George Herriman, Sports Cartoonist

Most people think of George Herriman only as the cartoonist of Krazy Kat, but he has a large body of other work. In the early 20th century Herriman participated in the development of the newspaper comic strip, but he also drew magazine cartoons, political cartoons, and sports cartoons. One of his first major cartooning jobs was with Hearst's New York American, for which he began drawing a daily sports cartoon in April of 1904. These huge cartoons spanned the width of a newspaper page, giving Herriman plenty of room to draw many different gags. The example above is only a piece of a cartoon Herriman created for the New York American, showing that even in the early days of baseball, players could be very superstitious (replacing Selbach with Garciaparra would be the only change necessary to update it).