Tag Archives: Humor and Satire

George du Maurier’s Facetious Victorian Girls

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I have no education or background in art, so there are many artists of whom I never heard before I started reading Pigtails and writing articles for it. In most cases it never bothered me that I had not known of these artists previously, but George du Maurier is an exception. Not knowing of him made me feel uneducated. He is the man who gave the English language the word “svengali” and the terms “in the altogether” for naked and “bedside manner” for a physician’s rapport with the patient. He is responsible for naming the trilby hat and the town of Trilby, Florida. His granddaughter Daphne du Maurier wrote The Birds, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie. George du Maurier inspired Gaston Leroux to write Phantom of the Opera, and his grandchildren inspired J. M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. George du Maurier himself was one of the most prominent cartoonists of Victorian England.

George du Maurier – A Young Humanitarian (1887)

George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier was born in France in 1834. He studied chemistry and painting. His passion for art was greater than his inclination for chemistry, and loss of vision in his left eye made drawing easier than painting for him. In 1865 he joined the staff of Punch, Britain’s leading satire magazine. His cartoons satirizing British society were very popular. I do not have the dates for most of the illustrations in this post, but all are probably from the period between 1865 and 1891 when du Maurier was an active cartoonist.

Du Maurier draws like Dickens writes, with plenty of elaborate detail. Du Maurier’s humor is subtle and droll. The caption for Chacun Pour Soi (Everyone for Himself) is “Mamma (sternly) ‘Now, Miriam, say Grace’. Miriam (who, for previous Misconduct, has been deprived of Pudding). ‘For all they have Received, let them be Truly Thankful.'”

George du Maurier – Chacun Pour Soi (unknown date)

Girls in Victorian England were stereotyped as being quiet and demure. It is more unexpected, and therefore funnier for a girl to use a prayer to complain of her punishment than it would be for a boy to do the same. This could be one reason that girls are prominently featured in du Maurier’s satire, but I think there is another reason: girls and women are prettier than boys and men. Du Maurier may have simply liked drawing girls better than he liked drawing boys. In Chacun Pour Soi, he drew everybody at the table as female. In the last illustration in this article, Gentle Terrorism, it was necessary to draw an ugly character, and du Maurier drew that character as a man.

George du Maurier – A Hint (1879)

A Hint is captioned “Oh, Mamma, did you see those pretty flowers in the conservatory? I wish you’d buy me one! “It would fade before you got Home, Darling?” “Would it? Now, Buns don’t fade.”

George du Maurier – An Unpleasent Social Duty (unknown date)

An Unpleasent Social Duty illustrates a difference between boys and girls that can still be seen today. Girls typically enjoy dancing to music and will do so all by themselves as young children. They often continue to like dancing throughout their lives. Heterosexual boys usually do not dance until they approach puberty, and then only as an excuse to socialize with girls; most boys never really enjoy dancing. An Unpleasent Social Duty is captioned, “Hostess- ‘Geoffrey, I want you to dance with that little girl!’ Geoffrey- ‘Oh, well, if I must, I must…!'” Note that in Victorian England, women’s hemlines were floor length, while young girls’ hemlines were knee length.

George du Maurier – Delicate Consideration (unknown date)

The next drawing is titled Delicate Consideration. I have not found the original caption for the drawing. Perhaps the boy playing with girls is something Victorians would find humorous, but I don’t get it.

George du Maurier – An Introduction (unknown date)

An Introduction satirizes the Victorian reserve that requires a formal introduction, or at least something significant in common in order to socialize with an unknown person. The girl is saying to her aunt, “Auntie, darling, this is my new friend, Georgie Jones. He is nice. And isn’t it funny, my birthday is the ninth of January, and his is the tenth, so you see we only just escaped being twins!” An Introduction brings to mind the poem Etiquette by W. S. Gilbert. Note the proper high society beachwear.

