Herblock in History starts at Counterpoint

Herblock in History starts at Counterpoint with a cartoon every Friday from the massive archives of the Herblock Foundation.

...although I'm a little surprised they started off with a Ronald Reagan is out of touch cartoon from February 23, 1990.

Secret History of Comics - Ephemera Finds in TN

 One of the things I like to do is wander around antique stores and junk shops. Here's some stuff I found in Tennessee last month.

This is a Herblock cover caricaturing Art Buchwald for Newsweek that I didn't know existed, so I was quite surprised by it.

This appears to be an advertising card for Union Pacific Tea from the latter half of the nineteenth century. It's being donated to the Library of Congress soon.

This matchbook looked like a New Yorker cartoonist to me so I reached out to historian/cartoonist Michael Maslin:

Maslin wrote back, "Not all of the faces, but a few (figs a&b), look like Steig's early work. The fellow extreme lower right most especially (fig. a) . But I'm not confident enough to say it is Steig's work."

fig. a

fig. b

Beetle Bailey original comic strip 9/13/1993. 

Note that the dealer thought it was a print, and not the original, and priced it accordingly.

A Buck Rogers post-production mini-poster by Dave Perillo that's being donated to Library of Congress.

Three British digest-sized comic books that will be donated to the Library of Congress comic book collection. The cover photos have been added to the Grand Comics Database already.

WorldCat doesn't list any copies in the United States, and almost none worldwide. When Randy Scott was at Michigan State's comic book collection, I would feed material such as this to them.

Love Story Picture Library #1259

Star Love Stories #591

Love Story Picture Library #1254

World War II cartoon postcards are easy to find, but the antique mall was waiting 

on me to close so I felt compelled to buy something.

Note the dental drill, for graphic medicine fans.

Herblock in the Cold War academic article

 

Laughter Louder Than Bombs? Apocalyptic Graphic Satire in Cold War Cartooning, 1946–1959

Brandon Webb

American Quarterly, Volume 70, Number 2, June 2018, pp. 235-266

online at https://www.academia.edu/40452236/Laughter_Louder_Than_Bombs_Apocalyptic_Graphic_Satire_in_Cold_War_Cartooning_1946_1959?email_work_card=title

In the postwar American media landscape, “the bomb” symbolized both security and insecurity. Two of the nation’s leading syndicated cartoonists—the Washington Post’s Herbert Block and the Village Voice’s Jules Feiffer—played on this paradox by parodying the arms race, civil defense, nuclear testing and deterrence. But the schisms within progressive politics in this period distinguished Block and Feiffer as social critics. At the height of anticommunist hysteria, Block’s single-panel editorial cartoons often featured the anthropomorphized Mr. Atom, who became a spectral figure within the Cold War imaginary. In the post-McCarthy era, Feiffer’s narrative-driven strips spoofed military Keynesianism by critiquing the role capitalism played in fueling the nuclear crisis. While Block and Feiffer both recognized the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons, they were representative of a left-liberal divide at a point when humor was undergoing transformations in the wider culture and a political struggle over the bomb’s future was being fiercely waged. By foregrounding these cleavages, this essay argues that satirizing the full slate of contradictions of the nuclear era meant questioning the basic assumptions of the Cold War rivalry and breaking from the consensus framework altogether. Only by critiquing the ideology of the American Cold War commitment could the absurdities of the arms race be laid bare.

KAL and Don Graham's Herblock talks online

Kevin Kallaugher: 2015 Prize Winner

herblockvideo

May 12 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqE8bSvOFu8

Former Washington Post publisher specifically talks about Herblock's career and what he meant to the paper.

Donald E. Graham: 2015 Lecturer

May 12 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_Hv_1EsjJ8

"Herblock Looks at 1965" Exhibit Features Cartoons About Voting Rights, Vietnam and More

---

NEWS from the LIBRARY of CONGRESS
April 29, 2015

Public contact: Sara Duke (202) 707-3630, sduk@loc.gov

"Herblock Looks at 1965" Exhibit Features Cartoons
About Voting Rights, Vietnam, Nuclear Weapons, Immigration and More

