Gustave Verbeek

Gustave Verbeek cartoon

About a hundred years ago one of the most popular newspaper comic-strip artists in America was Gustave Verbeek.  He contrived whole pages of pictures telling cartoon stories, which showed one sequence of scenes when viewed one way up, and the following set when turned upside down.  His best known adventures were those of Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, each of them, as in the scenes above, always the inverse of the other.  His stories are so crazy and his drawings so imaginative that it can take a moment to realise one scene really is the exact inverse of the other.   His imagery is surrealist – long before surrealism emerged with artists like Salvador Dali in the establishment art world.

His cartoons have recently been reprinted (not cheap!)

Verbeek was developing an earlier tradition of rotating heads illusions, in which a head has one identity one way up, and another upside down.  See my first earlier post of that, with an animation, and another example with Santa turning into playwrite Henrick Ibsen