color printing

In the 1890s, American printers produced some excellent color advertising. This ad for Newsboy Cigars was printed in 1894 by the Calvert Lithographic Co.

{Newsboy cigars. Manufactured by Brown Brothers, Detroit, 1894, Calvert Lithographic Co.; source: Library of Congress}

This one dates from about the same time.

{Drink Coca-Cola 5 cents, 189- , print: chromolithograph; summary: Print shows a well dressed young woman, wearing hat, white gloves, and pearls, holding up a glass of Coca-Cola, seated at a table on which is a vase of roses, the "Drink Coca-Cola" sign, and a paper giving the location of the "Home Office [of the] Coca-Cola Co." as well as branch locations; source: Library of Congress[1]}

Although digital imaging can be somewhat flakey, I imagine you can tell that these two make good use of a wide range of color tones.

Impressed on newsprint using high-speed, multi-cylinder rotary presses, advertisements in the local press couldn't attain such high quality. But, even in 1909, they looked pretty good, as this page from the New York Herald of 1909 attests. You can assume it looked a lot better on the day it came out. The highly-acidic wood-pulp paper on which it was printed will have deteriorated much more during the past century than the heavier stock on which the cigar and Coke ads appeared, and as the paper aged the colors will have grow dim.

{This comes from the Herald of 1909; source: NYPL Digital Gallery}

Newspaper color work from earlier in the 19th century is also surprisingly good. This example comes from a New York weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, in 1883.

{"North Carolina &mdash An Illicit Whisky Still in the Mountains Surprised by Revenue Officers," from a sketch by J.S. Hodgson, a page in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper for the week ending September 1, 1883; source: Shirley Stipp Ephemera Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, UNC}

This one comes from more than a decade before.

{Grant at the capture of the city of Mexico by E. Leutze, made between 1860 and 1870; source: Library of Congress}

Many newspaper illustrations were what we call political cartoons. This patriotic example appeared in the New York Herald on January 9, 1898. It isn't usually identified as typical of the era's yellow journalism, but this cartoon does fit the mold pretty well. When it appeared the high-circulation dailies, such as Hearst's New York Journal were flaming American jingoism and the Spanish American War was just about to break out.[2]

{"Uncle Sam -- Now Let Some of the Other Fellows Invent Something" by Charles Nelan, New York Herald, January 9, 1898; source: Cartoon Research Library, Ohio State University}

This 1895 drawing shows a multi-cylinder color press. These presses printed multiple colors in one operation at high speed.

{source: flickr}

These presses were enormous and immensely complicated. Containing about 50,000 separate pieces, they were something like thirty-five feet long, seventeen feet high and twelve feet wide. Although they used only four colors, they'd have some 64 sources of ink, called fountains. Fed by huge rolls of paper, they build up a color illustration by overlaying first yellow, then red, then blue, one after the other. The paper wound its way through the press much too fast for the different impressions to be visible, but if they were you would be able to see what the following images show. Note that the fourth color, black, is not part of this somewhat simplistic demonstration of the overlay process.

{source:
Modern industrial progress by Charles Henry Cochrane (J.B. Lippincott company, 1904) }

Although the process was highly automated, a great deal of skill was required in creating the plates from which each impression would be drawn and setting up the press to insure that the plates and unrolling paper were precisely aligned.[3] In most cases the artist would create the original color work using pen and ink or brush and paint. The work would be photographed three or more times using color filters to isolate, respectively, the yellow, red, and blue tones, and their variants. By a process called photoengraving, the photographic negatives (all of them black and white) would be used to make at least three printing plates and these, in turn, would be used to make the stereotype plates that were attached to the rollers of the giant presses. Each stereotype printing plate would be inked with a separate color to impress the paper as it wound its way through the press.[4]

The cigar and Coke ads were not made on one of these presses. They were poster-sized placards meant for display in shop windows, on advertising kiosks, and the like. The Coke ad was made by a process called chromolithography. In the late 19th century, chromolithographs were called "chromos." They were color lithographs and their quality varied greatly, depending on the skill of the printers and the size of the project's budget. The best were costly and could be extremely faithful to the original. They were made either by repeated impressions of a flat sheet of paper against inked lithographic stones or by a rotary method called offset lithography. A book published in 1875 describes this process clearly and in some detail.[5]

This enlargement from the Coke ad shows the tonal gradations that could be achieved in a relatively high quality chromo print.



