The Ruling Clawss

Published under the pseudonym A. Redfield by prominent New Yorker contributor Syd Hoff in the 1930s, these mordant and marvellously drawn gag comics skewer the rich and powerful with a pointed pen. <p/>If you were reading The Daily Worker in the 1930s, you'd have come across the words of Woody Guthrie and Richard Wright, along with the cartoons of the mysterious A. Redfield. Redfield was actually New Yorker cartoonist and future Danny and the Dinosaur author Syd Hoff. <p/>Scorning what he saw as the complicity and stale yucks of cartooning peers like Peter Arno, Hoff set his sights on the rich and powerful and revealed them for what they were: hilariously inept, deeply selfish, and incredibly dangerous. <p/>Hoff spared nothing from his pen, lampooning police brutality, thin-skinned industrialists, racists, and the looming threat of fascism at home and abroad. <p/>Still powerfully funny and troublingly resonant, these cartoons confirm what the legendary Milt Gross prophesied when he met Hoff as a high school student: "Kid, someday you'll be a great cartoonist!"