Tad Dorgan: Indoor Sports, Ca. 1923-1926

Tad's "Indoor Sports" drawings from the previous decade tend to be a bit static, and have characters shown in full arrayed across a shallow, box-like space. In the 20s his compositions gradually became much more sophisticated: here you can see that the figures are arrayed in three distinct levels receding in depth, while the billiard table in the foreground acts as a device to draw you into the scene, almost as if you were standing across the table from the main protagonists.

The caricatures of African Americans are, of course, a disturbing to modern eyes, but are they any more grotesque than the Anglos in the cartoon? Note, too, that they are the victors, the clever ones in this panel, and there are very rarely any victors in Tad's IS panels; usually everyone is terrible. So while I concede that this drawing has racist undertones (one character is, after all, referring to the waiters as "8 balls"), no doubt owing to taking place in a racist society, I can't really call this a racist cartoon per se. The fact that Tad adopted and raised two Chinese children definitely undermines any notions that he was a "white supremacist".

I welcome any and all thoughts on the subject!