Herriman Saturday

I think an appropriate subtitle for this Saturday's offerings would be "Herriman in a Hurry". Herriman produced the first two cartoons for the September 16th paper, the second two for the 18th. The first, in which he reports cartoonographically (a fine word I just made up) from a Los Angeles dog show, is obviously a rush job. The cartoon vignettes are small and unimaginative, and the captions, which are ostensibly humorous, all fall flat or are, as best I can tell, simply non sequiturs.

The second cartoon is an illustration for a short story. Herriman did a lot of this work at the Examiner. I made copies of very few because the illustrations were typically much smaller and less detailed than this particular one.

Herriman got a day off on the 17th, but then came back on the 18th with two ambitious political cartoons. In the first he introduces a new icon to represent the Southern Pacific company, an octopus. He'd use this representation quite frequently from now on, and he was able to draw it very effectively. Unfortunately he was still in a rush, and the woman representing "public sentiment" is very badly drawn. Herriman seemed to be trying to spruce up the rushed drawing with a ton of crosshatching, most of which just turned to mud.

The final cartoon is better executed if rather unimaginative, but here Herriman had the opposite problem -- a lot of his linework was too thin and barely reproduced in the paper. Of course my photocopying doesn't help matters any, but much of the background drawing is almost invisible in the paper itself.

If anyone finds particular text in the cartoons hard to read just let me know and I'll interpret. In the last cartoon the two tiny figures at the right side are tagged as Pardee and Black Hayes. Pardee says "Such dog demmy-tasse, such dog", Hayes replies "Uh-Huh".