They were the favorite part of the morning paper for many of us growing up, when we were introduced to the wacky and sometimes bizarre worlds of the characters inside their three-panel soul.
As we grew older and realized there was more to the world than Hagar and Garfield, we discovered deeply compelling stories like Maus and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
World upon barely possible world gets told in frame and boxes, word bubbles and strokes of pen, and the people who make it possible are Cartoonists, and National Cartoonists Day is dedicated to them and their craft.
How to Celebrate National Cartoonists Day
National Cartoonists Day is best celebrated by picking up a comic you used to know and love, and walking down memory lane on the part it played in you growing up.
Enjoy Calvin and Hobbes
Open up that worn Calvin and Hobbes comic book by Bill Watterson to find yourself reminiscing of memories of an adventurous boy and his stuffed tiger. Calvin and Hobbes is commonly referred to as the last great newspaper comic.
Chuckle at Dilbert
Not your cup of tea? Snicker along as you turn the pages to the lastest Dilbert cartoons, created by cartoonist Scott Adams. While more mature in content, anyone who has worked in an average office space can relate to the snarky humor presented in Dilbert.
Check Out Online Comics
Online comics are now a thing, and some of them have been running for 12 years or more, like Randy Milhollands Something Positive. Deep characters, compelling storylines, and a rapier wit make it a joy to read, though it’s certainly not for the easily offended.
Whether this comic or another one, discovering new worlds to experience through comics is a great way to spend National Cartoonists Day! You could even draw your own!
Learn More About Cartoons
Get involved with the day by learning about this fun genre! Check out some of these interesting tidbits and consider sharing them with friends:
- The longest known individual cartoon strip is over 1,100 feet in length, and was created by female cartoonist Mons Selvam in Chennai, India in 2019. The cartoon strip is focused on Mons’ childhood, and some of her memories of her village through her fictional character, Gundomalli. Mons Selvam considers herself a “happiness illustrator” as well as a cartoonist.
- The Katzenjammer Kids cartoon is the longest running ever, and it was even made into a play in 1903.
- One of the first film cartoons was released for viewing in 1908, and is considered to be Fantasmagorie, a hand-drawn animated by French cartoonist Émile Cohl. The cartoon, only one minute and twenty seconds in length, consists of a stick figure man running into and morphing into other objects. The short animated cartoon was derived from 700 hand-drawn illustrations. Émile Cohl would go on to be referred to as the “father of the animated cartoon.”
History of National Cartoonists Day
National Cartoonists Day was founded in the 1990s by the National Cartoonists Society to celebrate the many accomplishments of cartonists and all the good they have brought to the world as a result!
In 1895 a man named Richard F. Outcault introduced a small bald kid in a yellow nightshirt to the world in an incredibly popular publication in the big apple at the time, the New York World. While the paper itself was looked upon with a sort of disdain by ‘real’ journalists of the time, the yellow kid was embraced by people everywhere.
Little did Outcault know that when he first created this character, it would lead to a revolution in how stories were told and presented in sequential art pieces (that’s comics, kids!), but would in fact create a new standard piece of content for newspapers everywhere.
The Yellow Kid was an archetype of the world, rather than a character in and of itself. Richard recounted that as he walked the slums of the city on his rounds, he would discover the kid walking out of houses, or sitting and hanging about on doorsteps.
The archetypical “kid” was always warm and sunny, friendly, generous, and free of malice and selfishness. How amazing that Richard saw all the good in the world in the worst parts of it, perhaps that’s a lesson in and of itself.
The Katzenjammer Kids debuted in 1897 in the American Humorist, and has changed over into the hands of three different cartoonists. The original cartoonist of the comic, Rudolph Dirks, was one of the first to regularly indicate dialogue through speech balloons; speech balloons were standardized as the form in which cartoonists indicated dialogue by the early 1900s, and is still being used today.
Not all cartoonists aim to make you laugh but also use the media as a source of discussion. With the rise of the popular political cartoon, cartoonists now use comics and illustration as a form of political discourse.
The political cartoon is an illustration, often with a caricature, to convey commentary on current events or politics. Instead of finding these on the funny pages of a newspaper, they are often found in the editorial pages of a newspaper or journal.
For many years, cartoons were viewed as low-brow in comparison to other forms of art, but the work of cartoonists is important and underappreciated. The art form has grown in popularity with a younger generation that seeks to utilize both art and culture in their media expression.
The internet has allowed cartoonists to reach a larger crowd than when only a select few cartoons were chosen for the Sunday comics section of a newspaper or shown during Saturday morning cartoon times. Today, the two-dimensional art known as comics are not only available to be seen in newspapers but magazines, books, websites, social media sites, and blogs as well!
