Puck: America’s first successful color cartoon weekly
TL;DR — Puck was the first commercially successful colour cartoon weekly in the United States, published from 1877 to 1918. Founded by the Austrian immigrant Joseph Keppler, it made the full-page colour political cartoon its signature, dominated the visual politics of the Gilded Age, and set the template every American cartoon magazine would follow. This survey traces Puck’s whole arc — its founding, its years of real political power, its great rivalry with Judge and Life, and its decline before the mass magazines — and why its covers still matter.
By The Day Press · Published September 2026
Founding and innovation
Puck began as a German-language weekly in St. Louis in 1876 and launched in English in New York in 1877, the creation of the Vienna-born cartoonist Joseph Keppler (1838–1894). Its innovation was technical and total: where American political cartoons had been black-and-white wood engravings, Puck printed a full-page colour chromolithograph on its cover and a colour double-page cartoon inside, every single week. Nothing like it had been sustained before.
That colour was the magazine’s weapon. A Puck cartoon could be read and understood across a crowded newsstand, its caricature landing before a reader had bought a copy. Keppler and his staff turned the colour cartoon into the most powerful visual-political medium of the age.
Years of power
At its height in the 1880s Puck was a genuine force in national politics. Its Democratic, reformist politics drove relentless campaigns against corruption, the trusts, and the Tammany machine, and its caricature could shape events — Bernhard Gillam’s ‘tattooed man’ series against the Republican James G. Blaine in the 1884 election is the classic example of cartooning that helped move a presidential race.
Keppler built a stable of major cartoonists — Gillam, Frederick Burr Opper, Louis Dalrymple, and later his son Udo Keppler — whose recurring visual types taught Americans to read politics as caricature. For a generation, Puck was where the nation argued with itself in colour.
The field: Puck, Judge, Life
Puck’s success created a whole genre. In 1881 a breakaway group founded Judge, which became the Republican answer to the Democratic Puck; in 1883 John Ames Mitchell founded Life as a more literary, socially satirical weekly. Together the three illustrated humour weeklies dominated American magazine wit and political imagery from the 1880s into the 1900s, each with its own niche and readership.
The rivalry sharpened them all, and it is why the period is remembered as the golden age of the American political cartoon.
Decline and legacy
Puck’s decline came from forces larger than any rival: the cheap mass-circulation magazines of the 1890s and 1900s, photographic reproduction, and changing tastes eroded the colour-cartoon weekly. William Randolph Hearst bought Puck in 1916, and it closed in 1918. But its legacy is large — it established the American political-cartoon tradition, and its covers survive as some of the finest chromolithography the country produced and a vivid colour record of Gilded Age politics.
The Puck covers in our archive are restored from Library of Congress scans, each dated to the real issue it appeared on. Browse the Puck covers →
Frequently asked questions
What was Puck?
America’s first commercially successful colour cartoon weekly (1877–1918), founded by Joseph Keppler, which made the full-page colour political cartoon its signature and dominated Gilded Age visual politics.
Why was Puck important?
It established the American political-cartoon tradition, wielded real influence (as in the 1884 Blaine campaign), and produced some of the finest American chromolithography.
Why did Puck close?
Cheap mass magazines, photographic reproduction, and changing tastes eroded the colour-cartoon weekly. Hearst bought it in 1916; it closed in 1918.
Where did its name come from?
From Shakespeare’s Puck, with the motto ‘What fools these mortals be!’
Further reading
- Browse Puck covers
- Browse magazine cover art
- Richard Samuel West, Satire on Stone: The Political Cartoons of Joseph Keppler (University of Illinois Press, 1988).
- Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Harvard University Press, 1938–1968).
The Day Press curates, restores, and reformats public-domain American printed images from 1885 to 1928 for archival-quality home printing. Browse the archive · Browse by theme, month, decade.