George du Maurier – Modesty and Duty in Comfort (unknown date)

Modesty and Duty in Comfort spoofs the difference between beachwear for the upper class woman and the lower class children. At first I thought that all five children in the illustration were girls. All have long hair, and none have male genitalia. On second thought, probably only the two children in the water with very long hair are girls, and the ones with moderately long hair are boys, drawn with some censorship. At any rate, the upper class woman in the voluminous swimsuit seems to look on them with disapproval. The two nude children with long hair (I assume girls) in the right foreground appear to be moving away from the shorter-hair children (I assume boys) on shore. Many of you will have seen the PDF files of photographs at Graham Ovenden’s Garage Press site. A photo there shows a nude boy together with nude girls on the beach at Brighton in 1904. I suspect the children in that photo are from the lower social class.

George du Maurier – A Cry from the Heart (1881)

A Cry from the Heart is about a girl who doesn’t like school.
Little Dunce (looking up suddenly from her History book).— “Oh, Mummy darling, I do so wish I’d lived under James the Second”
Mamma.— “Why?”
Little Dunce.— “Because I see here that Education was very much neglected in his reign.”

George du Maurier – Proxy (unknown date)

The caption for Proxy is, “Proxy — As you’re going to say your Prayers, Maud, please mention I’m so dreadfully tired I can’t say mine to-night, but I’ll be sure to remember to-morrow! ”

George du Maurier – I must have this tooth out! (unknown date)

I must have this tooth out! shows a girl with no sympathy for her sister’s toothache. “I must have this tooth out, it hurts so!”
“Oh, please don’t, for I shall have to wear it, as I do all of your left off things!”

George du Maurier – Mothers Darlings (unknown date)

Mothers Darlings needs no caption. The point is obvious.

George du Maurier – Gentle Terrorism (unknown date)

Gentle Terrorism is the last du Maurier illustration in this post. The Professor.— “Will you give me a kiss, my dear?”
Effie (an habitually naughty girl).— “Oh, Mammie . . . . I’ll be good. I’ll be good . . . . I promise”

Mafalda

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First of all, I would like to apologize for not publishing this sooner. One thing after another keeps cropping up and I never seem to get to reviewing an author’s work. At the time, Quino (the artist in question) had just died so I feel bad that I didn’t get to it in a timely manner. Interestingly, Google did feel the man was important enough to commemorate with a Google banner. -Ron

Azul Portillo – Google Doodle: Quino’s 90th Birthday (July 17, 2022)

Quino – Mafalda

Today [30 September 2020] I woke up with very sad news. Mr. Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, better know as Quino passed away, at the age of 88, in his home country Argentina.

In the year 1964, Quino made a comic strip about a little girl that challenged society. The comic ran for only 9 years, but that was enough time to make Argentina, as well as many other countries, fall in love with this little girl and her shenanigans.
Mafalda was initially planned to serve in advertisements for the “Mansfield” product line for the Siam Di Tella company, but quickly became it’s own independent idea. A local newspaper also offered to publish it with the advertisements removed, but in the end Quino decided to publish his strip in the magazine Primera Plana.

Quino – Mafalda Comic (1964)

Mafalda:  But… Why do I have to do it?
Mom: Because it’s an order and I’m your mother!
Mafalda: If it’s a matter of titles, I’m your daughter!
And we graduated the same day, no?!

The first strip was published on 29 September 1964, one day and 56 years before Quino’s passing.

The comic moved to the newspaper El Mundo just one year later, but the newspaper shut down in December of 1967. The next year the weekly Siete Días Illustrados resumed the publication until the strip concluded on 25 June 1973.

The comic was a mirror of Argentinian middle class and progressive youth during that time period, but at the same time touched topics that are still of concern today, like world peace, communism, capitalism and the way society operates.

Quino – Mafalda – See no Evil

Mafalda is an innocent but critical 6-year-old, very concerned with the state of human kind. She very often poses questions or makes observations about serious or mature topics that adults are unable to answer. She hates soup—which is a running gag in the strips—sometimes used metaphorically for different topics. She’s also a big Beatles fan.
She has a younger brother, Guille, who in contrast loves soup! He’s also a troublemaker and, like his sister, also has the tendency to bring complicated topics from an even more innocent point of view.

