Click here for yesterday’s post: Walt Kelly’s 1960 Christmas Cards

1961 Christmas Card by Walt Kelly
Front
5 1/4" w x 4" h

1961 Christmas Card by Walt Kelly
Inside
8 1/4" w x 2 1/2" h

Walt Kelly was creating Christmas Comics years before Pogo was syndicated. Some of his best stories are included in The Great Treasury of Christmas Comic Book Stories, available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other fine comic shops and bookstores. This handsome edition keeps the tradition of Christmas comics alive with a warm-hearted collection of classics from the 1940s and 50s by Kelly and many other artists.

Click here for BookSteve’s review!

More Tomorrow …

What better way to celebrate Christmas, than with one of the Nineteenth Century’s real Scrooges — monopolist & stock market manipulator William H. Vanderbilt — performing a hostile corporate takeover of the North Pole, and displacing that red-suited socialist Santa Claus with a Kringle who understands how the “free”-market is better when controlled, manipulated, and best of all — not given away for “Free!”

And so, as our Christmas gift to you, we resume our presentation of artist Charles Jay Taylor‘s 1881-82 series of sequential comic strip adventures starring William Vanderbilt (for previous episodes, click here). Today’s installment — the eleventh strip in the series — is William H. as Santa Claus, published on the front page of the December 15th, 1882 issue of the (New York) Daily Graphic. The subject matter being poked at here, is that Vanderbilt, who controlled the train & subway systems of New York City, temporarily reduced the cost of a train fare to five cents for the holidays, and so was being parodied as a miser-Santa Claus (at this point, I guess, he’d already done so much bad, that he just couldn’t win with cartoonists or the public).

Click on the below pictures, to open versions large enough to read.

In the First Panel above, we see W.H. dressed as Santa Claus, entering a bedroom via the chimney, awakening/frightening fellow stock market manipulator Russell Sage. Sage exclaims, “Look here now, Bill, you can’t Nickel Plate me. Git!” Vanderbilt responds, “Well, if I don’t, Russell, Old Nick’ll plate you.”

In Panel Two, Vanderbilt points to a Christmas stocking, into which he’s stuffed “XMas: The Public B-” (in reference to his infamous “The Public Be Damned!” comment of two months earlier), adding, “I think the public got all they want this Xmas.”

Panel Three — referencing Vanderbilt’s famous Sept 1882 NYC horse race, we see Vanderbilt/Santa Claus attempting to gift his horse with “Condition Powder for Fast Time”, to which his (talking) horse tells him, “That won’t do me any good, Bill. If you want fast time don’t send me on the circuit — give me a private trial and let Eastman time me.”

Panel Four, in a double-reference to the horse race against rival Frank Work, and Vanderbilt’s train fare change, W.H.V. Claus is shown attempting to get his two race horses up to speed — “Get Up! You darling little reindeers — Santa Claus has got to get around among the boys this Xmas if it takes all Summer. Maybe my team don’t get along as quick in the same time as Work’s, but mine cost more.”

In Panel Five, Vanderbilt Claus, with his sack and brandishing shears, peeks over a wall labeled “Wall Street”, speaking to a group of lambs (Wall Street lingo for naive investors/suckers, to be sheared/swindled — click here for reference), saying to them, “Boys what you want this beautiful Holiday are overcoats. Might I suggest a Nickel Plater.” One lamb replies, “Lake Shore preferred, Bill.” (Lake Shore was one of Vanderbilt’s rail lines.) Another lamb, in reference to the practice of “watering stock” by falsely inflating its value with junk when selling it, says, “No more water in mine, William.”

Panel Six again refers to Vanderbilt’s “The Public Be Damned!” comment (made on a Chicago-bound train), while Panel Seven depicts W.H. as Capitalist Claus, stating “Talk about the Old Santa Claus making dolls, why I made 20,000,000 dolls” (meaning dollars) “myself this year. I always bring back my bag full while the other Claus empties his. Ta, ta!”

The large central panel depicts W.H. carrying a sack of “nickel plates” (his five cent train fares), a topic C.J. Taylor would take aim at again three days later, in the below December 18th, 1882 Daily Graphic cartoon.

Merry Christmas!

Doug Wheeler

NYDailyGraphic financial reform

1960 Christmas Card by Walt Kelly
Front

5 1/2"" w x 4 1/4" h

1960 Christmas Card by Walt Kelly
Inside
8 1/4"" w x 2 1/4" h

Walt Kelly was creating Christmas Comics years before Pogo was syndicated. Some of his best stories are included in The Great Treasury of Christmas Comic Book Stories, available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other fine comic shops and bookstores. This handsome edition keeps the tradition of Christmas comics alive with a warm-hearted collection of classics from the 1940s and 50s by Kelly and many other artists.

Click here for BookSteve’s review!

