The Cartooning Backyard

 

Valdemar Andersen, half-page cartoon for the satirical magazine Plat'Menagen, 1908.

In August 1908 the Danish lithographers went on strike and were in turn met with a lockdown. Supporting the lithographers, the typographers on the dailies left their printing machines too. To secure a daily news outlet, journalists across the political spectrum of newspapers concocted a daily paper, Pressen (The Press), which was printed by the only ones left in the printing rooms: the book printers themselves.

The distribution, however, failed in that the women supposed to bring it out refused to do so. The postal service had to take over. Readers who even came to know of the paper's existence were probably of a limited number. 

These are our known facts with the addendum that it was on all levels an enterprise that has not been attempted since.

By the end of 1908 the annual satirical magazine Plat'Menagen had to comment on this being its own world of printers, papers and presses. To give it visual presence Valdemar Andersen drew a mountain of papers that never made it out of book printer's yard.

The composition cuts the cartoon into two triangles with the joyous children and fighting animals distracting our attention from the tension running high in the background at the book printer's.

Valdemar Andersen, detail of the half-page cartoon for the satirical magazine Plat'Menagen, 1908.

Are we witnessing a verbal altercation about to turn into a physical one?

The one in the black cap must be Simon Bernsteen, but all four men are evidently portraits with their details of ink spots on the working coat and indoor slippers stepping outside in despair of the mess of the situation. The bald headed one to the left could be Hans Tegner. But did Bernsteen's printershop take part in printing Pressen and were there specific reasons for the altercation apart from the situation at large? Were the formal prints by Valdemar of his shop from the very same year such as this one a positive advertisement as a result of it?

Valdemar Andersen, Plat'Menagen, 1906.

Pressen had no affinity with the paper of the same name that was just as short-lived two years before, edited by and - in its entirety? - written by the author Johannes V. Jensen. He too had his portrait drawn by Valdemar when he had to give up the attempt.

Since Pressen anno 1906 was a one-man show, Valdemar drew Jensen as his own newspaper boy taking his product to the streets. His head is as always placed on the pedestal of a high collar with no eyes behind the glasses. The dots demarcate the metal bars of his spectacles. We are still not and shall never be of his league. 

All in all the outcome made for sad stories, which the cartoonists recognised only too well. Plat'Menagen was just one such example; drawn, edited, and organized by themselves. Pressen No. 1 and 2 were fundamentally their own tale.