Tammany Tiger: Political Cartoon Comic

John Tinney McCutcheon's cartoon deploys the visual vocabulary emerging in turn-of-the-century newspaper comics: sequential panels, caricatured animal characters bearing political meaning, and speech-balloon dialogue. Here, a muscular tiger labeled "Tammany"—representing New York's corrupt Democratic machine—grins while "Teddy" Roosevelt hunts elsewhere, suggesting the political machine operates freely in Roosevelt's absence. The anthropomorphic beast, a recurring device in editorial comics, combines humor with sharp political critique. McCutcheon worked during the formative years when newspaper comic strips moved beyond single panels toward narrative sequences, establishing conventions—expressive line work, exaggerated features, symbolic animal characters—that would define the emerging comic book medium.