The Newsboys Cigars ad has more abrupt tonal gradations. Although the curator identified the ad as a lithograph, the enlargement I've put below shows that it has been reproduced via halftone process. While chromolithography was done on lithographic flatbed or offset presses, halftone printing could be done on letterpress printing equipment, the same type of presses that were used to publish daily newspapers. In halftone work, tonal gradations are conveyed by dots of pigment. When the dots are close together the eye sees relatively intense tones; as they're increasingly separated, the eye sees lighter tones of the pigment. Making high quality halftones is difficult and time-consuming, requiring exact registration of the paper through multiple impressions, but the process is nonetheless cheaper and faster than is high quality chromolithography. Half-tone illustrations could be inserted along with text on the pages of daily newspapers, but this would normally be done for black and white photographs rather than color pictures.[6]

Here is an enlargement from the cigar ad that's comparable to the one of the Coke ad.



Compare this detail from a halftone reproduction of a painting of Chief Joseph made in 1897.



Here's the painting from which I've taken the Chief Joseph detail. Note that in this case the Library of Congress curator has identified the print as a halftone.

{Halftone reproduction of a painting by E.A. Burbank of Chief Joseph, Nez Percé chief, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing front, published by the Chicago Colortype Co., 1897; source: Library of Congress}

The New York Public Library has an excellent set of web pages describing and demonstrating chromolithography. Note in particular its sets of progressive proofs of a print called Prang's Prize Babies.

The two small crosses that you may have noticed on the Coke ad show it to be a type of proof. The crosses helped the printer determine that the registration was accurate as each successive color overlay was made. Once exact registration was assured, the crosses would, of course, be removed so as not to appear in the production prints.

-----------

Some sources:

The New Journalism 1865-1919

The Penny Press

Six thousand years of history see other blog post

The Daily Newspaper in America see other blog post

"Printing Presses" in The Encyclopedia Americana Encyclopedia Americana Corp., 1919

"The Development of the Rotary Web Press" in The American manual of presswork Oswald publishing company, 1916

Modern industrial progress by Charles Henry Cochrane (J.B. Lippincott company, 1904)

Color printing in wikipedia

History and present condition of the newspaper and periodical press of the United States by Simon Newton Dexter North (Govt. print. off., 1884)

American dictionary of printing and bookmaking by Wesley Washington Pasko (H. Lockwood, 1894)

History of Color Printing

COLOR PRINTING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY An Exhibition at the Hugh M. Morris Library, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, August 27 - December 19, 1996,curated by Iris Snyder

The wonders of modern mechanism, a résumé of progress in mechanical, physical, and engineering science at the dawn of the twentieth century by Charles Henry Cochrane (J.B. Lippincott company, 1900)

Chromolithography on wikipedia

"How Chromos are Made" in The living age, Vol 95 (Littell, Son and Co., 1867)

"Chromo-Lithography" in House documents, otherwise publ. as Executive documents, 13th congress, 2d session-49th congress, 1st session (Gov't Printing Office, 1876)

The half-tone process: A practical manual of photo-engraving in half-tone on zinc, copper, and brass by Julius Verfasser (Iliffe & sons, limited, 1904)

The chemistry of light and photography: in its application to art, science, and industry by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel (London, Henry S. King & Co., 1875)

Commercial engraving and printing, a manual of practical instruction and reference covering commercial illustrating and printing by all processes, for advertising managers, printers, engravers, lithographers, paper men, photographers, commercial artists, salesmen, instructors, students and all others interested in these and allied trades by Charles William Hackleman (Commercial Engraving Publishing Company, 1921)

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Notes:

[1] Wikipedia gives a bit more detail: '"Drink Coca-Cola 5¢", an 1890s advertising poster showing a woman in fancy clothes (partially vaguely influenced by 16th- and 17th-century styles) drinking Coke. The card on the table says "Home Office, The Coca-Cola Co. Atlanta Ga. Branches: Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Dallas". Notice the cross-shaped color registration marks near the bottom center and top center (which presumably would have been removed for a production print run). Someone has crudely written on it at lower left (with an apparent leaking fountain pen) "Our Faovrite" [sic].'

