Fresh of the announcement by Playboy that they will no longer be featuring cartoons in their magazine, here is a whole slew of cartoons from the early fifties, which in effect was the end of the Golden Age for cartooning. The Golden Age itself must be the forties, at least for the cartoonists. There were many markets and although a single cartoon didn't pay the rent (unless you were working for The New Yorker) you could sell enough each week to get around. A whole generation of cartoonists grew out of this pond of what I call the second tier magazines: the weekly family magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Look and Collier's. Some made it big in newspaper comics, like Mort Walker and Hank Ketcham. Others branched out to monthly magazines such as True and American Legion. Most produced at least a couple of book collections. And almost al of them were forgotten.
For some years I have been searching the internet for digital sources of this type of material and I was very pleased to find a complete digital collection of Collier's a couple of years ago. I have been showing some material from those files now and again, starting off with my favorites. But I did clip them all. So here, in effect, are my leftovers. Funny and not so funny, well drawn and not so well drawn cartoons by cartoonists who went on to fame or disappeared forever.
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