Jason Shaffer on “The American Cruikshank(?): David Claypoole Johnston’s Cartooning,” Sept 29, 2026
Jason Shaffer
The 459th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium held on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026 at 7 pm EDT. Jason Shaffer on “The American Cruikshank(?): David Claypoole Johnston’s Cartooning” This talk takes its title from the first major study of Johnston’s work, an essay by Clarence S. Brigham in The Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, which houses Johnston’s family papers and some unique paintings and sketches along with a nearly complete collection of his prints and illustrations. Brigham plays something of a double-game with the sobriquet bestowed on Johnston, denying that Cruikshank influenced Johnston’s style or portraiture even while establishing that the two men corresponded and that Johnston’s comic annual, Scraps, seem to have taken its title from a similar collection by Cruikshank. This talk will take as a given a cross-pollination, at a minimum, between these two groundbreaking caricaturists, considering elements such as mise en scene, the use of dialogue and speech balloons, and the particularly Juvenilian nature of the satire in which both artists frequently engaged. While beginning with a scene of a crowd waiting to buy theatre tickets (Johnston was a former actor and a rabid fan–or at least seems to have been), the discussion will extend outward to some of his other pathbreaking use of implied motion and dialogue in Scraps, and also in his important contributions to the development of political cartooning.
Jason Shaffer is Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (UPenn Press), and his work has appeared in such journals as Theatre Survey, Early American Literature, and Comparative Drama. He is currently writing a book on plays that reenact battle scenes from the American Revolution and the War of 1812 and researching a critical work on Johnston’s importance to both political and theatrical culture in C19 America.
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