"What on earth are you doing in there, Willie?"
"Teddy put me in. He says it's the best place for me during the campaign."
There are interest and significance in the fact that a majority of the ablest caricaturists of to-day are devoting their talents almost exclusively to the daily press. It is an exacting sort of work, exhaustive both physically and mentally. The mere idea of producing a single daily cartoon, week in and week out,—thirty cartoons a month, three hundred and sixty-five cartoons a year, with the regularity of a machine,—is in itself appalling. And yet a steadily growing number of artists are turning to this class of work, and one reason for this is that they realize that through the medium of the daily press their influence is more far-reaching than it possibly can be in the pages of the comic weeklies, and that at the same time the exigencies of journalism allow more scope for individuality than do the carefully planned cartoons of papers like Puck or Judge. Speed and originality are the two prime requisites of the successful newspaper cartoon of to-day, a maximum of thought expressed in a minimum of lines, apposite, clear-cut, and incisive, like a well-written editorial. Indeed, our leading cartoonists regard their art as simply another and especially telling medium for giving expression to editorial opinion. Mr. Bush, "the dean of American caricaturists," may be said to have spoken for them all when he said, in a recent interview, that he looks upon a cartoon as an editorial pure and simple.
"To be a success it should point a moral. Exaggeration and a keen sense of humor are only adjuncts of the cartoonist, for he must deal with real people. He must also be a student. I am obliged not only to use my pencil, but to study hard, and read everything I can lay my hands on. The features of Roosevelt, Bryan, Hanna, and Croker may be familiar to me, but I must know what these men are doing. I must also know what the masses behind these popular characters think and believe."
Homer Davenport, of the "New York American and Journal."
Another direct result of the influence of journalism upon caricature, in addition to that of compelling the artist to keep in closer touch than ever before with contemporary history, is the growing popularity of the series method—a method which dates back to the Macaire of Philipon and the Mayeux of Traviès, and which consists in portraying day by day the same more or less grotesque types, ever undergoing some new and absurd adventure. It is a method which suits the needs of artist and public alike. To the former, his growing familiarity with every line and detail of the features and forms of his pictorial puppets minimizes his daily task, while the public, even that part of the public which is opposed to comic art in general, or is out of sympathy with the political attitude of a certain series in particular, finds itself gradually becoming familiar with the series, through fugitive and unexpected glimpses, and ends by following the series with amusement and interest and a growing curiosity as to what new and absurd complications the artist will next introduce. This employment of the series idea is as successful in social as political satire. Mr. Outcault's "Yellow Kid" and "Buster Brown," Mr. Opper's "Happy Hooligan" and "Alphonse and Gaston," Gene Carr's "Lady Bountiful," and Carl Schultze's "Foxy Grandpa" are types that have won friends throughout the breadth of the continent. In the domain of strictly political caricature, however, there is no series that has attracted more attention than Homer Davenport's familiar conception of the Trusts, symbolized as a bulky, overgrown, uncouth figure, a primordial giant from the Stone Age. And since there have been a number of apocryphal stories regarding the source of Mr. Davenport's inspiration, it will not be without interest to print the artist's own statement. "As a matter of fact," he says, "I got the idea in St. Mark's Square in Venice. Seeing a flock of pigeons flying about in that neighborhood I immediately, with my love of birds and beasts, determined by fair means or foul to purloin a pair. I watched them fly hither and thither, and in following them came across a statue of Samson throwing some man or other—I forget his name—to the ground. The abnormal size of the muscles of the figure struck me at once, and turning round to my wife, who was with me, I said with a sudden inspired thought, 'The Trusts!'"