[2] Contemporaries news readers didn't use the term yellow journalism at that time. To them it was yellow kid journalism, after Outcault's Yellow Kid comic strips, about which I've previously written (see New York Sunday comics in the 90s & aughts).

[3] A contemporary account describes the whole process in considerable detail: Modern industrial progress by Charles Henry Cochrane (J.B. Lippincott company, 1904). I've outlined the method of making newspaper text in a previous blog post: Newspaper Story.

[4] In practice, more than three printing plates could be used. There might be one for black and grey tones and another for brown. Where faithfulness to the original picture was important, such as with high quality fine art reproductions, more plates would be added for different prominent tones in the original.

[5] "Photo-Lithography" in The chemistry of light and photography: in its application to art, science, and industry by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel (London, Henry S. King & Co., 1875

[6] See "Halftones" in the same source, and:

HALF-TONE ILLUSTRATION OVERLAYING

By "half-tone," in so far as this relates to printing plates made by the photo-mechanical process, is meant all engravings, pictorial and otherwise, which have their grays or lighter tones produced or enhanced by mesh formations over the face of the engraving, whether these be conveyed through a "dotted" or "lined" glass screen — the usual mechanical manner of producing half-tone effects on this character of printing plate.
-- The Inland and American printer and lithographer (Maclean-Hunter Pub. Co., 1895)

Hall Caine

In turn-of-the-century NYC the Sunday supplements weren't just devoted to graphic stories and comics.[1] The visual, literary, and performing arts also showed up, including, it hardly need be said, theater (or "theatre" as, then and now, it seems generally to be spelled in the Anglophiliac world). For this reason it's probably not out of the ordinary for the New York Herald's Sunday magazine for October 15, 1905, to have featured a celebrated British writer who had a play running at the New Amsterdam Theatre. The playwright was a prolific author named Hall Caine and he was, as wikipedia tells us, "exceedingly popular." His novels sold better than any of his peers and were thus among the first stories to be translated into the first wave of motion pictures.[2] Search his name in a newspaper archive and you'll be given hundreds of links to book, play, and film reviews, as well as appreciations and biographic sketches of the man.[3] It helped that his life was eventful and his appearance unusually striking. [4]

Here is the cover page of the Herald's feature on Caine.

{Hall Caine, the New York Herald, October 15, 1905; source: NYPL Digital Gallery}

His distinctive face, dress, and posture were a magnet for caricaturists as this page of the New York Times demonstrates.[5]

{Hall Caine Caught by a Caricaturist; Novelist-Dramatist Tells Something About His Method of Play-Making and Says a Few Things Anent Bernard Shaw, New York Times, October 1, 1895}

It looks to me like the artist who made the drawing on the cover page of the Herald's Magazine Section in 1905, drew upon this caricature from Vanity Fair in 1896.

{Hall Caine, Vanity Fair, July 2, 1896; source: wikipedia}

Do you agree?


Caine was notorious for wearing what Americans called knickerbockers and the British called plus fours and, after being elected a representative to the legislature of the Isle of Man, would find himself rebuked for wearing them on the floor of that chamber.[6]

The play which was the subject of the Herald's profile of Caine was The Prodigal Son, which also appeared as a novel of the same name. It opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on September 4, 1905, and closed before the end of October. Like quite a few others of Caine's works, the plot involves a love triangle. Magnus loves a woman who herself loves Magnus's brother, the Progidal. The Progidal marries the woman, takes cruel advantage of his generous-hearted brother, and becomes famous and successful in the eyes of the world. The woman eventually realizes her mistake, and, in the end, the Prodigal comes to a miserable death full of regret for his misdeeds. Caine's habit of reusing plot elements lent itself to parody, as in this treatment by a Punch cartoonist.[7]

{Mr. Hall Caine, in "Why Read at All?" Punch, December 8, 1902, part of a series of cartoons. Others include: Arthur Conan Doyle, William Le Queux, and Robert Hichens.}

Here's a review of the production from the New York Tribune.

{Review: "The Prodigal Son, the New Amsterdam, New York Tribune, September 5, 1905}

Other reviewers were a bit more charmed by the spectacle.[8]

Here's an ad for the production.

{Ad for The Prodigal Son, New York Sun, August 29, 1905}

Part of portrait in oils was painted c. 1898 by R E Morrison.

{source: wikipedia}

This is the New Amsterdam Theatre.

