For Week Two of this year’s Back-to-School College Comics, we present a few extracts from The Education of Alonzo Applegate and Other Cartoons, by cartoonist Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling. This 1910 collection reprints Ding cartoons which originally appeared in the Des Moines Register.

Above, the cover of The Education of Alonzo Applegate, showing his start and end of freshman-year selves, eyeing each other.

Regardless of when published — mid-19th Century or Jazz Age Twenties — comics involving college students contained the same set of themes — hazings, pranks, partying, anything but studious activities. When Alonzo Applegate’s parents send him off (below), warning him not to get involved in frats, football, or “Mandoleen foolishness”, you know those are precisely what he’ll be shown doing later in the series. According to the University of Iowa’s Digital Library, Darling himself was expelled from his first college, suspended at his second, and supported himself in his college years, playing the mandolin.

To see a larger version of any cartoon, click on it.

To see prior postings in this series, click next on College Comics.

Doug Wheeler

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