JUDGE Magazine, June 18, 1921, Volume 80, Number 2068

Cover illustration by Clinton Pettee. The cover has really been battered by the elements, but the interior is clean and full of great work that pretty much no one has seen since Prohibition days. Until now.


From an attic in Maine: Here are most all of the cartoons from a 1921 JUDGE Magazine, courtesy of Stacey Camire! Thanks, Stacey!

JUDGE was a comic weekly from 1881 to 1947. It was started by a group of cartoonists who left their positions at rival PUCK Magazine.

You can see the painterly way that illustrators inked back then. And you can also witness the early gag cartoons, the ones with several lines of dialogue under the drawing. Harold Ross would edit JUDGE for a few months in the 1920s. He left to create The New Yorker magazine, where the modern one-line gag cartoon came to fruition.

Some of these cartoons still hold up. And all are so well drawn that I blew each one up real big to look at those inky lines.

There was a European cartoon section here, with most all of the cartoonists uncredited (but the overseas publications where they first appeared did get a nod).

Drawing below by Orson Lowell:

A.S. Foster:

W.G. Farr:

John Conacher:

R.B. Fuller:

Art Helfant:

Paul Reily:

James Hammon:

J. Norman Lynd:

A.B. Walker:

Uncredited cartoon from The London Mail:

Uncredited cartoon from Le Rire:

German illustrator Fliegende Blaetter:

Uncredited from Le Journal Amusant:

Uncredited from Kasper:

Uncredited from Passing Show:

Uncredited (at least I can't make out the signature) from The Tatler:

Uncredited from Kasper:

Cleansing the cartoon palate: The Shakespeare Pageant as Presented by Famous Players of the Actors' Equity Association:

Percy Crosby:

R.B. Fuller:

Don Herold:

Paul Reilly: