Great Minds Think Alike
Cartoon historian Mark Bryant looks at two humorous takes on the same subject – the Siegfried Line, as the German defensive Westwall was known by the Allies, by cartoonists from both sides of the divide during the Second World War.
It is not unusual for two or more cartoonists to have the same idea. On February 15th, 1946, David Low of the Evening Standard and Vicky (Victor Weisz) of the News Chronicle both chose the same topic for their political cartoon that day – the post-war famine that was wreaking havoc across the globe while politicians from the newly formed United Nations, in a fantasy world of their own, argued in the clouds above. The captions were also very similar, being variations on the theme ‘Come Down to Earth’.
During the First World War, three almost identical cartoons, by three different artists, appeared in three competing Fleet Street newspapers – the Evening Standard, the Evening News and Daily Graphic – on the same day, March 6th, 1915. Each of them showed Germany’s co-belligerent, Sultan Mehmet V of Turkey, overheating in a Turkish steam bath as the Allies turned on the pressure.
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