{New Amsterdam Theatre, New York, Detroit Publishing Co., 1905; source: Library of Congress}

----------

Some sources:

Works by Hall Caine in the Internet Archive

Thomas Henry Hall Caine, 1853-1931 on Isle-of-Man dot com.

New-York tribune. (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, September 05, 1905

Some Ideas of Hall Caine, New York Times, December 3, 1904.

WHERE HALL CAINE DREAMS OUT HIS ROMANCES; On His Native Island the famous Manxman Lives Like an Uncrowned King in a Literary Atmosphere of His Own Making, by Bram Stoker, New York Times, September 6, 1908.

Bram Stoker in wikipedia

Hall Caine Caught by a Caricaturist; Novelist-Dramatist Tells Something About His Method of Play-Making and Says a Few Things Anent Bernard Shaw, New York Times, October 1, 1895

GENIUS OF HALL CAINE; Physically the Author, Like Daudet, Is the Man of His Books. HIS INHERITANCE FROM THE BARDS The Isle of Man, Which He Has Seen with Sombre and Grandiose Fancy, Described -- Caine Could Be Its King, New York Times, September 15, 1895

HALL CAINE REBUKED.; Protest Against His Wearing Knickerbockers in House of Keys, New York Times, January 19, 1908

HALL CAINE ON WEALTH TO ROCKEFELLER CLASS; Says It Is a Menace to the Individual and the Nation. HIS FAREWELL TO AMERICA King Edward the Most Popular Man Here Next to Roosevelt -- Kaiser Called a Pagan Monarch, New York Times, October 30, 1905

RECENT FICTION, New York Times, November 19, 1904. Extract from this book review: '"The Prodigal Son" is the Strongest and Most Sincere of Hall Caine's Later Novels. Since "The Manxman" Hall Caine has written nothing so moving in its elements of pathos and tragedy, so plainly marked with the power to search the human heart and reveal its secret springs of strength and weakness, its passion and strife, so sincere and satisfying as his much-heralded story "The Prodigal Son."'

New Concerted Attack on the Fame of SHAKESPEARE; TOLSTOY, Bernard Shaw, Hall Caine and Dr. Bleibtreu assail the Genius and Genuineness of the Bard of the Avon

THOMAS HENRY HALL CAINE in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Extract: "THOMAS HENRY HALL CAINE, novelist and dramatist, was born May 14, 1853, on the Isle of Man, of Manx and Cumberland parentage. He was educated at schools in the Isle of Man and at Liverpool. Brought up as an architect, he never followed this profession, but ... became a journalist and was for six years a leader-writer on the Liverpool Mercury. At the invitation of D. G. Rosetti, the poet-painter he went up to London, living with the latter until Rosetti died in 1882. ... His career as a novelist began when "The Shadow of a Crime" ... and real success came with "The Deemster" in 1887. ... "The Prodigal Son" was produced in London, in 1905, scoring a pronounced success. The same play was done in America the fall of the same year, but failed as an artistic or financial success. Despite his activity as a writer, Hall Caine found time to lecture before the Royal Institution in 1892, and to do some extensive traveling. ... His first visit to the United States was in 1895, though he returned in 1898 and in 1906. As ambassador of the Authors' Society he went to Canada to negotiate terms with the Dominion Government with regard to the Canadian Copyright Association, submitting this to the Canadian Cabinet, and receiving for his services the thanks of the Colonial Office. Hall Caine has had a great deal to do with the breakdown of the three volume novel. He is an enthusiastic horseback rider and mountain climber. He lives on the Isle of Man but spends quite a little time in London where he is a member of the National, White Friars, Maccabeans and Authors Clubs."

The Burr McIntosh monthly, Issues 47-53 (Burr McIntosh Publishing Co., 1907)

Public opinion Volume 33 (Public Opinion Co., 1902)

Punch Volume 122 (Punch Publications Ltd., 1902)

Why Read At All?, a portfolio of work from Punch cartoonist Lewis Baumer from 1909-1910, in a blog post by John Adcock.

"THE PRODIGAL SON" PUT ON.; A Large Audience Sees Hall Caine's New Play at Washington WASHINGTON, Aug. 28. -- Hall Caine's new play, "The Prodigal Son," was produced for the first time on any stage tonight at the New National.

