Last week on his blog,
Mike Lynch published all the
Best of the Post: 1946-1960 postwar cartoons collected in the
Saturday Evening Post issue of January 2, 1960. One of them by
Irwin Caplan may sound a little familiar to readers of this blog. It shows a doctor making a house call—remember those?—and realizing that he'll "have to come back later" because he's "brought the wrong bag." The doctor has discovered that he's brought the little black bag filled with cash.
This is pretty much the same premise as a famous gag by
Richard Taylor published in the
New Yorker. In fact, Taylor used it as the title cartoon for his collection R. Taylor's
Wrong Bag (1961).
So, which came first? The 1960 issue of the Post doesn't give the date of first publication, but a little sleuthing shows it was published on October 1, 1955. There, you can almost see the cartoon on the lower right:
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"I'm afraid I'll have to come back later... I brought the wrong bag."
Irwin Caplan
The Saturday Evening Post, October 1, 1955, page 48
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The Taylor cartoon, on the other hand, wasn't published until four years later in 1959!
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"Pshaw! I grabbed the wrong bag"
Richard Taylor
The New Yorker, September 19, 1959, page 35
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So how did these two very similar cartoons come to be published in leading national publications? It's impossible to say, but Caplan's clearly came first. Was Richard Taylor aware of the Caplan cartoon? It seems unlikely he would have called his 1961 collection
Wrong Bag if he were. What about the
Post? Were they aware of Taylor's cartoon? It's possible that they were and that's in part why they chose to republish Caplan's cartoon in their 1960 issue.
Note: This is
Irwin Caplan's first appearance on the old blog. Follow the link to read about him on Wikipedia. There are earlier posts here devoted to
Richard Taylor including one exclusively about the
"Wrong Bag" cartoon.
Let's raise a glass to the time I documented how three
New Yorker cartoonists drew a similar barstool gag in the post
"Three Cartoonists Walk Into a Bar."
Almost four years ago,
Mike Lynch noted a post of mine about Peanuts. I still haven't finished writing it. But I have written about his self-published magazine
Raconteur No. 7.
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