Saturday, January 04, 2020

The King of Cartooning

Saturday Leftover Day.

Pictorial Review was a Sunday Magazine Section filled and distributed by King Features. Rather than doing it as an imitation family or ladies magazine (such as This Week or Parade), this was more of a vehicle for a selection of columns (from people such as Hedda Hopper) and other journalistic features. All of the columns were illustrated, some even by big name cartoonists, such as Milt Gross, Virgil Partch, Ralph Stein and Colin Allen. That's Washington was written by George Dixon and illustrated by Otto Soglow, the modernist cartoonist who made it big with The Little King. With up to three cartoons per page, he was able to show more of his range in this feature.

I have shown some of these pages before, although most of those were from online sources (with the text barely readable). But I got a large set of these sections this year and was able to scan these myself. I would love to see a collection of the best of these columns, but I guess I am one of a few people left actually interested in the old cartoonists.



4 comments:

Mike Gold said...

Well prior to all this, Otto Soglow did many illustrations for a left-wing magazine called New Masses (financed by Rex Stout). Whereas this does explain the political tone of The Little King, it is nonetheless surprising to see Otto's work appear in a Hearst magazine -- even thoughKing Features also was part of Hearst. Well, the Chief's money was no less green than anybody else's... when he had any.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

He also had no problem doing ads for Pepsi. Maybe things weren't as polarized back then.

Mike Gold said...

Indeed, Ger. And, of course, there's much to be said in favor of paying the rent. I'm a big Soglow fan; thanks for reprinting these pages.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

If I or someone was doing a book, what would you prefer? Digital, so you can enlarge the text? Large size full pages? Recut in a smaller format? Complete or just the best? Maybe the text abridged? It's not only there, but there is also one with Virgil Partch illustrations (possibly his best work ever drawingwise) and My Dollink by Milt Gross.