“The Kaiser’s Route” (October 8, 1916)
by Jack Wilson
14 x 17 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

I can find little about the life of Jack Wilson. He spent a few years at NEA in Cleveland in the mid-teens, was at World Color Printing in 1919 and produced a short-run revival of the “Handy Andy” strip. A “Home Sweet Home” feature was produced at the same time.

One of the earliest radio-related comics was Wilson’s “Radio Ralf,” which arrived in April 1922, just three years after the first widespread radio broadcasts in 1919. The strip ended a mere three months later.

Kaiser Wilhelm oversaw the end of the Imperial Era in Germany, thanks in great part to waging a losing war on the back of nothing more than exceptional hubris. Started over the invasion of Serbia by its ally, Austria-Hungary, in 1914, Germany, with barely a few months of material back-up in war readiness, ended up taking on France, Britain, and Russia on two major fronts.

The year 1916 was characterized by two year-long wars of attrition, at Verdun and the Somme, with millions dead on each side. German morale went into decline.

The US entered the war in 1917, and through continued attrition, incredible demand on resources, idiotic policy, and a revolution, the war – and the Imperial Era – ended in Germany at the end of 1918.

A newly formed democracy, the Weimar Republic, faced an uphill battle of resentment and strife. Rampant inflation, domestically, was combined by severe international constraints set out in the Treaty of Versailles. Hindenburg, one of the Generals running the show in Germany by the end of the war, took over as President in 1925, and presided over an economic depression with its accompanying rampant unemployment. In 1933, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in a coalition government with the Nazis. And in 1934, upon Hindenburg’s death, the single-party Nazi dictatorship was established with Hitler as both President and Chancellor.