Collections: Cartoon 'Cats

Exhibit highlights the University’s cartoon collections and alumni cartoonists, illustrators and animators.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s Willie wasn’t the only big cat on campus. He was joined by Banderooge, the giant feline created by cartoonist Robert Leighton ’82 in a Daily Northwestern comic strip.

Leighton went on to co-found Puzzability, a puzzle-writing company in 1996, and has continued drawing cartoons for the New Yorker, among other publications.

Highlights from Banderooge and Leighton’s post-Northwestern work will be featured in a fall University Library and Deering Library exhibit on the University’s cartoon collections and alumni cartoonists, illustrators and animators. The exhibit will include work from, among others, James Gillray, an 18th- and early 19th-century printmaker; John T. McCutcheon ’43 H, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Tribune political cartoonist; John Musker ’75, a Disney animator; Murray Olderman ’47 MS, a self-taught sports cartoonist; and James Rosen ’96 MS, the Fox News journalist who also draws caricatures of political and cultural figures.

This Robert Leighton cartoon, which he says was loosely modeled on Northwestern’s campus, was featured in the New Yorker in 2013. © Robert Leighton/The New Yorker Collection 2013