President Theodore Roosevelt

Few figures from the dawn of American comics carry quite the historical charge of President Theodore Roosevelt, who leaped onto the page in Judge #1242 back in 1905 — right in the thick of his White House years — brought to life by the pen of caricaturist Eugene Zimmerman. A true Platinum Age artifact, this is comics history at its most raw and immediate, when the medium was still finding its footing in the illustrated humor weeklies of the era. With only a handful of catalog appearances, Roosevelt here is a rare glimpse at how the great satirical press of the early twentieth century seized on the most outsized personality in American public life and ran with him.