Judge grew out of the humour magazine Puck and most of its original staff of cartoonists had previously been published in that magazine; Judge wound up outliving Puck by quite a margin. Comparing early Judge issues to contemporaneous issues of Puck, you'll find the layout and format are practically identical; Judge eventually found a format all its own (which Life then copied to some extent). Judge was initially fairly political; the centerspread cartoon and covers for the first few decades were usually a work of political commentary or satire, but the magazine seemed much less interested in political fare after World War I (though never entirely out of it).
I became interested in examining Judge because it contained a lot of cartoons and some of the names are still known to fans of early comic strips: Bill Holman, R. B. Fuller, C. W. Kahles, John Randolph Bray, James Montgomery Flagg, Milt Gross, Art Helfant, Marge, Percy Crosby, Frank Beaven, Art Young, John Held Jr., S. J. Perelman, Otto Soglow; there's also quite a lot of early work by Dr. Seuss (the book Just What the Doctor Disordered is still in-print and contains many of Seuss' cartoons for Judge).
Initially, the magazine's top cartoonist was Eugene Zimmerman (aka "Zim"). Zimmerman stuck with Judge for decades, up to 1931. Zimmerman had a huge influence on the look of the cartoons and it seems clear to me that cartoonist T. S. Sullivant deliberately tried to copy his style (R. B. Fuller's early work for Judge also looked like Zimmerman's, but he grew out of it quickly). Grant E. Hamilton was the magazine's art editor for the first few decades and also contributed a lot of art to the magazine. Bernhard Gillam contributed most of the early years' covers and centerspreads, with his brother Victor Gillam following in his footsteps.
I've looked at issues from every year of Judge's publication and the trends across time are interesting to observe. Throughout the years of Prohibition, Judge mocked it mercilessly; there were many, many cartoons celebrating liquor and noting that everyone was drinking it, regardless of the law. A more unusual trend were the jokes about automobiles from around 1900-1930; it was pretty common to see more than one cartoon per issue about a pedestrian being hit by a car.
Another interesting trend is that in the magazine's early years, from time to time they ran cartoons with talking animals, particularly by H. C. Greening, Gus Dirks and John Randolph Bray; in the early 20s, Charles A. Hughes even had a recurring feature called Hughes' Zoo. I noticed the talking animal cartoons mostly disappeared after Norman Anthony became editor.
Judge loved golf, so much so that in the 1920s they usually gave over 2 pages to articles and cartoons about golf. I was also amazed by the crossword puzzle phenomenon; I didn't realize crossword puzzles were such a big deal in the 1920s but Judge had entire theme issues about them!
It was also interesting to follow Judge's jokes about William Jennings Bryan. Judge was politically a Republican publication and always took aim at Democrats, but Bryan was the gift who kept giving, since he remained in politics for so many decades and unsuccessfully ran for President three times during Judge's publishing years. When Bryan immersed himself in the 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" (in what was the last year of his life) it proved to be one last gift to Judge, as they were able to mock him before a new generation of readers.
It was heartening to find Judge was very anti-Klan, especially in the 1920s when the Klan was at its peak; although Judge ran plenty of racist cartoons of Black people in their early years, they'd mostly grown out of it by the 20s and seemed to have no problem mocking the Klan. It's also interesting that while in their first few decades Judge loved to make jokes about the Irish, they never seemed to take much interest in cartoons about Asian, Jewish or Mexican people, who were frequent targets in other publications.
Judge frequently ran theme issues, particularly in the 1920s under editor Norman Anthony (Anthony brought a lot of great talent to Judge, including Dr. Seuss; he eventually left Judge to become editor of Life and later still Ballyhoo). The theme issues included issues where college students created most of the issue's contents (among them in one issue was Chester Gould, years before Dick Tracy!). Other theme issues were designed as mock-ups of other famous magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. A lot of the satirical content in these issues - especially the fake advertisements - point to how much Anthony must have influenced Harvey Kurtzman's Mad.
Of course, Harold Ross was also briefly an editor on Judge; supposedly it was his time on Judge that inspired his publication, the New Yorker, which has been credited with cannibalizing Judge's audience and leading to its demise.
Judge had a number of recurring features, the best-remembered of which was Nervy Nat, a full-page comic book story initially created by James Montgomery Flagg (later by Fred Lewis). Nervy Nat wound up starring in a collection of his Judge strips and was adapted into four short motion pictures. Another was Little Johnny and His Teddy Bears by John Randolph Bray, which started simply tying into the teddy bear crazy of President Roosevelt's presidency; when Taft took office Bray tried to keep it going as Little Johnny and His Taffy Possums (I'm serious) to considerable less success. Gus Dirks had a series of Bugville strips that eventually received their own books. In the early 1900s there were a lot of "In Topsyturvy Land" cartoons, usually by H. C. Greening.
One of the magazine's longest-running recurring features was Laughs from the Shows, which shared a few jokes from a popular Broadway comedy alongside caricatures of the performers. It was initially by Robert Patterson but Jefferson Machamer stuck with it the longest. Another running feature was Laughs from Other Lands (often altered into various similar titles) where they ran cartoons from other countries, often translated from German, Spanish or French.
There were also recurring features C. D. Russell's Pete (who got his own comic strip later on), Bruce Bairnsfather's Old Bill, C. W. Kahles' Yarns of Captain Fibb, Marge's Dotty Declares, W. G. Farr's In the Year 2000, R. B. Fuller's Scrambled History, and various features by Charles Forbell such as Unconventional Conventions, Club Life in America or In Ancient Times.
As a publishing entity, Judge also printed a number of books - not just collections of Nervy Nat and Little Johnny but also a publication called Caricature that featured a few hundred pages' worth of Judge text features and cartoons. There were also a few books of Eugene Zimmerman's cartoons and at least one of Flagg's. But Judge also published completely unrelated material, such as reprinting stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant and Robert Louis Stevenson.
I've enjoyed delving into Judge, it's been an interesting journey and I'll probably continue to sift through issues now and then -- the Internet Archive have a very good collection of Judge scanned from microfilm that's almost complete from the first issue up until the magazine changed ownership in 1940. Judge at the Internet Archive.
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