Sleuthing out Punch magazine's IGY Antarctica cartoon

I was searching reddit for any IGY posts, and I came across an IGY cartoon at 

https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/gv3mhk/punch_magazine_cartoon_satirizing_the/

Scan of the cartoon from my newly acquired copy of the Punch Almanack

So, I thought I'd like to own an original of that cartoon. That took me on a bit of a wild ride, albeit successful in the end.

First, it's not from the extant Punch Magazine, Spirit of the [San Francisco] Peninsula magazine, which hails from California. It's from the influential British magazine of humour [British sic] and satire Punch, which was published between 1841 and 2002. Punch invented the meaning of the word cartoon as we know it today, first associating it with pictorial satire and eventually with any humorous drawing. A somewhat similar magazine today on my side of the pond would be The New Yorker.

There seems to be no index of Punch issues available online, despite the efforts of a Franklin & Marshall College librarian to help me. There is an online index of Punch cartoons, where you can search for IGY to find our cartoon, here or here. (My own family members, consider a print of this cartoon as a holiday gift.) You can see the word ALMANACK and the date of Nov. 5, 1956, at the top of the image in reddit (although not in the images on the Punch website). The metadata for the images of this cartoon on the Punch website show the information 1957.2.ALM.tif, so I was baffled by the apparently conflicting dates; the IGY did start in 1957, after all. For reasons unclear to me -- I don't even get much of the droll British humor in Punch, and I certainly don't understand the purpose of the Almanack -- the annual Almanacks were issued ahead of the years they referred to. Thus, the Almanack for 1957 turned out to have been published in 1956. An interlibrary loan book from 1957 by the cartoonist Russell Brockbank, The Brockbank Omnibus, had a lot of his specialty motorist cartoons, but not the IGY one I hoped might be in there. Finally, I looked for copies of a Nov. 5, 1956 Almanack issue on eBay, where I could also see that this date did not correspond to the dates of the regular weekly issues. Two eBay vendors of this Almanack kindly confirmed that it was indeed the issue with the desired IGY graphic. Whew! A lot of work for a cartoon. Once I got the issue, I could see the combination of information represented on the cover.

Outer cover of my newly acquired Punch Almanack

In any case, I think the cartoon is slyly satirical. On the one hand, it shows the British, American, and Soviet teams occupying their respective Antarctic bases, from where they would presumably cooperate in the scientific endeavors of the IGY. Yet there is a propagandistic jab at the different cultures. Penguins in the British camp are forced to endure a highfalutin British literature discussion (Brockbank was Canadian). Meanwhile, birds at the American base can enjoy a game of baseball, if they have not overindulged in alcohol. And the Russian camp is dominated by detainment and surveillance, harangues and regimentation. And there is that chasm separating the East from the West.

Bonus points if you know of a famous cartoon character from the 1950s who was featured in an entire book themed on the IGY. First person to comment on this entry with the correct answer wins a surplus item from my collection. I'll be posting on that book later.

I couldn't resist pricing out this Almanack issue. I never did understand the British currency system, which also changed in 1971. The cover price is 2/6, or 2 schillings (will Curt make it into the Hall of Fame this year?) and 6 pence. With 12p to the schilling and 20/ to the pound at that time, this was 2-1/2 schillings, a half crown, or 1/8 pound. The exchange rate to dollars in 1957 was 1 pound = $2.80 U.S., so the magazine cost the equivalent of 35¢. The price of a Life magazine at the time was 20¢. For comparison, the Federal minimum wage in 1957 was $1.00. (Btw, $1.00 in 1957 adjusted for inflation to today would be $9.31, so the current Federal minimum wage of $7.25 is effectively 20% lower than it was in 1957. Take that, service workers of America!)

Thursday morning addendum: the last word I needed to achieve "genius" level in the NY Times Spelling Bee game today was -- penguin!