Judge

*Judge* was one of the leading American humor and satire magazines of its era, a chief rival to *Puck* in the golden age of the color-lithographed comic weekly. This cover, dating from around 1912, reflects the lavish full-color style that these magazines made their signature. *Judge* was founded in the 1880s by artists who had broken away from *Puck*, and it distinguished itself in part through a political stance more favorable to the Republican Party, in contrast to *Puck*'s frequently oppositional posture. Like its competitor, *Judge* filled its pages with elaborate caricatures, comic allegories, and social satire, offering steady work and wide exposure to a generation of cartoonists and illustrators. Its large, brightly printed cartoons commented on politics, business, and the manners of the age, packaged for a broad popular readership. Together with *Puck*, *Judge* helped make the satirical magazine a fixture of American cultural life and a nursery for cartooning talent. These humor weeklies refined the craft of character-driven, visually inventive drawing for a mass audience—an inheritance that would flow directly into the newspaper comic strip and, in time, the comic book.