Cartoons

For anyone in my generation, the name David Low would be enough to justify devoting a whole section of a Gallery like this to cartoons. Low’s cartoon of Hitler meeting Stalin pierced to the centre of a whole historical epoch: you could write a caption a book long. Similarly, the cartoons of Daumier have, for a backing board, a large part of the history of France. On a smaller but still significant scale, Stephen Potter was right to say that the cartoonist who called himself “Pont” was at least as sensitive to British social life in the 1930s as any novelist. And already I have my eye on unjustly forgotten achievements, such as the cartoons of Émile Mercier, which captured the look (and, remarkably, the sound) of life in Australia when I was young. But for all the cartoonists there will be large problems of reproduction. Not much can be cribbed from the web: most of what matters is preserved in precious books that are hard to scan; so the work will be slow. For the present era, I will cunningly concentrate my efforts on letting Martha Richler’s site do all the work: a link to it is provided. Meanwhile I can lie back and figure out how to get at the timeless wealth of all nations. And there are problems of nomenclature. Does William Busch count as Cartoons or Bande dessinée? The dilemmas are endless: a sure sign that the field is rich.