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Notes:

[1] I've done two earlier posts on the Sunday papers, one on a graphic feature in verse, called Fluffy Ruffles, and the other on comics, particularly the most visually interesting ones (New York Sunday comics in the 90s & aughts). The two are part of a larger series on New York newspapers in general and the New York Herald in particular. The series began with a post exploring photographs of New York's Herald Square in the late 19th and early centuries.

[2] And, versatile as well as prolific, he made some of his own screenplays.

[3] A search for "Hall Caine" in archives of the New York Times yields 850 hits dating from February 6, 1882, to December 2, 1980, with most (507) clustering in the two decades from 1890 to 1910. Here's a Google Ngram showing the relative popularity of Caine, James Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame.



And this one, restricted to the pair of decades from 1890 to 1910, for Caine, Barrie, and Grahame, plus Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad, and Lewis Carroll.



[4] The wikipedia capsule biography is good. Born in 1853, he had roots in Cheshire and the Isle of Man. He earned his living as both draftsman and author, mainly working for the local press in Liverpool. Intellectually, he became a follower first of John Ruskin, then Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Politically, his views were socialist but not revolutionary. Both his intellectual and political inclinations led him also to environmentalism and activist in a movement led by William Morris to save scenic spots and ancient structures. In the summer of 1902, when his novels and memoirs had brought him recognition and a degree of fame, Caine did not let his radical views prevent him from associating with members of the British Establishment and apparently had no qualms about accepting an invitation to join King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra during a visit to Isle of Man. As wikipedia says, "the Queen had enjoyed Caine's Manx novels and Caine was invited to join the royal couple on their yacht and to accompany them on their tour of the island the following day."

[5] Here are some caricatures of the man.

{Drawing from The New Student's Reference Work (1914)}

{Cartoon of Hall Caine by Harry Furniss; source: wikipedia}

[6] HALL CAINE REBUKED.; Protest Against His Wearing Knickerbockers in House of Keys

[7] This appeared in Punch in 1909:



It was part of "The Chantey of the Nations" Punch, June 25, 1902:


[8] See for example "Prodigal Son Review," Newtown Register, September 14, 1905.

New York Sunday comics in the 90s & aughts

One of the first and most popular uses of color printing was in the comics pages. The San Francisco Examiner is credited with publishing the first real comic in 1893. This was The Little Bears which grew out of a cartoon accompanying the daily weather report.[1]

Though not among the first, the Sunday comics in the Herald were among the best.[2] The most visually interesting of them was Winsor McCay's Little Nemo. Begun in 1905, this was the first strip with an episodic story line: the narrative continued from one weekly installment to the next. Zachary Chavez has digitized Little Nemo's adventures from the first on October 15, 1905, to the last on July 26, 1914. You can see them here:
Little Nemo in the Comic Strip Library.

Here's the first — October 15, 1905 — setting the scene for the others to follow. Little Nemo falls asleep and is called to journey to a place called Slumberland. Each comic shows his adventures as he tries to get there. Review the wikipedia entry on the strip for a full description of the plot line. Click the image to view full size. You can see McCay's potent imagination and his skill as an illustrator and you can see also the relatively high quality of the Herald's printing.[3]



This is the third; it ran October 29. 1905.



This is the sixth — December 3, 1905.


December 3, 1905

The giant elephant of September 23, 1906, is particularly spectacular. This is the first of a three-week set. You can see the second and third here and here, respectively.



On July 26, 1908, McCay drew this walking bed.



Foxy Grandpa was the Herald's first Sunday strip. It appeared on January 7, 1900, a creation of cartoonist Carl E. Schultze drawing under the name of "Bunny."[4]

Produced later the same year, Pore Lil' Mose was the first Sunday strip to feature an African American hero. Taking its humor from racial stereotypes, it's in keeping with attitudes of that time and not at all in keeping with our own. However, there's nothing vicious or much more than superficially demeaning in the comic. Here's a sample from February 1901. You can see that the artist's approach to drawing and visual design are less imaginative and more in keeping with what we consider normal comics than is McCay's.

{source: valentinecollectors.com}

The Herald's longest-lived comic strip was Buster Brown. Begun May 4, 1902, it too lacked the visual imagination and drawing skill that McCay brought to the Little Nemo strips, but it was funny and became very popular.[5]



Both Pore Lil' Mose and Buster Brown were made by Richard F. Outcault whose Hogan's Alley was one of the first and best-loved Sunday strips. Outcault specialized in depicting antics and life-in-general among the urban under class of dwellers in tenement aparments. His first, in 1894, was a series these gritty cartoons for Truth Magazine.

