Thanksgiving Puck

Bryant Baker's cover for Puck's Thanksgiving issue depicts a small Pilgrim boy — rosy-cheeked, buckle-hatted, grinning — briskly sharpening a carving knife while a massively overfed turkey stands locked in wooden stocks branded 1910. The bird sweats visibly, eye wide with alarm, tail feathers fanned in baroque splendor behind it. In the harbor distance, sailboats and a colonial village settle under a harvest-yellow sky. The joke is pure calendar gallows humor: the year itself is the prisoner, the turkey its stand-in, and Thanksgiving the appointed execution. Baker's draftsmanship is confident and his color saturated. The image carries no ethnic caricature unusual for its era — its targets are the year and the bird, nothing more.