked mainly in Life and other humor and mass market magazines of the 1890s and 1910s. In fact after WWI Gibson became editor and eventually owner of Life. But by that point the newspaper revolution had diminished the power and role for weekly humor periodicals. This may be why both Gibson’s style and career seems at odds with the evolving comic strip. He represented the more gentle and genteel humor of a magazine world that sniffed at the crude humor and violence of the massively popular dailies.

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