Monday, August 20, 2012

Titanic editorial cartoons from 1912

Cartoons and humor aren't always funny, like those jokes I shared before.  

I found a trove of editorial cartoons about the Titanic's sinking that were published in 1912, and I'll share a few here.

These two below, from the webpages from a Library of Virginia exhibit this year, are memorials, expressing a country's sadness over the tragedy and loss.



Other cartoons from the days and weeks after the wreck were more pointedly critical.  These are from a collection on the Super I.T.C.H. Archive. (That's International Team of Comics Historians.)  If you go to the site, you can enlarge the cartoons and read them.  

Instead of blaming the ship's company for providing too few lifeboats or speeding through ice fields, this British cartoon below skewers Senator Alden Smith for his less-than-competent investigation of the wreck in the U.S.

This one, from the Cincinnati Post, and posted (with other 1912 cartoons) by the Hemlington Nautical Society, is an illustration of what the Titanic's wreck brought to the ship industry.  

My question:  if there had been enough boats, would there have been enough time to fill them?  The last boats were launched near 2 a.m., and the ship sank at 2:20 a.m.  "More Life Saving Boats" was just one of many problems that caused tragic loss of life.

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