Retro Rank

The San Francisco Waspwas aptly named. In its 65 years of publication, the magazine specialized in the kind of acerbic, waggish political commentary absent from today's simple-minded partisan debates.

Poor ol' Grover Cleveland was a frequent Wasp target.

Details

Opens at 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 22 (and runs through Oct. 17)

Admission is free-$6

227-8666

www.c artoonart.org

Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission (at New Montgomery), S.F.

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More About

• Charles Crocker
• Henry Barkhaus
• Denis Kearney
• Cartoon Art Museum
• Frantissek Korbel

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"Western publications of the 1870s and 1880s were scurrilous and rude," says Rich West, author of The San Francisco Wasp: An Illustrated History and guest curator of "The Sting of the Wasp: San Francisco's Political Cartoon Weekly 1876-1897," opening this week at the Cartoon Art Museum. "But the Wasp was witty, too."

Founded by former Czech revolutionary Frantissek Korbel (who later launched Korbel Champagne Cellars) in the late 1800s, the Waspdistinguished itself with its political cartoons. Printed via a complex chromolithography process that produced magnificent washes of color, the comics (by artists such as Henry Barkhaus and G. Frederick Keller) were every bit as caustic as the editorials found in competing publications like the Chronicle or the Examiner, but a lot more sly, as they commented on local characters and vintage scandals ranging from the pernicious influence of money in politics to Grover Cleveland's admission that he'd fathered an illegitimate child.

The 1883 Barkhaus work Mr. Crocker's Kindergarten is a good example: Central Pacific magnate Charles Crocker was depicted as a teacher educating his pupils on the ugly realities of "railroad monopoly," his wooden blocks inscribed with images such as an unseen hand pulling the strings of a wooden puppet labeled "Official."

Unfortunately, many of the Wasp's best-remembered cartoons riffed approvingly on the era's rallying cry of Denis Kearney's racist Workingmen's Party, "The Chinese must go!" One horrifying example, 1880's Devastation, portrayed Chinese immigrants as pigs rooting through a cornfield, with Kearney shown as an impotent scarecrow.

"So ugly," sighs West. "But a true sign of the times." Just like the Waspitself.