Kate Carew: America's First Great Woman Cartoonist

Award-winning cartoonist Eddie Campbell writes the first extensive critical biography of this path-breaking pioneer artist.

Kate Carew was America’s first great woman cartoonist, drawing for newspapers in the first two decades of the 20th century. She drew Sunday color comics alongside George Herriman, but it was in the idiom of freestanding caricature that she made her mark. She interviewed and sketched many of the famous celebrities of her time including the Wright brothers, who built and flew the world’s first successful airplane; Marconi, who invented wireless radio; Picasso, the most famous painter of the 20th century; the world champion African American heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson; and the leading figures of the suffragette movement in the years before women won the right to vote in the UK (1918) and the US (1920). Her most endearing achievement was her cartoon alter ego “Aunt Kate,” whom she sketched into the proceedings, turning graphic reportage into her personal adventure from San Francisco and New York to London and Paris.

Written and designed by award-winning artist Eddie Campbell along with Carew's granddaughter, Christine Chambers, this book is an insightful, well researched biography as well as an astonishing archive of Carew's cartoons and illustrations.

Kate Carew: America's First Great Woman Cartoonist is part of the Fantagraphics Underground imprint.