Making Fun of Sport: James Fitzmaurice, Robert Ripley, and the Art of Sport Cartooning in Vancouver, 1907-1918

This study looks at the emergence of newspaper sport cartooning in the early twentieth century through a comparison of the parochial images of Vancouver British Columbia cartoonist James Fitzmaurice and the syndicated American sports cartoons of Robert Ripley. The study examines the working lives of the best known American sport cartoonists and then focuses on the work of Vancouver Province staff cartoonist James B. Fitzmaurice during the prewar period and how these images grew out of local experience. With the arrival of the syndicated sports cartoons of New York City cartoonist Robert Ripley in 1914, Vancouver readers are given "world of sport" images that differed from the more eclectic visual meanings tied to local experience that characterized Fitzmaurice's work. This study suggests that the contrast between Fitzmaurice and Ripley marks the difference between two levels of sport culture consumption and that visual culture acted as an important conduit for the growth of shared international sport consciousness.