CARTOON

The word cartoon has various meanings, based on several very different forms of visual art and illustration. The term has evolved over time.The original meaning was in fine art, and there cartoon meant a preparatory drawing for a piece of art such as a painting or tapestry.The somewhat more modern meaning was that of humorous illustrations in magazines and newspapers. Even more recently there are now several contemporary meanings, including creative visual work for print media, for electronic media, and even animated films and animated digital media.When the word cartoon is applied to print media, it most often refers to a humorous single-panel drawing or gag cartoon, most of which have captions and do not use speech balloons. The word cartoon is not often used to refer to a comic strip.

A cartoon (from the Italian "cartone" and Dutch word "karton", meaning strong, heavy paper or pasteboard) is a full-size drawing made on sturdy paper as a study or modello for a painting, stained glass, or tapestry. Cartoons were typically used in the production of frescoes, to accurately link the component parts of the composition when painted on damp plaster over a series of days (giornate). Such cartoons often have pinpricks along the outlines of the design; a bag of soot was then patted or "pounced" over the cartoon, held against the wall to leave black dots on the plaster ("pouncing"). Cartoons by painters, such as the Raphael Cartoons in London and examples by Leonardo da Vinci, are highly prized in their own right. Tapestry cartoons, usually coloured, were followed by eye by the weavers on the loom. In modern print media, a cartoon is a piece of art, usually humorous in intent. This usage dates from 1843 when Punch magazine applied the term to satirical drawings in its pages, particularly sketches by John Leech. The first of these parodied the preparatory cartoons for grand historical frescoes in the then-new Palace of Westminster.

The original title for these drawings was Mr Punch's face is the letter Q and the new title "cartoon" was intended to be ironic, a reference to the self-aggrandising posturing of Westminster politicians.

Modern single-panel cartoons or gag cartoons, found in magazines and newspapers, generally consist of a single drawing with a caption immediately beneath or (much less often) a speech balloon. Many consider New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno the father of the modern gag cartoon (as did Arno himself). Gag cartoonists of note include Charles Addams, Gary Larson, Charles Barsotti, Chon Day and Mel Calman.Editorial cartoons are a type of gag cartoon found almost exclusively in news publications and news websites. Although they also employ humor, they are more serious in tone, commonly using irony or satire.