Cartoon Cavalcade

This book came out in 1943. It's mostly panels from the New Yorker but those are in print elsewhere so I'll skip them. I'll skip the strips that are in other collections. The stills from Disney cartoons can all be seen in other places in color. Even leaving out all that, there's still a lot in this 444-page collection covering the medium up until then. Even though it curtails the use of paper during wartime, it still uses more paper than books produced recently in which such sacrifices are not made.

In the introduction. Author Thomas Craven says, “The first consideration, in selecting the illustrations for this book, as I have pointed out in the text, was that the drawing must be funny. It was a long and complicated business involving both a sense of humor and that curious quality known as artistic temperament. Deceased cartoonists were well satisfied with the illustration in their name; but living cartoonists had their own ideas on which pictures represented them in a volume dealing not only with the course of laughter but the causes of laughter through the passing years. For the solution to the endless difficulties of selection, procurement, and appeasement, I am indebted to Florence and Sydney Weiss[...] I am particularly indebted to William Murrell's A History of American Graphic Humor, the only work of it's kind and a monumental contribution to Americana. Murrell's history, besides being invaluable for reference, has recalled to me the old artists and funny men whose cartoons were a part of my education”


The endpapers have the signatures of most of the (then living) cartoonists in this volume:


C.H. Ebert Scribner's, 1901


Carl Hauser, Fun for the Millions, 1900


Walt Kuhn, Judge 1908


George McManus, New York Evening-Journal 1904


Walt Kuhn, Judge 1907


Thomas Starling Sullivant, Harper's Weekly 1912


L. M. Blackens, Puck 1907


Thomas E. Powers, New York Evening-Journal 1907


Harrison Cady,Life 1906



George Bellows, The Masses 1911


Robert Minor, The Masses 1915


Crawford Young, Judge 1917