Damir GLOBOČNIK

The paper presents some insufficiently known material about the beginnings of Slovene journalistic caricature. Humorous illustrations were first published in a Slovene newspapers in 1852, when the Novice produced two supplements with comic illustrations, but it never published this kind of thing again. Around the year 1863 a comic text by the journalist and author Jakob Alešovec (1842–1901), illustrated by an occasional caricaturist, Ivan Kos (1846–1907), was published in the Munich satirical paper Fliegende Blätter. Both the writer and the illustrator were secondary-school pupils at the time.

The earliest two Slovene satirical papers, Brencelj and Juri s pušo, appeared from 1869 onwards, the former in Ljubljana, the latter in Trieste. Juri s pušo (1869/1870) borrowed caricatures from an Austrian satirical journal, while those caricatures that echoed local political events were drawn by an anonymous draughstman who signed his works as “Kranjski”.

The editor of the satirical journal Brencelj (1869–1875; 1877–1886), Jakob Alešovec, initially commissioned caricatures from Viennese draughtsmen. Between 1871 and 1874 they also designed a number of cartoons and illustrations for short comic verses. A number of caricatures from 1874 onwards were drawn by an anonymous local draughtsman, “Pražanski”. In 1877 Franc Zorec (1854–1930), then a student of theology, began to contribute regularly to Brencelj. Most of the caricatures published in this paper between 1877 and 1885 were drawn by him. The ideas for these drawings came partly from Alešovec, the editor, while Zorec conceived many others himself.

Some biographical data on Ivan Kos and Franc Zorec is quoted in writings of their contemporaries. The types of caricatures in the two afore-mentioned satirical papers are presented with some selected examples. The drawing manner is naive, true portrait caricatures are rare and the satirical effect most often relies on the situations depicted and captions added. They are most interesting for their content,. belonging mainly to the genre of political caricature.

Other Slovene artists at the dawn of Slovene caricature are also mentioned, for example Matevž Langus (1792–1855), Jurij Šubic (1855–1890), Ivan Zajec (1869–1952) and Fran Tratnik (1881–1957), who occasionally drew caricatural or similar satirical illustrations with no intention of publishing them, and it is reasonable to assume there were several other caricature artists as well.