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J. Earle Bowden Cartoon Archive

In early 2013 J. Earle Bowden, editor emeritus and cartoonist of the Pensacola News Journal began donating some of his cartoons to the University of West Florida’s Archives at the John C. Pace Library. A team was formed at the Library to match the cartoons to the related editorial when possible, scan the print cartoons into digital images, assign subject headings to the digital scan to facilitate access, and preserve the originals.

This web site is designed to facilitate the public’s access to Earle’s unique cartoons which help to tell the history of Pensacola and northwest Florida, the rest of the state, and the nation through the images. Earle has donated thousands of cartoons to this project; the digital images of the cartoons will be added to this web site as they are processed and scanned.

Bowden inducted to Florida Newspapaper Hall of Fame

In the Fall of 2016 Earle Bowden was inducted to the Florida Press Association's Hall of Fame. You can access the announcement at the Florida Press Association website or by viewing a PDF.

The Collection

There are currently 3,065 digitized files available on this website. There are two main ways to interact with online collection, searching and browsing.

To search, simply enter your search terms in the search box on the top right of every page. The built in search engine will scan all of the data that is associated with each image in our collection and show you a list of results with thumbnailed images and highlighted word matches. So, for example, if you were looking for cartoons related to the NASA Challenger disaster you could simply enter Challenger or Space Shuttle in the search box and click the "Search" button. Date searching also works. For example, you could enter January 1986 to view all the cartoons that we have identified as being published or drawn in that time period. One useful way to search is to include the wildcard character *. For example, if you searched for Alex* you'd see results for Alex, Alexander, Alexandria, etc. You can read more detailed syntax information on this page.

Browsing the collection is a good way to get an overview of what we have available. Each image has one or more category labels assigned to it. A good starting point for browsing the collection is to view a list of current categories.

The top ten categories (that is, categories with the most tagged images) are:

You can also browse the collection by year (that is - the year we've identified the cartoon as being drawn or run in the paper).

		1962	1963	1964	1965	1966	1967	1968	1969
1970	1971	1972	1973	1974	1975	1976	1977	1978	1979
1980	1981	1982	1983	1984	1985	1986	1987	1988	1989
1990	1991	1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999
2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
2010	2011

We're adding images to this collection all the time and you can see the 10 most recently uploaded images below. Click on any image to view a larger version and see detailed information about it.