Many illustrations in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century continued to rely on engraved relief blocks. Relief half-tone printing on high speed machines introduced COLOR to mass circulation magazines and newspapers.
(click here for a wonderful explanation of half-tone printing)
(let's look at this video to learn from photoshop halftone process)
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| The Return of the Prodigal Father, Joseph Keppler, 1883 |
Cartoonists exploited the compositional and stylistic possibilities of the new technology. Visual narratives caught the public eye as paper became a cheap commodity and color satisfied consumer's appetites for amusement in print (GDHCG).
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| by Frank Nankivell, 1910 |
Puck was America’s first successful humor magazine, which is to say it was long-lived (1876-1918), influential, and quite prosperous. It published three large color cartoons in each issue, which for the first ten years or so were all political in nature. Later they were increasingly purely comic or illustrative. At Puck’s height, the cartoons were among the country’s most important political pronouncements of the week. In addition to that, Puck played a critical transitional role in the evolution of American humor, moving the art from its tall-tales and dialect-laden roots toward the more urbane and literary humor associated with magazines like the New Yorker. It became a training ground for a generation of cartoonists, including beside its founder, Joseph Keppler, great talents such as Frederick Opper, Bernhard Gillam, Eugene Zimmerman, C. J. Taylor, Louis Dalrymple, J. S. Pughe, Harrison Fisher, Rose O’Neill, F. M. Howarth, Joseph Keppler, Jr., Will Crawford, and many others. (Vulture)
Frederick Opper's cartoons for the Chicago Herald.
