Observation: Andy’s archive is indeed a very amazing compilation but, like Wikipedia and a number of other web assemblies, it’s not quite as far-reaching or inclusive as it aspires to be. Don’t get me wrong, I VERY MUCH enjoyed trolling through these pages and I found artists who were new to me. But there ARE gaps as well: I could not find an old favorite, Honore Daumier anywhere even though English artists like Gillray and Rowlandson are well represented. Daumier’s nearly 4,000 lithographs appeared in Caricature and Le Charivari and his portrayals of lawyers and other governmental officials far exceed anything similar accomplished on this side of the Atlantic before or since. (see http://www.daumier.org) One can only assume Andy just hasn’t been exposed to this particular graphic genius. I can’t imagine he would knowingly leave out a talent of this magnitude from a timeline that starts with Greek papyrus.

Jumping off point:
For those interested, I highly recommend a wonderful book published a year or two ago called “The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898 - 1911).” It’s really a big picture book that reproduces (not quite original size) all kinds of graphic pages from the New York World in the period when “the comics” were coming to life. The Yellow Kid and the term “yellow journalism” come from this paper in this period, but what this paper did in an age when newspapers were still the primary means of conveying the news (today they’re not even among the top three sources for news to most of us) was to use artists in EVERY conceivable way possible to tell a story or provide background. The half-tone method of reproducing photographs had not been perfected yet and that left visual story-telling to the artists. So quite apart form telling cute stories about amusing, made-up characters in strips of panels, the World also did things like take a full page to print giant concentric circles so that readers could get a feel for the actual diameter of cannon on naval vessels fighting in the Spanish American War. Or a double-page depiction of what might happen to New York City if an earthquake of the same magnitude that hit San Francisco in 1906 struck the northeast. The amount of energy, talent and sophistication put into news graphics has waxed and waned in the intervening decades but what a start it all got off to at the beginning of the 20th century. (Personal interest disclaimer: My great-grandfather was Pulitzer’s managing editor at the World for six of the years covered in this book, and his son, a great-uncle, was a staff artist there as well. But you don’t have to take my word for it that the book is a wonderful one. Just look at the unanimously glowing reviews on Amazon.com.)