Mafalda’s parents are a regular middle-class young couple. Her mom is a housewife—very common for that time in Argentina—and her father works as an insurance agent. Both try to avoid Mafalda’s tough questions about adulthood, work, society and school.

Quino – Mafalda’s Friends

Mafalda also has friends who appear in the comics. One is Manolito whose family owns an almacén (a type of traditional shop), called Don Manolo, and usually represents the capitalist point of view. He loves soup and hates The Beatles. He’s always trying to make money.

Felipe is the oldest member of the gang. He’s a bit lazy and also a dreamer, very often worried about school. He loves to play and likes The Beatles.

Susanita is a very, very girly child; she loves gossip and other stereotypical female traits of the period. She dreams of becoming a mother and a housewife one day which usually leads to arguments with Mafalda.

Libertad—which means freedom in Spanish—is a really short girl, the same age as Mafalda, but shorter than Guille. She’s the most political and radical of the children, often touching upon even more complicated topics than Mafalda. She was the last character to be added to the strips. All the children’s parents are secondary characters in some strips.

Estatua (Mafalda statue)

In the year 1972, one year before the strips ended, Mafalda was developed into an animated series. Running for 52 short episodes. The show was very popular and aired in multiple countries including Spain.

In the year 1976, Argentina was ruled by a military dictatorship; but even in that hard political climate, a Mafalda movie was developed. It was released in 1981.

The last time Mafalda was animated was in the year 1993, with a short series titled Mafalda Animada; it was just a collection of strips turn into shorts.

Quino worked on over 20 different books and comics, but Mafalda became his best-known work. You can still see his legacy to this day in and all the generations Mafalda has touched.

Maiden Voyages: January 2022

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Happy New Year to all our readers!

Passing the Buck: Many if not most readers have noticed that this site has been down a number of times. We do not have the full picture yet, but I wanted to share what we do know and how we are investigating. The problem is that organizations (like the Canadian Centre for Child Protection) or individuals make a complaint and because we are being accused of promoting something heinous, the natural inclination is to err on the side of conservatism and shut us down without investigating. Most people cringe at having to look into this deeper in fear of what they might see or learn. Naturally, there is nothing really to fear in our case but someone in the internet chain is shutting us off without due process. Getting information has been difficult because each actor in this drama is in the uncomfortable position of being accused of either censorship or child abuse. In any event, Pigtails in Paint is switching to a different data center hosted in another country and see if that works better. Meanwhile, we will continue to investigate to work out the weak links in the chain.

Journeys of Gender Identity: Pip brought to my attention a graphic novel meant to help young people in the LGBT community to feel less alone. However, conservative communities have raised an uproar about the fact that this material is openly available to young people in a public school. You can read more here.

Tongue in Cheek: A reader brought to my attention a song featured in the film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983). Like all films of this ilk, everything in it is meant to be a parody. But I had forgotten about this one song called “Every Sperm is Sacred”. In it, there are some fairly young performers singing the lyrics to this facetious work. It seemed hardly worth mentioning but I can’t help but wonder what the auditioning process was for getting young people to appear in this kind of scene.

Random Images: Anna Maltz

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Since the advent of the internet, there sure has been a lot of crazy-ass stuff out there. Anna Maltz says she is an avid knit and sweater-spotter and has published a couple of books. Most intriguing are her knit suits which cover the entire body. This photo is of one of her creations and it blurs the link on nudity. Is it or isn’t it? I just couldn’t resist showing this one and it does have a little girl in it, so it’s legit for this site.

Anna Maltz – Natasha, Peter, Zack and Imogen (2004)

Anna Maltz website

Merry Christmas!

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This is an unattributed photo in the Corbis collection and made into a postcard. This was Christian’s Christmas card to me this year. It is unknown whether the photo is just of unknown provenance or was staged to look like a period piece. The date is just a guess and the Corbis copyright says 2004. Sometimes photographers are hired for a commercial job and not credited so who knows.

