What this site covers

In Contempt Comics is a reference on the political cartoon from Hogarth’s subscription of 1735 to the syndicated page. It is organised around the four things the subject actually consists of — the people who drew, the papers that printed, the processes that carried the line onto a sheet, and the institutions that kept the sheet afterwards — with the prize record and the two words everybody confuses set beside them.

The six sections

Each piece names a dated work and the publication that carried it. Draughtsmen runs from Hogarth and Gillray through Nast and Tenniel to the syndicated and animated present. Papers covers the weeklies that commissioned the drawing and set the deadline. Printing takes the plate, the stone, the boxwood block and the zinc line block in turn. Archives is about the drawers. Prizes holds the Pulitzer record and the tax and copyright law that came before it, and the Glossary separates caricature from cartoon.

Where the originals are

The artwork behind most of what is written about here sits in four places: the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State, the print rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Département des Estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Each of them takes readers; two of them are written about at length here.

The flat list of everything on the site is on the archive page. The section pages are the better way in.