Professor Tigwissel’s Journalistic Venture, January 15th, 1876: Tigwissel Tuesdays #25
Above, from the front page of the January 15th, 1876 edition of the (New York) Daily Graphic, comes the ninth appearance of this series’ favorite recurring comic strip character, Professor Tigwissel.
In Professor Tigwissel’s Journalistic Venture, creator/artist Livingston Hopkins breaks form by having Tigwissel engaged in a non-scientific activity — newspaper editor.
Click on the above & below pictures, to view them in detail, and read their captions.
Hopkins was recruited away from his native U.S. to move to Australia, and become a regular contributor to the weekly humor paper, Sydney Bulletin. In an effort to determine if Hopkins might have continued to produce Professor Tigwissel episodes in Australia, I searched the first several years of the Sydney Bulletin. While I found no new Tigwissel episodes, I did find instances in which Hopkins drew characters which looked remarkably like Tigwissel, but were neither scientists, nor had the character’s name. Below, in A Little Hint to Contributors , Livingston Hopkins depicts an editor about to release a bulldog upon a poet, who is approaching the editor with a pile of his work. From May 19th, 1883, this is amongst the earliest of Hopkins’ cartoons published in the Bulletin.
Beneath, we find Parts One & Two of The Boogeebung Boomerang, appearing together in the March 15th, 1884 edition of the Sydney Bulletin. A comparison of it to Hopkins’ Tigwissel episode of eight years prior, shows that Hopkins re-used the art from that prior episode for his new Australian audience, who likely never saw the NYC-published original. Hopkins recycled his own Daily Graphic work for re-use in the Sydney Bulletin on several other occasionsdid this on other occasions — click here to view how yet another Tigwissel episode was altered for replay to his Australian audience. In The Boogeebung Boomerang below, Hopkins has slightly re-arranged the order of panels in the story, plus changed the accompanying text.
The Professor’s tenth adventure will appear here, in two weeks. Meanwhile, you can click on Tigwissel Tuesdays to view prior episodes in this series.
ProfTigwissel NYDailyGraphic
— Doug