More Tomorrow …

The only thing better than getting Christmas cards in the mail is getting them from cartoonists! Sadly, in our age of e-cards, rising postage costs and Facebook, the art of the Christmas card is going the way of the crow-quill pen. It used to be customary for cartoonists to craft a card, but apart from a few undaunted and treasured throwbacks (like Roy Doty), that practice is largely lost to a generational shift.

Speaking of Roy Doty, Hogan’s Alley has a huge archive of his cards, which range from amazing to mind-boggling. Here’s one example, from 1987:

But there’s lots more holiday fun to see. Consider these gems from “Little Orphan Annie” creator Harold Gray:

You can see a smorgasbord of Gray’s Christmas cards here.

And in 2009, we looked at the decades of Christmas cards created by one of the most inventive cartoonists working, Arnold Roth. Here’s one example:

But you can see a lot more of his mini-masterpieces here.

This year, we took a look at more than four decades of Christmas cards by “Hagar the Horrible” creator Dik Browne. More than just cards, they really chronicle the story of his adult life, from newly married to grandfather. One example:

You can see the rest of the cards here. And at the bottom of that page, you’ll see links to many past Christmas-themed goodies, courtesy of your pals at Hogan’s Alley.

All the best to you in 2011, and one of my New Year’s resolutions is to be a more diligent SuperITCH blogger!

Happy Holidays to all of the I.T.C.H. bloggers and readers!

Walt Kelly celebrated Christmas throughout the 1950s and 60s with a wonderful series of Christmas cards that reproduced his annual Christmas strip with a splash of color. The cards were printed on deckle-edged, letter-size sheets and folded in quarters to fit in envelopes for mailing.

1954

1954 Christmas Card by Walt Kelly
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5 1/2"" w x 4 1/4" h

1954 Christmas Card by Walt Kelly
Inside
8 1/4"" w x 2 1/4" h

Details of 1954 Christmas Card

1956

Pogo Christmas Day Comic Strip by Walt Kelly
December 25, 2025
7" w x 2" h

1956 Christmas Card by Walt Kelly
Front
5 1/4" w x 4" h

1956 Christmas Card by Walt Kelly
Inside
8 1/4" w x 2 1/2" h

Walt Kelly was creating Christmas Comics years before Pogo was syndicated. Some of his best stories are included in The Great Treasury of Christmas Comic Book Stories, available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other fine comic shops and bookstores. This handsome edition keeps the tradition of Christmas comics alive with a warm-hearted collection of classics from the 1940s and 50s by Kelly and many other artists.

Click here for BookSteve’s review!

More Tomorrow …

With the Civil War ended, the Union Army was free to concentrate on the conquest of Western native tribes (plus the re-conquest of tribes that had become “western”, by virtue of being forcibly re-settled west, after their lands in the east had been stolen.) Depictions were rampant of murderous savages commiting acts of senseless violence, against innocent whites who were merely exercising their God-given right to take from natives everything they had. For our second post for Native American Heritage Month, below are a few examples.

First up, illustrated by Frank Bellew (Sr.), The Massacre of General Canby — The Murderers and Their Allies, on the front page of the April 23rd, 1873 issue of the (New York) Daily Graphic.

Click on any picture, to open larger versions.

WARNING: The following cartoons contain racist imagery and slurs.

Next, from the rear cover of the August 7th, 1878 issue of Puck magazine, Oh! Oh! Howard! , by Puck‘s founder, cartoonist Joseph Keppler, Sr.

Above, The Indian “Difficulty”, by the senior Keppler, again, found on the front cover of tha January 22nd, 1879 issue of Puck. Left (click on it to enlarge it), the prose piece in the January 22, 2026 Puck issue, detailing what the above cartoon is satirizing. The article and cartoon are taking Generals Schurz and Sheridan to task, for neglecting the welfare of relocated indians. Right and below, three-and-a-half years later, Puck proves its fickleness/lack of memory, with a text bit plus cartoon, complaining about the resettled indians being “lazy”, with Uncle Sam needing to feed them (neglecting the fact that they were perfectly self-reliant, before the U.S. corraled the tribes into reservations/

ghettoes, on unproductive land for farming, with not enough game to hunt). The cartoon — A Losing Business — is by Frederick Burr Opper, who imagines a wealth of food stocks being given to the natives — far from the reality of the situation, in which the government left them freeze and starve.

Next, below, two Currier & Ives plates, titled A Howling Swell, showing Buffalo Bill escorting a British “Swell” (Dude) on an excursion in the prairies, and encounting “Injun” trouble. I’m uncertain of the date, though I suspect it to be around the time of — or soon after — Buffalo Bill’s tour of England (1887 — click here to find my article from this past Spring, on British and American cartoonists’ coverage of the Meeting of Buffalo Bill and Queen Victoria).

Click here, if you missed last Monday’s Native American Heritage article. Next Monday, we’ll have another new entry in this series.

Doug Wheeler

NYDailyGraphic BellewSr KepplerSr NYPuck NativeAmericanHistory