{Outcault's "Feudal Pride," June 2, 1894, in Truth Magazine; source: cagle.com}

In 1895 Outcault moved the Pulitzer's New York World and, while there, he made more prominent one of his Truth Magazine characters, the famous The Yellow Kid. [6] Here are a couple of these early Hogan Alley strips in which the kid appears.[7]

{"First Championship Game of the Hogan's Alley Baseball Team." Hogan's Alley. New York World. April 12, 1896.}

{"Golf—The Great Society Sport as Played in Hogan's Alley." Hogan's Alley. New York World 5 Jan. 1896.}

This next comic shows the Yellow Kid in a Thanksgiving turkey raffle. It appeared in the New York Journal following Outcault's move there in 1896. What was Hogan's Alley has now become McFadden's Row of Flats and the presentation has moved closer to an illustrated story than a simple comic.

{"A Turkey Raffle in Which the Yellow Kid Exhibits His Skills with the Dice." McFadden's Row of Flats. New York Journal. November 22, 1896.}

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Some sources:


Comic strip

Sunday comics

The Little Bears

The Yellow Kid

Buster Brown

Little Nemo

The Katzenjammer Kids

Winsor McCay. Extract: "Most of the prominent comic strips of the 1890s and 19-aughts are remembered today as pioneers. Little Nemo in Slumberland is among the first to be remembered for its outstanding quality. Even today, it is regarded as one of the high points in the history of comics. Winsor McCay was the son of Robert McKay (later changed to McCay) and Janet Murray McKay; Robert at various times worked as a teamster, a grocer, and a real estate agent. Winsor's exact place and year of birth are uncertain — he claimed to have been born in Spring Lake, Michigan in 1871, but his gravestone says 1869, and census reports state that he was born in Canada in 1867. He was originally named Zenas Winsor McKay, in honor of his father's employer, Zenas G. Winsor."

Finding "Little Nemo" by Douglas Wolk

R. F. Outcault

American comic strips before 1918

Rudolph Dirks

What's with the Strips, Anyway?

Comic Book Legends Revealed by Brian Cronin

Comic Book Resources

Richard Outcault

The Yellow Kid

R. F. Outcault, The Father of the American Sunday Comics

The Kid From Hogan's Alley By John Canemaker (Kitchen Sink Press, 1995)

Bill Bedard on “Little Nemo in Slumberland”

Winsor McCay

A hundred years later, fans are still over the moon about 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' comic strip October 22, 2005|By Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

(Arguably) The Best Comic Strip Ever

Little Nemo in the Comic Strip Library

Little Nemo, a musical production; music by Victor Herbert, book by Harry Bache Smith (Cohan & Harris, 1908)

Comics Timeline, the history of the funnies in America

Chronology of Comic Strips and Comic Books in America

Comic Strip Library by Zachary Chavez

R.F. Outcault's "Pore Lil' Mose"

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Notes:

[1] Wikipedia defines the comic strip as "a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions," and says "the Little Bears (1893–96) was the first American comic with recurring characters, while the first color comic supplement was published by the Chicago Inter-Ocean sometime in the latter half of 1892. On January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first full daily comic page in his New York Evening Journal." Here's the little guy:

{source: wikipedia}

[2] The first New York paper to feature a comic was Pulitzer's New York World (1895). The Herald's first strip was, apparently, Foxy Grandpa by Carl E. Schultze in 1900 (Chronology of Comic Strips and Comic Books in America). Here's a Foxy Grandpa strip from 1904. It does seem to display high quality color.

{Foxy Grandpa Cartoon 1904 Children Mirror Sale Joke; source: cqout.com}

The Herald's claim on having the best comics comes partly from the superiority of its color work. Among cartoonists, the Herald's printing was said to be the best (The Kid From Hogan's Alley By John Canemaker (Kitchen Sink Press, 1995). It was also known for excellence in the quality of the comics themselves, as the Little Nemo strip shows, and for its innovativeness, as the Pore Lil' Mose strip shows.

