Thursday, October 13, 2005
Cartoonist Convention Art
At newspaper industry get-togethers cartoonists often create some special art to commemorate the event. Since they’re cartoonists, they usually approach the job with humor and poke fun at their industry.
Here we have a treasure – three special comic strips created especially for a 1917 newspaper convention. The cartoonists are Rube Goldberg, Charles A. Voight and Robert Brinkerhoff, all with the New York Evening Mail at the time, and all in the early years of long prosperous careers. Here we get to see them poking fun at newspaper publishers and their penny-pinching ways. Here’s the write-up that accompanied these cartoons in the May 5 1917 issue of The Fourth Estate:
The ‘big surprise’ of the New York Evening Mail’s “gambol” to 800 newspapermen and advertisers, at Cocoanut Grove, atop the Century Theatre, on April 26, was the joint appearance of Goldberg, Brinkerhoff and Voight, the Evening Mail’s cartoonists, in a comedy skit written for the occasion by Roy K. Moulton, the Evening Mail’s columnist.
The sketch, billed on the program as “a tragedy,” told of the efforts of a newspaper publisher to buy a roll of print paper. “Paper King,” one of the characters, informed “Mr. P. Ubble Isher” that one roll of print paper would cost him exactly $9,000.00. In despair, the publisher turned to his cartoonists for assistance and after a whispered consultation they offered to help him out of his difficulty by lending him their “last week’s salary,” which happened to be the amount needed.
The above cartoons, by Goldberg, Voight and Brinkerhoff, are reproduced from the program of the Evening Mail’s party for its newspaper and advertising men friends.
