What’s to admire about Shepard? These examples from Punch are all from 1923, when the Hundred Acre Wood was still seeds and saplings. It’s also a time when cartoon captions were often dialogues, and editors felt obligated to tell you which character in the panel was speaking. Ponderous, but Shepard makes it sing.
Draftsmanship is the foundation of all of these, but what really brings them to life is his pen technique. There’s no big fetish for crisp outlines or attempts to keep it “tight.” His sketchy lines define the characters accurately while still being loose enough to maintain the drawing's rough vitality, keeping the figures in motion! He strives for long lines only for the most streamlined forms (a flapper’s legs, for example). It's rare that his line weights get much thicker than what's represented here, and they do so only to convey the extreme foreground.
A History of Punch by R.G.G. Price celebrates the cartoonist: “Shepard’s work was distinguished by movement. Compare any of his drawings of any period with the usual Punch drawing. He does not seem to have depended upon a studio pose or a diagrammatic composition. One feels the studies for the pictures were made on a wind-ruffled sketching-block…Above all he was thinking in terms of the dance. With Shepard the rest of Punch began to look static...Even when the scene in Shepard was a conversation one feels that there was a wind in the room and that someone had just moved and that someone else was about to move.”
Let’s go further into the Jazz Age. It’s 1927, and Shepard has been working on Winnie for about a year.
As you can see from “Emancipation of the Young” in the earlier section, Shepard had a real flair for historical costume and settings. In 1926, he provided almost sixty pages of illustrations for an abridged version of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, released under the unlikely title of Everybody’s Pepys. (Sounds like a companion volume to Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops, doesn’t it?) In anyone else’s hands, the project might seem a little musty…but that “wind in the room” is a breath of fresh air, and makes the book seem almost breezy.
Lame name or not, it was successful enough to be followed by Everybody’s Boswell and Everybody’s Lamb.
Shepard earned a full page of his own in Punch. First, these were traditional political cartoons, but as times changed, his pages were devoted to the lightest of light verse.
I feel funny explaining these to anybody who’s my age or older, but: Ages ago, the first two "numbers" one dialed to make a call were actually letters, referred to as the "telephone exchange" -- MU. EX. AS. -- with mnemonic words that completed them -- MUrray Hill, EXeter, AStoria. (Even the phony movie number that everyone knows had its own exchange: KLondike!) You can see that there are still vestigial letters printed on any keypad. British exchanges happened to be three letters.
The conceit behind these flights of poetic fantasy was that these mundane exchanges instilled in the dialer some wistful memory or Howard Pyle-inspired adventure, solely by dint of digit dialing. These particular verses, written by Jan Struther, were collected in her book Sycamore Square.
His biographer, Rawle Knox, wrote in The Work of E.H. Shepard that his subject’s “disadvantage was that he was just about the last artist left on the paper who drew the classical line. It is true, as Price wrote, that when [Shepard] started to draw for Punch he made everyone else look static; by 1953 everyone around him was moving in oddly comic directions, and he was left looking beautifully still…The new editor was going to make changes. One of his first was to sack Shepard.”
That editor was a gentleman named Malcolm Muggeridge, a television pundit who had the task of adapting Punch to perceived changes in public taste. Ironic, then that public taste would take to Shepard’s (and Disney’s) work on Pooh so well as to guarantee it would outlive nearly everybody else’s on the magazine. The first possible exception that springs to mind might be Sir John Tenniel, who brought Alice to life…and didn’t Disney have a go at that, too?
