Greetings.

Collecting original illustration art that has been published is a fun target. The art is truly one of a kind, and because it has generally been published is a low resolution form, actually forging an original is functionally impossible. A scanned and edited version is too perfect, and the randomness of ink lines means that reproducing even a fraction of a percent of them would be impossible, even if you were looking at the high resolution art. The originals are fixed, annotated, on old paper, have production stickers and notes, and so on. Everyone knows the published piece from its appearance on newsprint, so faking something is out of the question, too. It took a long time for illustration and comic book and comic strip art to be recognized for its unique character instead of being considered low brow.

As of 2022, editorial art has not quite caught up, but it has the same qualities. Newspapers are not as widely distributed as comic books, so familiarity with the published work is less common. But the inability to forge and fake certainly is. I personally like editorial art because it always speaks directly to the moment of its creation and not in retrospect.

With this site, I would like to reconstruct some of the historical highlights of World War II through a collection of editorial illustrations (hard to call them cartoons, actually), and filling in what I can about the backstories. When they are dated, it is generally quite easy to dig out the contexts. When they are not dated, I need to do a little detective work and inference building to figure the most likely referents. One thing about editorial art is that it is timely. So when you find the event being referenced, you can be pretty sure the art appeared within a day or so and not even a week later.

“Up to His Old Tricks.” (August 1, 1941)
by Wallace Heard Goldsmith (1873-1945)
10 x 13 in., ink on board

Goldsmith was a Boston institution, working over his long career at the Herald, the Post, and the Globe. This editorial cartoon is from his 25-year period at the Post.

At the turn of the century, the Boston Herald just couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to run a syndicate. Their homegrown comic section was born and died at least four different times. The Adventures of Little Allright came in the third version of their Sunday section and ran from March 6 to June 26, 1904. There really wasn’t much to set the strip apart from any other kid strip — the starring kid saying “all right” a lot seems an almost ridiculously weak hook. Goldsmith took the dubious credit for this stinker. The strip was rebooted as Little Alright (the second ‘L’ was dropped), and ran from November 11 1906 to April 14 1907. He was well known for illustrating Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost.”

Baron Münchhausen is a fictional German nobleman created by Rudolf Raspe in 1785. The character is loosely based on a real baron, Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen. The real-life Münchhausen fought for the Russian Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. Upon retiring in 1760, he became a minor celebrity within German aristocratic circles for telling outrageous tall tales based on his military career. After hearing some of Münchhausen’s stories, Raspe adapted them anonymously into literary form. The book was soon translated into other European languages.

In 1941, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels ordered the production of a filmed version of Münchhausen’s exploits. Münchhausen represented the pinnacle of the Goebbels’ Volksfilm style of propaganda designed to entertain the masses and distract the population from the war, borrowing the Hollywood genre of large budget productions with extensive colorful visuals. The release of the Technicolor film, The Wizard of Oz in the United States was a heavy influence for Goebbels. Münchhausen was the third feature film made in Germany using the new Agfacolor negative-positive material.

The film’s production began in 1941, with a big public fanfare, and an initial budget of over 4.5 million Reichsmarks that increased to over 6.5 million after Goebbels’ intentions to “surpass the special effects and color artistry” of Alexander Korda’s Technicolor film The Thief of Bagdad.

The editorial “Up to His Old Tricks,” is more of a commentary on Goebbels and the disinformation campaigns taken from the headlines of the recent times.