Fresh Comics

Kate Carew was America's first great woman cartoonist, drawing for newspapers in the first two decades of the 20th century. She drew Sunday color comics alongside George Herriman, but it was in the idiom of freestanding caricature that she made her mark. She interviewed and sketched many of the famous celebrities of her time including the Wright brothers, who built and flew the world's first successful airplane; Marconi, who invented wireless radio; Picasso, the most famous painter of the 20th century; the world champion African American heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson; and the leading figures of the suffragette movement in the years before women won the right to vote in the UK (1918) and the US (1920). Her most endearing achievement was her cartoon alter ego "Aunt Kate," whom she sketched into the proceedings, turning graphic reportage into her personal adventure from San Francisco and New York to London and Paris.