And back across the sea we go, back to merry old England, where the final of the “Big Three” was George Cruikshank (1792 - 1878), who was something of a child prodigy, already helping his father Isaac illustrate his cartoons by the time he was thirteen years old. Although he wanted to go to study at the Royal Academy, Isaac taught him at home, and George followed the same path as his contemporaries in satirising political parties and yes, good old King George himself, though this time George IV, who, as the Prince of Wales, had been so upset with James Gillman. Now he was in the crosshairs himself, and even went so far as to bribe Cruikshank not to caricature him, but to no avail. Seems these artists did not give a flying f
uck. Fair play to them.
Cruikshank illustrated satirical text written by William Hone, the most interesting being
The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder (1820), which was an fourteen-panel depiction of the scandalous love affair between the king’s wife and an Italian soldier, cleverly constructed as a ladder, with each sequence beginning at the bottom of the drawing and progressing up through to the top image, each labelled with a word ending in -ation, e.g. degradation, consternation… anyone remember INXS? After accepting bribes from the king not to ridicule him any more, Cruikshank turned to book illustration, and worked with some of the great authors such as Milton and Thackeray, and finally with the great Charles Dickens himself.
But like his fellows, Cruikshank was a pioneer of comics, drawing sequential strips complete with speech balloons and even, in one,
The Preparatory School for Fast Men (1849), using title cards to show the passage of time. An earlier strip,
Gent, No Gent and Regent (1816) goes after his favourite target, George IV, while
Comic Alphabet (1836) is more gentle, depicting the alphabet in humorous ways.
His largest work however, outside of illustrating books, came in the form of
The Tooth-Ache (1849), a six-page (not panel now, page) comic depicting the tribulations of a man with a sore tooth.
When he illustrated William Ainsworth’s
Jack Sheppard (1839), an account of the life and incarceration and finally death of the famous thief, he used a ten-panel drawing to show Sheppard’s escape and a six-panel one to show his execution.
Unlike our friend James Gillray, he was not a supporter, but in fact an opponent of abolition, and became a fanatical advocate for temperance, having been previously a notorious alcoholic. Oh, there’s nothing worse than a reformed smoker, is there, unless it’s a reformed drinker! And he was both! His moralising would not sit well with many, as he rewrote fairy tales such as
Cinderella and
Puss-in-Boots in order to preach his own high-handed message of temperance and abstinence. Yeah, ruin it for the rest of us, why don’t you? His pontificating and judgemental stance turned out to be hypocrisy though, as when he died in 1878 it came to light that he had had no less than eleven illegitimate children with his maid, the last born when he was, wait for it, 82! The dirty old bastard!
One of the first I can see to feature an anthropomorphic animal as its main character was Allen Robert Branston (1778 - 1827) in his
The Comical Cat (1818) which shows, among other things, a cat at table, standing on its hind legs on the chair cutting up its food, doing a handstand and playing cards with a dog. However as this was all carved in wood I can’t consider it a proper example of any sort of comic. Interesting though.