Professor Tigwissel‘s third published adventure — Professor Tigwissel’s Arctic Experience — appeared on July 28th, 1875, on the front page of that day’s (New York) Daily Graphic.

Tigwissel creator — comic artist Livingston Hopkins — took his inspiration from contemporary accounts of Polar explorers (and popular cartoon parodies of same). Concocting a polar scenario during New York City’s hot summer, was a bonus. 1875 was the year of the nearly disastrous British HMS Discovery expedition and its attempts to reach the North Pole, as well as the first of two expeditions by the steamship HMS Pandora to the North West Passage, and its search for signs of another Arctic expedition, lost thirty years earlier.

(Click on the above picture to open a version large enough to read!)

The prior episodes in this series can be found by clicking on Tigwissel Tuesdays.

Also, later this week, I’ll post the adventures of another “academic” — the Sophomore Year chapter from the circa 1850 graphic novel, The College Experiences of Ichabod Academicus.

Doug Wheeler

ProfTigwissel NYDailyGraphic Polar Exploration