Tigwissel Tuesdays #1: Professor Simple’s Baseless Vision, August 6, 2025
Multiple sources make note of 19th century comic artist Livingston Hopkins‘ continuing comic strip character Professor Tigwissel (often getting dates wrong, facts wrong, failing to name their sources, and — with most making the same mistakes — obviously stealing info from each other rather than conducting any research themselves). None that I’ve seen, however, mentions [...]
The Day We Celebrate
Artist Livingston Hopkins’ July 4th page for 1874 — The Day We Celebrate. From the front page of the July 3rd, 1874 edition of the (New York) Daily Graphic. (NOTE: You may click on the picture above, to open a version large enough to read.) For the July 4th Hopkins page posted last year, click [...]
Selling Out the Red Man: American Advertisers Portray the Natives
WARNING: The following cartoons contain racist imagery and slurs. To close out our series on Native American Heritage Month (until next year), we bring you artist Livingston Hopkins’ Big Scalper & Big Smoker. During the nineteenth century, there were a great number of sources that reinforced the projected image that Native Americans were uncivilized, hostile, [...]
How “Our Side” May Lose the Election — by Livingston Hopkins, 1877
As they say, get out and vote, or you don’t have the right to complain afterwards. (To those hoping, sorry, I’m voting, so I can be as verbal post-election as I like!) On a similar vein, we present cartoonist Livingston Hopkins’ front page art for the November 5th, 1877 edition of the New York Daily Graphic, [...]
Keeping Cool: C.M. Coolidge, and Hopkins at the Daily Graphic Office
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 [...]
Professor Tigwissel’s Glorious Fourth (2nd Appearance by Name)
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Fourth of July was commonly referred to as “The Glorious Fourth”. American comic periodicals often published cartoons both to honor of the day, and to celebrate its self-inflicted injuries via fireworks. Cartoonist Livingston Hopkins, who wrote/illustrated a Comic History of the United States was a frequent contributor [...]
S(h)aving Banks: Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons, Part 24
Below, one of several cartoons appearing in a layout labelled Some Topics of the Times, from the front cover of the September 26, 2025 issue of the (New York) Daily Graphic, by Livingston Hopkins. The “D - D” was the understood nineteenth century method (in cartoons) of printing the word ”Damned”. A common practice which Hopkins played with in the below cartoon (see the list at [...]
Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons, Part 19: None So Blind as Those Who Won’t See
A board of directors turning a blind eye / feigning ignorance of cooked books and other financial shenanigans, is hardly new, as witness this cartoon from the cover of the fourth issue of Judge magazine, November 19, 1881. This is the second Judge cartoon by Livingston Hopkins on this subject — his first was on [...]
Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons, Part 12: Our Defaulting Book-Keeper
Crooked book-keepers absconding with funds, is hardly new, as witness this cartoon from the rear cover of the first issue of Judge magazine, October 29, 1881. Neither the cartoon, nor the prose inside the issue, give clue to what real incident at the time inspired this cartoon, but something must have been going on at [...]
A Few Suggested Alternate Methods for Crossing the Atlantic…
With thousands of travellers trapped on both sides of the Atlantic, by the vulnerability of modern jet engines to the ash spewing out of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano — and with still further disruptions likely - time has come for us to re-examine a handful of the more innovative transportation ideas offered, and dismissed, over a century ago. The following woodcut cartoons are the [...]