Anonymous – Who’s Fooling Who? (c1960?)

Pigtails in Paint wishes all our readers a Merry Christmas!

Random Images: Guy Peellaert

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One of the most interesting leads from one of our readers the past few months was Belgian artist Guy Peellaert (1934–2008). According to our contributor, he is one of the unidentified artists in an earlier post but did not give specifics. Perhaps another reader will come forward with the details. In a sense, this post is almost an ‘Album Covers’ entry as many of the works were used in that capacity.

This and many others are part of a series of images published in Rolling Stones magazine. Perhaps most remarkable is a 1974 book Rock Dreams produced in collaboration with early Rock chronicler Nik Cohn, the Ulster-raised son of psychologist Norman Cohn. The impetus of these works is to create a series of farcical pictures that portray the what-might-have-been of famous personalities. One in particular is extremely edgy even for work of that genre. In fact, Pip apparently knew about it but was reluctant to post it because readers would not accept it as an expression of satire.

Guy Peelleart – from Rock Dreams [#14] (c1974)

The images from that book were lovingly scanned and posted in a blog (Diet) Coke and Sympathy. There was a reprint of the book but, in that version, the image was split by the unsightly crease of the binding. The author painstaking searched for the first edition so that we may have the pristine example shown above.

One of the nagging questions I have is: where did the models came from? The girls are lovingly rendered and realistic. I have the feeling that I have seen that girl at the piano in a photograph before (I believe in an Edwardian postcard). So maybe there’s a real expert out there who could help us out.

Random Images: The Joy of Trousers

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In an earlier post, I included a postcard of a girl trying to be one of the boys. Gender aside, we are human beings who want to indulge in the pleasures of life. Until the fairly recent conveniences of life, the demanding requisites of reproduction and child-rearing for women made it more difficult for them—with the possible exception of girls born into aristocratic families. These postcards were meant to be humorous—it really shows how humor changes over time—but I feel a certain sadness when I look at them. That society should impose standards of dress and behavior on girls so that they are less able to experience the joys of freedom inspires pity. The opportunity to wear trousers (with permission or illicitly) must have seemed like a Godsend. A girl could then engage in exuberant physical activities with abandon and not risk appearing indecorous by accidentally exposing her private parts (with or without panties).

‘What a chance’ postcard (c1900)

Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie

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I would guess that most already know who Annie is. For the benefit a few of the younger readers who may not be familiar with her, she is the protagonist of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. Annie is a young orphan girl who left the orphanage to become the ward of the incredibly rich Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks. She then battled dangerous criminals around the world with the help of Daddy Warbucks and his bodyguards, Punjab and the Asp. Her courage, common sense, and integrity made her one of the most popular fictional characters of the 20th century.

Harold Gray- Little Orphan Annie (1937)

Little Orphan Annie was not in the local newspaper when I was growing up, so it was not one of the comics I read frequently as a child. I read it a few times in out-of-town newspapers, but because Annie’s adventures continued over many issues of the paper, I was never able to follow a complete story. Millions of people did follow Little Orphan Annie from its inception in 1924 until Harold Gray’s death in 1968, and it became one of the most popular comic strips in the world. The strip was continued by other artists until 2010. It has inspired movies and a popular musical. What made Little Orphan Annie loved by so many?

Harold Gray- Little Orphan Annie (1964)

Many believe that the choice of a female protagonist for the strip helped its popularity. Harold Gray stated that he chose a young girl of about eleven years old as his protagonist because there were many more boys than girls in the comics at that time, especially in the adventure strips. A girl would make his strip different and stand out. He modeled the character with frizzy red hair and a red dress after a street urchin he once met. The name Annie is derived from the poem Little Orphant Annie by James Whitcomb Riley. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Gray initially planned the strip about a boy called Little Orphan Otto. He changed the character to a girl at the request of the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, which published the strip.

