The variety of methods for keeping cool before the age of air-conditioning, could be an endless source of inspiration for early cartoonists (who, due to the nature of deadlines, may have been producing these in the winter!)

Below, from 1883, a series of trade cards by one of our eternal favorites, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, who is forever immortalized as the creator of the great American painting, Dogs Playing Poker.

Another favorite here, is cartoonist Livingston Hopkins, known best as the creator of the 1870s to 1880s comic strip character, Professor Tigwissel. Below, on the front page of the July 17, 2025 issue of the (New York) Daily Graphic, Hopkins shows the Daily Graphic’s staff attempting to cope with the Terrible Effects of the Hot Weather at the Graphic Office.

Click on below picture, to open a version large enough to read.

The above includes in its depiction (which I’ve extracted below to hilight it) a gathering of the Daily Graphic’s contributing cartoonists, inundating the Graphic’s editor with their versions of Hot Summer Weather cartoons (prompting him to bring out a rifle and a club). The central tall figure weariung a stove pipe hat, is Frank Bellew, Sr., identifiable not only via the large triangle on the side of the portfolio he is carrying (Bellew’s signature often was just a triangle), but by the fact that Hopkins previously depicted Bellew in the now extremely rare New York comic weekly, Wild Oats. According to comics historian William Murrell, in Volume 2 of his A History of American Graphic Humor(MacMillan Company, 1938, page 26), Hopkins created a series of caricatures of his fellow Wild Oats cartoonists, each accompanied by parody biographies. Murrell reproduces two of these caricatures, one being a cartoon of Frank Bellew which somewhat mirrors Hopkins’ drawing of Bellew shown here, down to the portfolio with a triangle on it.

Murrell also reproduces Hopkins’ Wild Oats depiction of walrus-mustached cartoonist Edward Jump, shown in our Daily Graphic cartoon as the shortest person of those immediately behind Bellew. Jump’s face here so closely matches that of Hopkins’ drawing of him in Wild Oats, that it could have been traced. In Wild Oats, however, Jump is shown wearing winter hat, jacket and boots, to play upon his walrus-like mustache. Here, his clothes have of course changed for the hot summer weather theme. The entire problem here though, is, Jump never worked for the Daily Graphic. Which raises the question of just which of the artists here depicted, actually were Daily Graphic cartoonists, versus how many simply involve Hopkins making use of his prior Wild Oats caricatures. As I’ve been unable to identify any of the other cartoonists shown (anyone out there know recognize some of them?), it’s an open question.

Prior postings of Victorian Age Summer Cartoons can be found by clicking on the hyperlink. Starting in two weeks, we’ll begin serialization of the 1847 graphic novel of a family’s Summer Vacation, London Out of Town.

Doug Wheeler

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