Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist

Kate Carew: America's First Great Woman Cartoonist is a carefully compiled, linear history of Carew’s career, authored by veteran comics legend Eddie Campbell, with help from the titular artist’s granddaughter, Christine Chambers. Packed with examples of Carew’s work from across her career, it feels beefier than its 160 pages.

Born Mary Williams in the late 1860s, Carew would work for papers and magazines on both U.S. coasts and in London. Across her decades-long career — during which there were pauses thanks to marital pleasures or troubles, becoming a mother, etc. — she would produce a diverse, transatlantic portfolio of work, ranging from realist portraits to cartoon strips, theater reviews, and oil painting (some even debuted at the Paris Salon in the 1930s), not to mention the accompanying prose reportage. Her achievements and career have been sketched out before, but Campbell’s effort can surely claim to be the definitive biography.

Campbell presents the story in a conversational yet precise style. He treats his subject with seriousness without veering into pretensions. Being an artist himself it is no surprise that he is able to highlight some of the specificities of Carew’s technique and tools, and he does this in a way that benefits the general reader as well as the specialist.

The bulk of Carew’s career was spent working for the "yellow pages" press on stories that generally sit in the milieu of celebrity culture. In the years before photographs were easily reproducible, she was making precise portraits of interviewees. Later, when she began writing the stories as well, her "liberated pen" allowed her cartooning style to become more expressive and subjective.

Carew began by drawing illustrations for stories written by Alice Rix in the late 1890s. Rix was a reporter whose subjects spanned topics as diverse as a man facing execution to the latest developments in the psychology department at Berkeley. A 1987 drawing by Gertrude Partington depicts her as slender and fashionable, while a year later Carew draws her as imposing in a heavy, black Victorian dress. This was an early instance of Carew foregoing realism in order to forge a narrative character – or cartoon avatar, to use today’s parlance.

She would eventually depict herself as "Aunt Kate," signed Kate Carew, a bespectacled and diminutive version of herself, often outsized by her furniture or her sketchpad. This approach transforms her into a cypher for the story and its other characters. Carew is quoted as saying that women’s “features do not lend themselves to the caricaturist’s art. Features showing strongly marked individuality are almost fatal to beauty in a woman.” This standard might be why she chose to make herself so small and generic in cartoon form.

In both Rix and Carew, we find the first incarnation of what would go on to be called gonzo journalism. Carew’s work may have a different sensibility from what we tend to associate with that term, but the main key elements are here, including satire. What is thankfully missing is the overbearing machismo we associate with the genre today.

As Campbell points out, the subjects of Carew’s pieces are of mixed interest to a contemporary reader. Celebrity is a transient culture. She did snag a rare interview with Mark Twain, an interaction which Carew retells with humor — not least because Twain didn’t know he was being interviewed. He would never have spoken to her if he knew she was going to report his words, though he seems to have had no issue with her capturing his likeness. I would have been interested in reading more about Richard "Boss" Croker’s interview. Generally speaking, politics takes a back seat. Like with much literature from the time, one gets the sense that these are characters moving through an America whose elite do not yet define themselves by factions (aside from gender-based ones). Given the large array of names and events mentioned throughout, the book would have benefited from an index page and list of illustrations.

Her pieces on the Suffragette movement are her most radical and engaging. In her interview with Dr Anna Shaw, she draws herself, alongside some sisters, picking up a rock to throw at President Taft, who here appears a little like Mr Monopoly. She also interviewed Sylvia and, later, Christabel Pankhurst. The latter was in exile in Paris at the time. These pieces give contemporary readers a great snapshot of these by now mythical figures of 20th century politics.

Her core skill seems to have been perception of character. This is present in both her drawings and her prose. One of her stand-out portraits is a vivid illustration depicting one of the many claiming to be the “only survivor of the Custer Massacre." The extended extract on her encounter with Picasso is also welcome, not least because, not being a fan of his work, Carew restrains from hagiography.

Carew’s interest in aesthetic developments seems to have stopped at Art Nouveau (though her paintings have an impressionist lilt). She did, however, push this style into a strange, bewitching shape. In her later pieces for Tatler, her subjects are somewhat gooey and a bit bulbous, with toothpick legs, flicked feet, and bendy fingers that wrap around like ivy.

Perhaps of most interest to comics fans are Carew’s strips, which she started drawing once photos could be reproduced in newspapers and illustrators had to prove their worth in other ways via the "funny pages." The most famous of these is The Angel Child, a rare instance of an early comic strip with a female protagonist. The character is ironically named, given that the plots usually revolve around her getting into trouble.