Regardless of whose idea it was to make the strip about a girl, it was a huge success. A girl in the lead role caught the readers’ attention in the 1920s. Feminism was becoming mainstream, but female heros were still relatively rare. Annie’s blank eyes, and the eyes of other characters, also grabbed the reader. I don’t know why Gray decided to draw eyes without pupils, but the vacant orbs drew the viewer into the strip.

In addition to the fact that a girl heroine was unusual, I believe that a girl who is being mistreated, or who is in a dangerous situation, arouses more sympathy than a boy in similar circumstances. It is in our genes that we should feel this way. For a population to survive and reproduce, it is necessary to have sperm cells, egg cells, and wombs. Sperm and eggs are abundant, but wombs are not. Anybody who has a womb, therefore, is more important for the survival of the population than those who do not have wombs (by the reckoning of evolutionary theory). It may be sexist and unfair, but nevertheless true that evolution has hardwired our nervous systems to be more alarmed by a damsel in distress than by a male in a similar plight.

Another advantage of a girl as the heroine is that it may have been easier for children, both boys and girls, to identify with a character whose ability to fight was no greater than an ordinary child. It is socially acceptable for Annie to be an ordinary little girl, relying on Punjab or Asp to provide the muscle when confronted by tough adult male criminals. A boy would be expected to fight for himself. If he beat the bad guy it would be unrealistic and children would have a harder time identifying with him. If he relied on others to fight for him he would be perceived as a wimp.

Note that Punjab and the Asp are both people of color; Punjab from India and the Asp from an unnamed country in East Asia. I believe Gray made these characters non-white to make them exotic, rather than for diversity. Regardless of his reasons, Harold Gray was ahead of his time by including racial diversity in his comic. This is noticeable in the following strip from 1942. Annie had organized a “Junior Commando” unit to help with the war effort on the home front. The strip inspired real children to imitate Annie’s work by forming real Junior Commando organizations. At that time the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was not part of the Army. It became the Women’s Army Corps, part of the Army, the following year. Black soldiers were not integrated into the same units as whites until after the war. Annie’s unit had boys and girls in the same unit, and she even made an African-American boy a sergeant with authority over white members of the unit! At the time this was quite radical, and the strip aroused some controversy.

Harold Gray- Little Orphan Annie (1942)

Don’t think this means that Gray was the kind of person who would be considered “woke” today. He was the opposite; a rugged individualist who despised government programs, socialism, labor unions, the New Deal, and President Roosevelt. The characters in Little Orphan Annie echo Gray’s personal and political philosophy. Note that in the first strip in this post, the Asp even disdains the role of government in enforcing the law and punishing criminals. Asp, like Annie, Daddy Warbucks, and Harold Gray himself, would rather do it himself than depend on the government. Daddy Warbucks died of despair in 1944 because Franklin Roosevelt was reelected. In 1945 his death was changed to a coma. He recovered and was back in the strip.

Little Orphan Annie was adapted as a movie in 1932, 1938, 1982, 1999, and 2014. It was a Broadway musical in 1977. Little Orphan Annie is also featured in many children’s books and toys. Annie has appeared in the Dick Tracy comic strip after Little Orphan Annie was discontinued. The following illustrations are a Little Orphan Annie strip from 1970, drawn by Tex Blaisdell, and Aileen Quinn as Annie in the 1982 movie.

Tex Blaisdell- Little Orphan Annie (1970)

Columbia Pictures- Aileen Quinn as Annie (1982)

Random Images: Women’s Suffrage

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Among the images in Pip’s digital collection are a number of political postcards. Regarding the subject of women’s suffrage, like most political movements, there is much fodder for humor.

Women’s Suffrage Postcard (date unknown)

Rather than expressing the indoctrination of young girls into the movement, the above postcard was simply observing the practice of putting a child as a stand-in for an adult character. The postcard below probably reflects the very real concern men had about allowing women into public life. Of course this assumes that men have a general distaste for children.

Election-Day Postcard