Cartoonists of the Lambs

Not every artifact of comics history is a drawing. This group portrait gathers newspaper cartoonists of the turn-of-the-century era — figures associated with the Lambs, the famous New York theatrical club — and it documents something the funnies had made possible: the cartoonist as public personality.

A generation earlier, the men who drew for newspapers were largely anonymous craftsmen. But as recurring characters like the Yellow Kid and Buster Brown became household names, so did their creators. Cartoonists such as Richard F. Outcault, George McManus — later of Bringing Up Father — and Rube Goldberg, whose name would become a synonym for absurdly complicated contraptions, moved in the same social and professional circles, celebrated much as popular authors or performers were.

The portrait matters because it captures a profession coming into its own. Comics had created not just an art form but a career, and a community of practitioners who knew and competed with one another across rival papers. Behind the strips reproduced elsewhere in this gallery stood real, ambitious people, trading gags and jobs. Here they step out from behind their creations — the human faces of an industry that comic strips had, in barely a decade, called into existence.