ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

[Baseball game] / Zim.

Zimmerman, Eugene, 1862-1935, artist · ca. 1895

[Baseball game] / Zim.
Eugene 'Zim' Zimmerman renders a country baseball game as controlled pandemonium: a gap-toothed rustic in patched overalls swings wildly at center, a runner tumbles head-over-heels at right, a man on all fours scrambles through the infield, and livestock—dog, duck, chicken—scatter underfoot. A scoreboard lists players' names in the background; competing vendors hawk Hard Cider and, in temperance counter-programming, W.C.T.U. Fresh Milk, 2¢ a Glass. The juxtaposition is the joke: rural vice versus reformist virtue, both equally ridiculous. Zimmerman's figures rely on the exaggerated grotesquerie then standard in *Puck* and *Judge*—slack jaws, enormous feet, straw-hat poverty markers—deploying class caricature as the engine of comedy rather than the sharper ethnic targeting found elsewhere in his catalog.

Zimmerman, Eugene, 1862-1935, artist Public domain