A CARTOONING THOMAS JEFFERSON

I was wandering through the bowels of the Rancid Raves Book Grotto the other day and my moistly rolling eye fell upon a magazine that had, inexplicably, strayed from its appointed place to lie on top of a stack of old Saturday Evening Posts. The errant magazine was the February 1937 issue of College Humor, and, picking it up to restore it to its rightful place somewhere else, I thumbed a page or so, then, sitting down to lavish a little leisure at the pastime, I came upon a two-page spread by Thomas Jefferson Machamer.

Machamer may be the oddest of his breed: known as a girly cartooner (or, as Jim Linderman puts it at his blog — employing as the blog title the only swear words his father ever used — “a fine gag, gam and garter artist”), Machamer drew women who usually looked startlingly mannish, unless he was overtly imitating Russell Patterson, which, as occasion demanded, he sometimes did. Drawing in a slapdash manner that skewered his figures with stickery lines, Machamer produced bristly-looking cartoon characters for over thirty years, won the first annual Vintage Sleeze “Lead in His Pencil” Award (probably a Linderman invention), and yet I can find almost nothing about him on the Web.

College Humor, by the way, was no longer very collegiate by 1937, if we are to judge from the specimen at hand. My understanding of the magazine is fairly primitive, but, withal, when it started in the early 1920s, it mined college humor magazines and carted off cartoons and humorous essays and short stories and reprinted them, without permission or recompense to the originators, who, being mere college sheiks and shebas of the flapping era, were doubtless thrilled to see their work in a National Publication. (Well, if they were paid, it probably wasn’t much — certainly not as much as if they’d been adult professionals.)

This issue lists dozens of “Our College Editors,” but the cartoons within, a plentitude, are almost all by known professionals — Otto Soglow, Jay Irving, Dorothy McKay, Lawrence Lariar, Gregory d’Alessio, Syd Hoff, Ty Mahon, George Shellhase, and Peter Arno. (I bet you thought, like me, that Arno cartooned only for The New Yorker; we’re both wrong.) The magazine staggered on through the early forties as a thin bimonthly, dying, finally, in the spring of 1943.

Comments

[Jim Linderman]

Yes Indeed, I'm a big Machamer fan, but your link to my post doesn't work. I have written several times about the artist, one link with numerous examples of his work is here:
http://vintagesleaze.blogspot.com/2011/01/jefferson-machamer-humorama-original.html

Jim Linderman