A 10-cartoon display of Herblock drawings at the Library of Congress focuses on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and U.S. policies in Vietnam.  Herblock was the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist at The Washington Post for more than 55 years.
The exhibit, "Herblock Looks at 1965: Fifty Years Ago in Editorial Cartoons," is now open in the Herblock Gallery of the Graphic Arts Galleries on the ground level of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.  Free and open to the public from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, the exhibit runs through Saturday, Sept. 19, 2015.
Other topics addressed in this display, which opened in March 2015, include internal discord in the Republican Party, the buildup of nuclear weapons and immigration reform.
The Herblock Gallery, part of the Library's Graphic Arts Galleries, celebrates the work of Herbert L. Block with a rotating display of 10 original drawings.  The display changes every six months.  A second set of drawings from 1965 will be placed on exhibition from Sept. 26, 2015 to March 19, 2016.
Herblock's cartoons also are showcased in another room of the Graphic Arts Galleries in an exhibition titled "Pointing Their Pens: Herblock and Fellow Cartoonists Confront the Issues," which opened March 21, 2015 and will close on March 19, 2016.  The exhibition, featuring 30 cartoons, looks at how editorial cartoonists, often with divergent viewpoints, interpreted the divisive issues of the 20th century.
"Herblock Looks at 1965" and "Pointing Their Pens" have been made possible through the generous support of the Herb Block Foundation.  The foundation donated a collection of more than 14,000 original Herblock cartoon drawings and 50,000 rough sketches, as well as manuscripts, to the Library of Congress in 2002, and has generously continued to provide funds to support ongoing programming.
The Library has been collecting original cartoon art for more than 140 years.  It is a major center for cartoon research with holdings of more than 100,000 original cartoon drawings and prints.  These works, housed in the Prints and Photographs Division, span five centuries and range from 17th-century Dutch political prints to 21st-century contemporary comic strips.  The division holds the largest-known collection of American political prints and the finest assemblage of British satirical prints outside Great Britain.  The Library acquired these materials through a variety of sources including artists' gifts, donations by private collectors, selective purchases and copyright registration.  For more information, visit www.loc.gov/rr/print/.
The Library of Congress, the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 160 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats.  The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.

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4/29/15
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Herblock's awards

A couple of weekends ago, I was lucky enough to spend some time at the Herb Block Foundation's offices. One room there is decorated with Herblock's awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Pulitzer Prize, the Reuben Award, the RFK Journalism Award, and others. Here's some pictures, and more are online here.

Herblock and Chast on YouTube

Courtesy of TCJ.com-


Herblock: A Political Cartoonist - History, Cartoons, Civil Rights,
McCarthyism, Nixon
C-Span2's BookTV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFg8N4HvEus

Roz Chast "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant"
Politics and Prose· May 20, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLI0L-A1c6c

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast discusses her new book at Politics &
Prose in Washington, D.C. This event was recorded May 13, 2014.

The Atlantic on Herblock

'This Shop Gives Every New President of the Unites States a Free Shave'

In 55 years as the Washington Post's editorial cartoonist, Herblock coined "McCarthyism," helped take down Nixon, and delivered pointed commentaries that remain relevant today.

David A. Graham Jan 26 2014,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/this-shop-gives-every-new-president-of-the-unites-states-a-free-shave/283131/

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Herblock in his office after winning his third Pulitzer Prize, in 1979. (Charles Tasnadi/Associated Press)

More cartoons on view at Library of Congress

Continuing our recent survey of the Library of Congress' cartoons on exhibit - the Civil War in America show has at least three cartoons in it. Although they appear to our eyes as political cartoons, these were published as stand-alone prints that one would buy to admire and look at frequently - almost the television of their day. Go see them in person to get a better view than these pictures taken without a flash.







In the Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress, 1912–2012 exhibit, there's two original paintings by Arthur Szyk for playing cards.





Down to Earth: Herblock and Photographers Observe the Environment is only open for three more weeks.

Cartoons to see in the L.o.C.

The Library of Congress has several cartoon and comics exhibits up now.  Here's a quick overview.

You can buy District Comics in their gift shop in the Jefferson Building. My story on the Army Medical Museum is around page 90, wink, wink.

Also in the Jefferson Building for another month is  "Down to Earth: Herblock and Photographers Observe the Environment" curated by Carol Johnson and Sara Duke. Carol's the photograph curator, Sara the Herblock one. I thought this was an excellent exhibit. The photographs and the cartoons really complemented each other, and the unlikely pairing made for a stronger exhibit than either alone would have.

There's a small brochure for the exhibit, although you have to get it at the Madison Building's Prints & Photographs department.


At the same location is "Herblock Looks at 1962: Fifty Years Ago in Editorial Cartoons," an exhibit curated by Sara Duke. This smaller exhibit focuses on President Kennedy.

Obviously Sara made curatorial choices to influence this in both exhibits, but it's still depressing how relevant 50-year-old cartoons are:

The third exhibit is a small one on comic books featuring Presidents that Megan Halsband did in the Serials Department (in the Madison Building) for President's Day. The majority of these comics are from Bluewater's current biographical series, but she did find an issue of Action Comics that I don't remember seeing.









The Prints & Photographs division showed off its new acquisitions this week. Sara Duke showed some original comic book and strip artwork:



A piece by Keith Knight, and two pages from Jim Rugg's anthology. They collected the entire book except for the centerfold. Not shown is...



Above are voting rights prints by Lalo Alcaraz, possibly selected by Helena Zinkham.

Martha Kennedy had some great acquistions this year, including works by James Flora, editorial cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, Garry "Doonesbury" Trudeau, and Charles Vess' entire book of Ballads and Sagas:












This artwork isn't on exhibit, but you can make an appointment to view it.