Tigwissel Tuesdays #13: F. Opper’s “Our Household Patents”
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This week’s exploration of comics and scientists/inventors, is an extract from the extremely rare 1890 collection of Frederick Burr Opper comics, This Funny World as Puck Sees It (the cover of which is shown at right). Like the earlier, and nearly as rare, 1888 Opper collection (Puck’s Opper Book), it collects cartoons and sequential comics strips by Opper, first published in Puck magazine. (NOTE: Click on any picture, to view a larger version.) The above cartoon page, “Our Household Patents”, would have run on a back cover of Puck. One frequent target of nineteenth and early twentieth century cartoonists, in addition to scientists, explorers, and inventors, was satire of inventions themselves, with a frequent angle on inventions meant to make life easy. Inventions whose mere concept was ridiculous (below, which appeared in the January 1890 issue of Puck’s Library, in addition to being in This Funny World as Puck Sees It), and/or, those which failed to work as intended (above). Opper did a number of such cartoons and pages during his career. |
For prior entries in this series, click here on Tigwissel Tuesdays.
NYPuck
— Doug
Apart from Punch are there any other Oscar Wilde cartoons?
I expect the US press must have been interested when he lectured there in 1882.
Congratulayions on site. I was particularly interested in the Tigwissel feature.
regards
JD
Hi!
Tigwissel will definitely be returning in January. I already have all his appearances scanned, it’s more the “other science parodies” I’ve been interspersing between the actual Prof Tig episodes, which are sometimes a struggle to come up with. The brief hiatus should help with that.
On your Oscar Wilde question — Wilde, nearly always pictured by American cartoonists holding a giant sunflower and drawn in a style parodying the “Aesthetic Movement” — was heavily targeted in the 1880s. If you type “Oscar Wilde” into the “Search” on the top right of this page, you’ll find a six-panel 1883 advertising comic strip featuring him, from Hood’s Sarsaparilla.