For just over a hundred years, the front page of the Des Moines Register featured a daily editorial cartoon, establishing a tradition of Iowa political commentary. From 1949 to 2008, artists Tom Carlisle, Frank Miller and Brian Duffy addressed local, national and international issues by drawing cartoons that spoke to their Iowa audience. The project builds on the existing Jay N. “Ding” Darling, who worked for the Register from 1906 to 1949, project and involves digitizing original cartoons held in the University of Iowa Libraries’ Special Collections to make them available to the public online.
In 1906, the Des Moines Register hired Jay N. Darling, establishing a tradition that endured for a century. Darling produced a daily political cartoon comment on local, national, or international events that it ran, centered above the fold, on its front page. Syndicated and read in over 150 U.S. newspapers, "Ding" retired in 1949. The University of Iowa Libraries had digitized and analyzed 12,000 Darling cartoons.
Tom Carlisle (1949-1953), Frank Miller (1953-1983) and Brian Duffy (1983-2008) followed Darling. The Libraries hold collections representing each of these cartoonists, and under an agreement with the Register, the current project establishes 500 cartoon digital collections of each man's most influential cartoons, collections which will grow over time to include every cartoon published by the Register 1906-2008, a run of cultural commentary unmatched anywhere in length, quality, insight and humor.