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Agag cartoon (alsopanel cartoon,single-panel cartoon, orgag panel) is most often a single-panelcartoon, usually including a caption beneath the drawing. In some cases, dialogue may appear inspeech balloons, following the common convention ofcomic strips. A pantomime cartoon carries no caption (see also:pantomime comics).
As the name implies—"gag" being a show business term for a comedic idea—these cartoons are most often intended to provoke laughter. Popular magazines that have featured gag cartoons includePunch,The New Yorker andPlayboy. Some publications, such asHumorama, have used cartoons as the main focus of the magazine, rather than articles and fiction.
Captions are usually concise, to fit on a single line. Gag cartoons of the 1930s and earlier occasionally had lengthy captions, sometimes featuring dialogue between two characters depicted in the drawing; over time, cartoon captions became shorter.[citation needed]
In the mid-1950s, gag cartoonists found a new market with the introduction of highly popularstudio cards in college bookstores. Single-panel cartoons have been published on various products, such as coffee mugs and cocktail napkins.
Traditionally, newspapers and magazines printed cartoons in black and white, but this changed in the 1950s whenPlayboy began to feature full-page, full-color cartoons in every issue.
There are numerous collections of cartoons in both paperback and hardcover, notablyThe New Yorker collections.From 1942 to 1971, the cartoonist-novelist Lawrence Lariar edited the annualBest Cartoons of the Year collections.[1]
A well-known 1928 cartoon inThe New Yorker, drawn byCarl Rose and captioned byE. B. White, shows a mother trying to convince her young daughter to finish her meal. "It's broccoli, dear." "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it", which have created anidiom in English language.
CartoonistCharles Addams drew his first gag cartoon forThe New Yorker in 1932, and in 1937 started inventing a set of macabre characters which came to be known asThe Addams Family. This was turned into a1960s television series which ran for two years, in an agreement in which Addams gave his characters names and more developed characteristics.
CartoonistTed Key created a gag panel about a bossy maid namedHazel forThe Saturday Evening Post in 1943. This also was made into a1960s television series, which ran for five years.
There are some well-established setups used regularly in gag cartoons.
