Wayback Whensday: Dick Cavalli, John Held, Jr., Rea Irvin
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The magazine cartoons of Dick Cavalli, John Held, Jr., and Rea Irvin.
Dick Cavalli’s “Girlie” Cartoons
I have mentioned before that I grew up on a Newspaper Enterprise Association comics page so I was well aware of Dick Cavalli‘s Winthrop comic strip, and Morty Meekle before that. Like many comic strip creators of that time Cavalli had honed his talents as a magazine cartoonist, and Cavalli was one of the more successful ones (Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, etc.).
While ther are a few of those aforementioned comic strips it is those magazine cartoons, particularly those that lean toward the “girlie” market, that Paul Tobin highlights on his blog where he posts over a hundred of those really innocuous gag cartoons that he has collected from original art.
Civilization’s Progress by John Held, Jr.
John Held, Jr. was perhaps the cartoonist that is most associated with The Roaring Twenties. His Sheiks and Flappers were the ideal representation of the youth of the day and very popular. The Great Depression put an end to all the fun and games and Held’s newspaper and magazine career, though not ended, was dragged down also. But – in 1932-33 he contributed a series called Civilization’s Progress to Liberty magazine. The Then and Now series presents the two styles Held was most famous for: woodcuts and fine lines. Rob Stolzer has collected the entire series and presents all 33 installment on his Inkslingers blog.
The Life and Times of Rea Irvin
In 1925 cartoonist Rea Irvin became inextricably linked to The New Yorker, but he had decades of experience before that good fortune, and during his time with that magazine he did wander among other mediums like books and comic strips.
Pete Beard presents “The Humorous illustrations of Rea Irvin” a 16 minute documentary which traces the cartoonist’s career with particular emphasis on, as the title says, Irvin’s excellent illustrations.
To an extent, the relentlessly cheerful work of Rea Irvin has already featured, due to his work as editor of the New Yorker, in the video I made about the earlier years of its publication. But this time around I want to go into more detail about his own work and its remarkable contribution to the evolution of humorous illustration in the 20th century. Certainly he was another man who was way ahead of his time, and one of the most downright entertaining illustrators I can think of.
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