CSotD: Puckish humor
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The Billy Ireland Museum has begun adding period pieces at the Nib; this second one, by Frederick Burr Opper, is from Puck in 1881 and falls under the category of "nothing new under the sun," as you'll see by examining the various fears over easily obtained revolvers.
I wish the curator would provide more background, because revolvers weren't new in 1881, so we have to assume that this was a much less expensive model or one that was being promoted aggressively. It may also be that this was when the older style cap-and-ball revolver gave way to the revolver that took a self-contained metal encased bullet, much easier for the civilian to load and fire.
In any case, the objections haven't changed a whole lot.
Meanwhile, the King Features Archivist does provide context for the vintage cartoons profiled over there, and happens to also touch upon Puck this week, with some good, expandable-to-see-the-detail examples of old time comics.
The archivist somewhat skips over the earlier Puck — a free-standing magazine which once featured this tribute of sorts to Hearst and his comics, and was later acquired by Pulitzer – and focused on Puck, the Comic Weekly, which was a more aggressively promotional piece offered to local newspapers.
As noted there, with more examples than this 1936 feature, Puck the Comic Weekly carried cartoons that were basically advertisements, a medium that was still very much around when I was a kid.
I'm not sure how I viewed these things: I knew that a Spooky or Little Lulu comic was a comic, and ditto with most of the comics in the Sunday paper, while an Elsie and Elmer cartoon was going to wind up telling me about Carnation milk or Elmer's glue, and I seem to remember Boys Life having cartoons that were tied to a sponsor, but I'm not sure I felt ripped off or exploited by the commercial tie-ins.
Which I guess was part of their Cunning Plan.
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