Vanity Fair: New York's Civil-War Comic Weekly

Vanity Fair was New York's first durable comic weekly — a humor and caricature paper that ran from 1859 into 1863, its whole life bracketed by the secession crisis and the Civil War. It was the American Vanity Fair, and it should not be confused with the later London weekly of the same name whose Spy and Ape portraits filled the 'Men of the Day' series; the two share only a title. Modeled on Britain's Punch, this Vanity Fair set comic verse and prose against a wood-engraved cover cartoon each week, taking aim at Union politicians, generals, editors, and the celebrities of the day. For a stretch its editor was Charles Farrar Browne, better known by his stage name Artemus Ward, the deadpan platform humorist Lincoln liked to read aloud. The war that gave the paper its subject also killed it: rising costs and a public with little appetite for jokes in 1863 closed it after a few years. What survives are the covers — public-domain scans of an 1862 run, digitally restored and presented here at comicbooks.com from the Villanova University Digital Library.