Mr. G. Hopper — Kansas

Fred T. Vance's 1875 lithograph presents a grasshopper personified as a ruined Kansas settler: top hat shredded, one leg amputated below the knee, arm in a sling, eye patched, ragged coat trailing, a forlorn carpetbag at his feet, leafless trees behind him. The figure is a visual joke about the catastrophic 1874 Rocky Mountain locust swarms that stripped Kansas farms bare — the grasshopper himself rendered as the victim he created. Part of a series of over 100 comic parody prints tied to popular songs, this single-image gag format belongs to the pre-comic-strip tradition that fed directly into newspaper humor pages. Within two decades, artists like Richard Outcault and Rudolph Dirks would borrow exactly this combination — recurring character, exaggerated body, punchy visual punchline — and distribute it in Sunday supplements, inventing the sequential comic strip as a mass medium.