A decade before Walt Disney released his first animated short, “Alice’s Day at the Sea” in 1924, illustrator Louis Glackens (1866-1933) created trailblazing animated shorts featuring mermaids, anthropomorphic beasts, and political satire.

His career has often been treated as a footnote to that of his younger brother, Ashcan School artist William J. Glackens.[1] Both Glackens brothers attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which played an important role in the development of the Ashcan School in particular and modernism in general. Like other members of the Ashcan School, William Glackens painted realistic scenes of everyday life: scenes that according to critic Robert Hughes were “as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow that froze on Broadway in the winter.” Their paintings were the visual equivalent of muckraking journalism.  By contrast, Louis’s work was cartoonish and often fanciful in style. At the same time, his work shared the critical approach to modern life that was central to the Ashcan School.

Louis Glackens began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist working for newspapers in Philadelphia. In 1890, he  moved to New York and took a job as as a staff artist for Puck,[2] a satirical weekly magazine based in New York. For the next twenty years, Glackens created hundreds of cartoons and dozens of covers for the magazine, in a variety of formats, styles and targets. He created a series that ran for three years called “In Colonial Days, “that pictured Puritans and Founding Fathers in comical and undignified scenarios and often drew cartoons in which cavemen stood in for their modern counterparts.[3]

When Puck changed ownership in 1915, and subsequently declined in quality, Glackens found work as an animator at Bray Studios, an early animation pioneer credited by historians of animated cartoons as launching animation as a practical form of entertainment rather than a novelty.[4] (My guess is that Glackens found his way to Bray Studios because the studio’s founder, J.R. Bray, worked for a time as a cartoonist at Puck.) Often billed as “The Famous Cartoonist” in the title, he produced more than twenty films for Bray. He is believed to have also worked for the Barré, Pathe, and Sullivan studios, all major players in the early days of animation, though if he did his work there was uncredited. Some of his films, most notably the “Haaden Baad” caveman series, built on the satirical use of historical themes to satirize modern issues that he used at Puck. Others were fanciful fairy tales—predecessors of Disney’s fairy tale-based features.

After five years at Bray, Glackens returned to Philadelphia. He continued to work as a commercial artist, though his work was always a little too bizarre to fit the commercial mainstream. He produced illustrations for book publishers, general interest magazines, newspapers, and for catalogs for his childhood friend, Samuel Sorenson Adams, creator of novelty items such as the Whoopee Cushion and the Dribble Glass He also had paintings in the 1913 Armory show, possibly because his brother William was in charge of selecting paintings for the American portion of the show.

His work as an innovative early animator is largely forgotten. His Whoopee Cushion illustrations live on.

[1] The Ashcan School has been tracking me down for months now. One of these days I’m going to take a day at the library and sink into their work. . Not with a project in mind. Just because they’ve been calling my name.  But not right now. I am currently rushing to finish something by the end of the year. Which is coming real soon.

[2] Puck was the first widely distributed humor magazine published in the United States, with a circulation of 85,000 in 1880. The magazine cost 10¢, making it accessible for working men as well as the upper middle class. (The popular Harper’s Illustrated cost 35¢.)  Puck used visual humor to ridicule prominent figures and institutions of all kinds: politicians of both parties, union leaders, high society and ethnic minorities. As the character Puck explained in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue, “People get all fussed up when their own ox is gored, but they do love to have me gore the oxen of their neighbors, and on the whole, I please most of the people most of the time.”

[3] The roots of and problems with the pop culture idea of the caveman is too complicated for me to deal with here, but I’m making a note.

[4] And this is where I went down a rabbit hole about Bray Studios, which led me to more rabbit holes about early animation history. A blog post or three on the subject may arrive in coming weeks.