The Editorial Cartoons on Smoking Collection comprises satirical artworks by more than 100 editorial cartoonists at American and Canadian daily newspapers from the 1960s to the present. The collection consists of 25 boxes with the following: items from the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society’s museum exhibition, “Cartoonists Take Up Smoking” https://csts.ua.edu/cartoons/ (including over 120 original artworks individually acquired by Alan Blum, MD directly from the artists and the newspaper headlines that inspired these cartoons); 132 additional original cartoons not shown in the exhibition; over 1000 uncut newspaper editorial pages with cartoons, organized by artist; and local materials related to numerous showings of “Cartoonists Take Up Smoking” across the US. Other parts of the collection include every issue of MAD Magazine from the 1950s to the early-2000s that featured satirical content related to smoking and cigarette advertising; numerous issues of BALLYHOO, a 1930s forerunner of MAD that featured parodies of cigarette advertisements; and unsorted boxes of an estimated 1500 uncatalogued newspaper and magazine single panel cartoons, newspaper comic strips, and comic books with smoking themes. The exhibition has distilled editorial cartoonists’ biting satire of the tobacco economy, from seedling to tumor. No sector of society was spared in ridiculing the failure to end the smoking pandemic: tobacco industry executives; allies of cigarette manufacturers in the advertising, financial, and pharmaceutical industries; politicians, the mass media, and organized medicine covetous of tobacco industry money; and prohibitionistic elements of the anti-smoking movement.
View the slideshow with audio recording of the presentation given by Alan Blum, MD at the combined annual conventions of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) and Canadian Association of Editorial Cartoonists in Toronto, June 29, 2001, three years before the first showing of the exhibition at the 2004 AAEC convention in Lexington, Kentucky: “Cartoonists Take Up Smoking”
