A University of Arkansas at Little Rock faculty member has published an article examining the lost art of paid cartoon advertising rampant in Arkansas politics in the mid-20th century. 

Dusty Higgins, instructor of digital arts at UA Little Rock, and his former professor, Janine Parry, professor of political science at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, co-authored the paper, “Arkansas’s Campaign Cartoon Advertisements, 1942-1970,” which ran in the 2018 autumn issue of “Arkansas Historical Quarterly.”

Higgins and Parry reviewed 23 examples of one-panel paid political cartoon ads, which candidates and political parties paid to have placed in hundreds of newspapers across the state between 1942 to 1970. Higgins and Parry have placed the article and cartoons in a publicly-accessible slide show. The cartoons featured in the slideshow tell us a lot about the state’s politics at mid-century, Parry said, making them lively additions to the Arkansas Politics course she has taught for more than 20 years.

“The cartoons strike a populist note, urging voters not to be manipulated by Arkansas’s political powerbrokers,” she said. “That’s the central way that these cartoonists – and the campaigns that hired them – left us a rich record. We’re thrilled finally to share it with others.”

In post-World War II Arkansas, hundreds of original, bitingly satirical political messages appeared as paid cartoon ads in the state’s newspapers during election season. Peaking in the 1960s, it has been decades since Arkansans have seen cartoon-style advertisements, but they used to be as familiar as today’s television spots.

Arkansas’s experience with cartoon campaign ads probably was unusually rich, according to the authors. Although cartoons were used in campaigns elsewhere—including sequential art treatments on behalf of presidential candidates Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman—Parry and Higgins propose that it likely remained a common practice decades longer in Arkansas than elsewhere because television was slower to emerge as the central form of political communication.

Although the ads were not signed, the available record suggests most can be attributed to the two best-known Arkansas editorial cartoonists of the 20th century, Jon Kennedy and George Fisher. Kennedy drew for the Arkansas Democrat for almost 50 years, Fisher for the Arkansas Gazette. From the 1940s through the 1960s, both artists moonlighted for parties and candidates using the same single-panel cartoon medium they used at the newspapers for which they worked, a practice anathema to later journalists’ professional ethics, but acceptable – even expected – at the time.

“Kennedy and Fisher were both incredibly talented, very important figures during the golden ages for newspapers,” Higgins said. “Technical limitations made illustrations and cartoons a much more viable option in terms of production for newspaper graphics and ads during this period, which likely helped contribute to their use and popularity. These cartoons were the Daily Show, Colbert Report and Jon Oliver’s of their day.”

Higgins did extensive research into the artistic style of Kennedy and Fisher to identify which drawings the two most likely were responsible for. However, identifying the drawings became complicated by the fact that the authors tried to hide their involvement with the political ads.

“It’s difficult to say with absolute certainty that Kennedy and Fisher did all these campaign cartoons we identified,” Higgins said. “I was able to discuss this with Kennedy before his death in 2014. He didn’t agree with some of these ads politically, but it was a commercial art job to him, so he would try to alter his drawing style in an effort to avoid identifying himself with some of the drawings.”

Higgins was able to find clues to the artists’ identities in the way they tried to disguise their drawing.

“Most artists, especially in these quick commercial jobs will take the most direct route to hide their unique style, which is to slightly alter the rendering of the art, but the foundations of how their unique approach to form remain,” he said. “Through comparing the ads with the extensive library of known works by Kennedy and Fisher, a few distinctive characteristics in their work arose, such as subtle variations in the way they wrote certain block letters like the ‘s.’ These subtle artistic fingerprints can be easily overlooked, but provide valuable insight when it comes to identifying the artist.”