1871 - 1918...

Puck, 1881

"Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown" --Charles Stross: 

This week's post shall be short as I am grading 1st semester exams while contentedly sipping coffee and enjoying the calm of a Sunday afternoon following a pleasant sleep-in...

I have no flow in mind for today's post, save an attempt to draw my readers' attention to a gem of American history, while allowing for a little biography at the same time. The history is Puck, and the biography is my love for the aesthetic found within a thing labeled steampunk. The two are not connected other than the latter draws in part from the look of the former. I have come to realize that my interest in the history of the late 1800s and early 1900s is in part formed by my like of the aesthetic of the time more than the events or politics of that era. I love glass and steel, and wood and rivets, and gears and cogs, and mechanical systems, oh boy!...

City of Lost Children (1995)

Howl's Moving Castle (2005)

Puck is a humor/satire magazine that was in publication from 1871 to 1918; steampunk is a term that starts in my formative years, 1980s, as a sub-genre of cyberpunk, a science fiction world with the aesthetic of late 19th century, early 20th century styles of late industrialization.

LEG (1999)

Puck published cartoons from a time when illustrations often have a modern technical precision while looking antique at the same time. Steampunk seeks to embrace that time along with a "what if" way of looking at events of the past blended with alternative futures.

I love the work as it makes its way into Miyazaki's movies like Howl's Moving Castle, post-apocalyptic cinema like City of Lost Children, or graphic novels such as League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

For my semester exam I challenged my students to analyze a political cartoon from Puck in 1883. I do not wish to analyze it some much as use it's interestingness to power haps draw my readers into doing a brief google search for puck illustrations and finding they way to looking at some delightful historical pieces. Enjoy!