The Press: Comic Citizen

After 49 years of political cartooning, Britain’s famed David Low wanted a “try at new things and a change of air.” The “new thing” turned out to be a weekly cartoon strip, which made its first appearance this week in Auckland’s New Zealand Herald and other papers around the world, begins next week in Low’s home paper, the London Daily Herald. The strip’s title: World Citizen.

To the old cast of characters (e.g., Colonel Blimp, the trade-union workhorse, the escapist ostrich) which have helped make him the world’s top political satirist, Low has added a tousle-haired, bewildered character called World Citizen. Said Strip-Father Low: World Citizen is an “ordinary fellow in contact with the difficulties and absurdities of the present day . . . contentious world.” World Citizen is a young man who wears only a raincoat (“It would be all the better to draw him naked—life in the raw, you know”), no shoes (“He can’t afford them”). He runs up against such absurdities and difficulties as peace-petition bearers who beat him up to force him to sign, security sleuths who shadow him because he carries a briefcase (it’s his lunch).

In November, the Register & Tribune Syndicate expects to start syndicating World Citizen in the U.S. The new strip will not affect Low’s political cartoons; he will still draw them. But he is having so much fun with his new venture that his pointed pen has already sketched out a year’s supply of Citizen strips.