Jay N. “Ding” Darling (1876-1962) was regarded by many as America’s greatest political cartoonist during the first half of the twentieth century. A two-time Pulitzer winner, Ding repeatedly topped popularity polls throughout the Twenties and Thirties. He was also an influential conservationist and visionary founder of the National Wildlife Federation, and both conceived of and illustrated the first Federal Duck Stamp. The Jay N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida, is named in his honor. For more than four decades, he drew for the Des Moines Register and his cartoons were syndicated around the country for millions to see. Ding was a fiercely independent spirit and a progressive Republican who followed his conscience, not party dogma. This led him to take many surprising stands, such as impassioned support for the League of Nations.

An extraordinary number of notable cartoonists have lived, worked or been educated in Columbus, Ohio. In honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding, this exhibition features original cartoon art and other artifacts created by many of them, including Billy Ireland, Milton Caniff, Harry J. Westerman, Eugene Craig, Doc Goodwin, Bill Crawford, Edwina Dumm, Dudley T. Fisher, and James Thurber.

The only artwork Roy Doty really cares about is the work that is currently on his drawing board. This is not to say that he does not enjoy looking at finished work. He takes great pride in what he has done. The fact is, however, that the act of creating now, in the present, brings him such pleasure and satisfaction that he cannot imagine doing anything else.

Doty’s work cannot be pigeonholed. The cartoonist’s society did not think he was a cartoonist and the illustrators did not think he was an illustrator. In fact, he is both—and much more. Since 1945 he has been a successful free lance artist who never had an agent. He had his own television show, drew a comic strip for three years and won awards for his greeting card art. His advertising clients have included Ford, Macy’s, Perrier and Texas Instruments. At age 89 he is completing a book contract that requires more than 130 full-page, four-color illustrations. He draws a regular monthly magazine home improvement feature and a bi-monthly cartoon for a British publication. What has kept his art fresh is his clean line and flawless sense of design. Although much of Doty’s work was published in black and white, when he has the opportunity to use color, he excels.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of Chester Gould’s celebrated comic strip, Dick Tracy. From 1931 to 1977, Gould (1900-1985) wrote and drew the popular continuity strip about a tough, intelligent, and incorruptible police detective who battles a parade of increasingly strange and grotesque villains.

The items in the exhibition were chosen by artist and author Art Spiegelman, a Wexner Center Residency Award recipient, with Jenny Robb, curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. According to Spiegelman, Dick Tracy “brought the front-page violence of the prohibition-era tabloids to the back of the newspaper. In today’s blood-soaked entertainment culture it’s hard to realize just how extravagantly brutal the original Dick Tracy must have seemed to its tens of millions of daily readers in the 1930s and 40s. It was The Sopranos of its day, but without the moral ambiguity.”

More than 50 sports cartoons will be on display as part of the exhibition Let the Games Begin:  A Century of Sports Cartoons.  The exhibition features original drawings by some of the most prolific and influential cartoon artists of the past century and includes likenesses of a wide variety of sports figures including Jack Dempsey, Dizzy Dean, Ted Williams, Willie Shoemaker, as well Ohio State athletics.

Editorial cartoons have a long history but the sports cartoon, as we know it now, evolved as a fixture on the sports page as athletic endeavors became more and more of a ubiquitous form of popular entertainment.  Before television and higher-speed photography, sports cartoons were an important way for a commentator to communicate to the public the personalities on the field or to sum up an achievement or brewing controversy.