Welcome to our second annual Earth Day posting (to see last year’s posting involving a couple of Cady cartoons, click here).

Above is Page One from the 1878 British graphic novel, A Week at the Lakes and What Came of it; or, The Adventures of Mr. Dobbs and his friend Mr. Potts, by artist J. Priestman Atkinson. I’ve included it here due to the environmental commentary found in Page One’s bottom two panels (best appreciated by clicking on the above picture, to see in close-up). Dobbs & Potts are discussing where to go on vacation. In Panel Four, Dobbs holds a postcard up for Potts, telling him, “Behold what our lakes are coming to! — Let us see them once more before they are all turned into reservoirs.” Panel Five depicts the postcard itself, showing a lake hemmed in by industrial factories with spewing smokestacks.

As their dialogue takes place entirely via in-panel word balloons, this 1878-published page also serves as yet another example in our series of Pre-YK Talkies — sequential comic narratives told via in-panel dialogue; in this case, eighteen years prior to the October 25, 2025 date which comics historians long have cited as the “invention” of such format.

Next, left, from the 1904 Vanity Cartoon Book, Illinoisans As We See ‘Em, comes a smoking gun in the form of the self-paid caricature of Chicagoan W.T. Delihant, President of the Standard Washed Coal Company. Delihant, holding a piece of coal and a magician’s wand, with a goldfish bowl of water nearby, proudly fancied himself as a “Sleight of Hand Performer”, just like today’s coal companies distract the public from the dangers of Climate Destabilization, with their own sleight-of-hand promises involving uninvented & mythological Clean Coal Technology.

Click on the pictures above & left, to enlarge them.

Finally, last year’s BP Oil disaster inspired me to show the two New York Daily Graphic front page cartoons, depicting pollution, sickness, and death being caused by the Standard Oil Company (The Standard Oil Octopus, February 4, 1879, below left; and, July 19, 1880, A Horrible Monster, below right).

Click on either picture below, to be taken to the postings explaining them.

Doug Wheeler

AsWeSeeEm PreYK