[3] Unless otherwise noted, my source for the Little Images is Zachary Chavez's Comic Strip Library. Compare the first Little Nemo, in the Herald, with this strip, the Happy Hooligan, which also debuted in 1905 (in the New York American):

{source: flickr}

[4] See note 1.

[5]Newspapers stole successful comics from each other. Outcault left the Herald for William Randolph Hearst's employ in 1906, and after a court battle, he continued his strip, now nameless, in Hearst papers, while the Herald continued their own version of Buster Brown with other artists. The latter lasted until 1911 or so, and the former until at least 1921.

[6] As the Yellow Kid grew more and more popular, William Hearst began trying to entice him over to his New York Journal. In 1896 he succeeded and Pulitzer struck back by hiring George Luks to draw his own version of The Yellow Kid. Both strips ended a year later. This was the era of yellow journalism which originally was referred to as "yellow kid journalism" after the comic.

[7] These Yellow Kid images come from The Yellow Kid on the Paper Stage by Mary Wood.

Fluffy Ruffles

In the early 1890s color printing came to the big New York daily papers. The Herald was an early adopter and by mid-decade was putting out weekly color supplements. Here are some posters they produced to advertise them. All these come from the NYPL Digital Gallery. You can find other posters in this collection here.

1. February 1896.


2. Easter 1896.


3. April 1896.


4. Easter 1897.


5. November 1897.


Here's an ad for the Herald's Easter Number of a decade later.

{source: New York Evening Telegram, March 1, 1907, on Old Fulton Postcards}

Beginning in 1906 the Sunday Herald featured full-color drawings of a young lady with the engaging name of Fluffy Ruffles. As you can see her artist was Wallace Morgan. The text, in verse, was contributed by Carolyn Wells.



As wikipedia points out, the 1890s earned a reputation as a frivolous decade. It may therefore seem odd in that from 1893 to 1897 or so, the US was mired in a deep economic depression. But on second thought isn't it pretty much usual for hard times to stimulate a need for distraction, particularly the frivolous kind? Whatever the reason, Fluffy Ruffles had the right stuff for those years. She was attractive and well-attired, poised and quite correct, but also lots of fun to be with. In time, Macy's would develop a line of clothing in her style. There were also a book, a Broadway musical, sheet music, and even a brand of candy named after her.

Here's a full page Fluffy feature with legible text, though, sadly, not in color. It appeared in the spring of 1908 and it shows Fluffy's remarkable aplomb. (Click image to view full size.) Fluffy might seem to have a lot in common with her contemporary, Mary Poppins. They both were skilled in navigating the complex rules of maiden behavior, both were assertive without being also aggressive, and both were capable of accomplishing marvelous feats. Of the two, however, Fluffy was the more flirtatious and charmingly feminine. They were both known for their parasols and dressed much alike in shirtwaists and fitted jackets, but Fluffy was a lot more fashionable.

{source: wikipedia}

The Herald sold a colorful paper doll collection to those who couldn't get enough of the lady. This example appeared in with the December 29, 1907, edition of the Herald.

{source: paperdollconvention.com}

As you can see, Jerome Kern contributed to Fluffy Ruffles, the musical, which opened in New York on September 1, 1908, and lasted through half of October. Hattie Williams played Ruffy. This is Hattie.

{source: NYPL Digital Gallery}

And this is she as Fluffy.

{source: wikipedia}

The Herald pushed for increased sales with ads like this.

{From the New York Telegram August 10, 1907; source: fultonpostcards.com}

It's tempting to think this painting helped Wallace Morgan conceptualize Fluffy but there's no evidence that it did.

{Woman buying paper from newsboy on Broadway, looking north toward the New York Herald Building on 35th Street, painted 1899 by Herman Hyneman; source: NYPL Digital Gallery}

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Addendum:

Satisfied with Fluffy's success, the Herald added another attractive heroine of the Sunday Supplements.

{From the Herald, September 10, 1911; I got these two images from eBay ads}

As you see, the Widow Wise drawings came from William H. Loomis and its verse from Paul West.

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Some sources:

The New Journalism 1865-1919

The Penny Press

Fluffy Ruffles

Six thousand years of history see other blog post

The Daily Newspaper in America see other blog post

Fluffy Ruffles Carolyn Wells (D. Appleton, 1907)


William H. Loomis New York Times, December 1, 1917