Campbell informs us that the naughty child is a trope that was common to strips at the time — as was the depiction of corporal punishment. A contemporary reader’s enjoyment of the stories may well be impacted by the former’s persistent inclusion. The plots tend to follow this pattern: the Angel Child plays a prank or something similar on an adult, usually her father, which she is then punished for by him, before being celebrated by her mother with a treat for “reforming Pa” through her antics. Whichever adult is giving the spanking is also to be often found saying “it’s hurting me more than it’s hurting you!” To which the titular Child responds, “Don’t be so crool [sic] to yourself!”

I am left wondering about the psychology of a story which depicts a young female character being celebrated by a female adult character for being the repository of masculine violence that was meted out to benefit the man rather than teach the child anything (part of the running joke of The Angel Child is that she doesn’t "learn her lesson," or at least not the one that would be expected of her). I suppose we can presume that children took something from reading this "funny side" of the newspaper, but it is the unspoken dialogue between the adult artist and parent readers which is most intriguing. Was Carew relaying a life lesson she’d learnt about gender dynamics, or the power dynamics within upper-class families?

Tonally, The Angel Child is Carew’s most abrasive work. That is also her at her most cartoonish, and presented on pages where she was sharing space and sometimes the same panel with the likes of George Herriman, tells us something about the subversive potential of comics in those early years of the medium’s development.

Campbell has taken the liberty to recolor some of the original strips taken from microfilm. He notes that in doing this he has had to make some educated guesses, such as picking a red for the dress. Regardless of its veracity, this is a useful approach to reproducing the work because it gives us a sense of how readers at the time would have encountered it. We too often think of the past as being monochrome or black and white, when it was often very colorful.

A notable part of her writing, both in terms of dialogue in her comics and in her prose, is her use of the vernacular. Carew utilized purposeful misspellings, often of the cutesy and somewhat sarcastic variety, such as when she talks of a “dook”, rather than a “duke”. The Angel Child speaks in what is described as a "baby voice" (spot the above “crool” for “cruel”). In presenting people as they are heard, I detect Twain’s influence, although Twain held disdain for populist grammar, whereas Carew indulged in it. I would be curious to find out if this was common in newspaper reports at the time, or if Kate Carew is an innovator in this field as well.

However, vernacular mimicry does require a high degree of experience or empathy with the trope being portrayed, and its real world counterparts. Campbell points out that Carew fails this challenge in her interview with African-American boxer Jack Johnson, for whom in early interviews she transcribes with “phonetic mockery”. Elsewhere, I spot in one of her cartoons for the New York American an Asian man speaking in a ridiculously stereotypical lisp.

These problematic moments within Carew’s work may have indeed been somewhat "of the time," but I think they also point to a sort of unspoken snobbishness regarding people who are not within the orbit of her particular class, and who are almost never mentioned. There are quite long stretches in this book where Campbell retells anecdotes from Carew’s days as a celebrity reporter; these can be charming, and the accompanying cartoons demonstrate that by this time Carew had developed an effective and expressive cartooning style, but they are essentially celebrity stories about famous, rich people, and strike me as often being a proximate journalistic equivalent of small talk. We are pushed far too much content about thespians in the social media age (perhaps this has taken the charm out of it), and so I personally find these historical equivalents a bit wearying.

If I am more respectful of Carew’s work and impact than personally smitten with it, I am enamored with the historical work undertaken here by Campbell. It restrains itself from hyperbole and theoretical rabbit holes, and in this way allows the work and its artist to exist not through a filter but how they actually were. That Carew’s work carries some of the baggage of her epoch, and even more persistent bugbears, does not detract from the undeniable impact she had as an innovator not only as a female journalist but as a cartoonist, too. Kate Carew: America's First Great Woman Cartoonist is a clear and invaluable guide to a historical figure who embodied a pivotal time where mass media, cartooning and the suffragette movement intersected.

"Aunt Kate" became more than a simple moniker to the artist. In the final chapters, Campbell details Carew’s return to California (and painting) during the last two decades of her life, during which she shared a house with her son’s family. She insisted that "Carew" be the middle name of her second granddaughter. She also returned to signing paintings as Kate Carew.

Two handsome self-portraits are reproduced, neither of which are dated. Is this due to vanity or a fear of recognizing the passing years? To me, these paintings are two instances of an aging woman engaging with her memories by studying her own gaze. They are neither overly sentimental nor critical; an attempt to grasp something at once concrete and intangible. Her own sense of self, perhaps. Why would one want to put a date on that?

Upon her death, her granddaughters were surprised to find out about her career, and that she had profiled some of the most prominent high society figures of the early 20th century. It would be many years before a call from a curious journalist started the process of her family and the public rediscovering her oeuvre. I wonder how many more Kate Carews there have been – artists, especially women, who have made their mark on newsprint that has since dissolved, and who have produced canvases which are left collecting dust.

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