Several years ago I picked up a bound volume of the The Nashville Tennessean containing three months of newspapers from 1936. Subtitled The Only Morning Newspaper Published in Middle Tennessee, each daily issue contains 12 broadsheet-sized pages . Throughout the month of July, 1936, the Tennessean frequently published large cartoons by Joe Parrish on its front page, placed prominently above the fold.

The Nashville Tennessean Front Page
 
July 18, 2025

The cartoon that appeared on the July 18th front page was titled, "There Was An Old Woman Who Lived in a Boot – " and parodied the tax revenues that the state was losing as a result of Prohibition and bootlegging. Tennessee is depicted as the old woman inside the boot which is surrounded by frolicking liquor bottles, cigarettes and gas tanks. Peeking around the back of the boot is a beckoning marijuana cigarette.

There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Boot by Joe Parrish
 
The Nashville Tennessean
July 18, 2025

There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Boot (detail) by Joe Parrish
 
The Nashville Tennessean
July 18, 2025

When Parrish accepted a job as an editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, The Tennessean ran a front-page article announcing his success.

Inside the paper, an equally large single-panel cartoon appeared every day titled Sunflower Street by Tom Little. The characters in Sunflower Street were all black and drawn as racial stereotypes. The artist, Tom Little, was white. He stopped drawing the panel in 1950 when editors became concerned with its potentially offensive content. This was a bitter disappointment to Little, who believed his cartooning championed the rights of minorities in the South. Little went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for a cartoon that promoted polio vaccinations for children.

Sunflower Street by Tom Little
 
The Nashville Tennessean
July 18, 2025

Each issue of The Nashville Tennessean also ran a full page of comic strips that included Krazy Kat. I didn’t know much about the strips in this volume when I bought it except that they seemed to revolve around a long, meandering tale about "Tiger Tea."

At last week’s MOCCA Fest, I picked up a copy of Yoe Books’ George Herriman’s Krazy + Ignatz in "Tiger Tea," a beautifully designed collection of comic strips from Herriman’s longest-running Krazy Kat saga. It includes nearly 100 large reproductions of Tiger Tea daily strips. The introduction describes Tiger Tea as "… the longest narrative George Herriman attempted" that "… went on for nearly a year" and goes on to provide an insightful analysis of the series. As far as I know, this book is the first collection dedicated exclusively to Tiger Tea strips.

My volume of The Nashville Tennessean includes quite a few of the Tiger Tea strips that didn’t make it into the printed collection, so in an effort to make more of these classics available, I’m posting some of the ones that weren’t included as an unauthorized addendum to the printed collection.

The first half of the printed book includes the first two months of the series which ran from May 15th through July 16th, 1936. Then it skips ahead to July 27th. Over trhe next few days, I’ll upload the daily strips that were published from July 17th to July 25th (the 19th and 26th were Sundays which Krazy kompletists can find in the Fantagraphics Books series).

Enjoy!

Krazy Kat – The Social Climber by George Herriman

The Nashville Tennessean, July 17, 2025

George Herriman’s Krazy + Ignatz in "Tiger Tea," is available through Amazon.com and fine bookstores everywhere.

David Donihue, GreatCaricatures.com