Posted by 
Winsor McCay (right)
Let me explain why Craig Yoe is so proud of this book:
Louis Raemaekers’ “Seduction” (1916)When Louis Raemaekers’ drawings first appeared in the Amsterdam Telegraaf in the early days of the first Great War, the Germans offered a 12,000-guilder bounty for the Dutch cartoonist, dead or alive.
And when you look at “Seduction” almost a century later — the smug malice in the German’s slouch, the taut chain around Liberty’s neck, the harrowing sense that the depravity has just begun — you can understand the Imperial Government’s outrage and panic. When Raemaekers bent over his board, J. Murray Allison wrote in 1919, “the pencil in his hands becomes an avenging sword, because by it millions of people have been aroused to a clear-cut realization of the fact that the issue of this war is no less than Slavery and Autocracy versus Freedom and Democracy.”
If Raemaekers was perhaps the most famous of the anti-German propagandists, he had austere company, as Craig Yoe deftly illustrates in The Great Anti-War Cartoons from Fantagraphics.
Winsor McCay (1917)
France’s Lubin de Beauvais, Italy’s Giuseppe Scalarini, The Netherlands’ Albert Hahn Sr., and America’s Robert Minor, Winsor McCay and Art Young were all at the top of their game, producing the poster-quality illustrations that moved the masses, ended political careers … and confronted the atrocities of war.
