Number 898


Boss Tweed


The story--to me, anyway--isn't that with his drawings cartoonist Thomas Nast helped bring down the New York Tweed political ring in the 1870s, but that 140 years later the kind of corruption practiced by Tweed and his Tammany Hall gangsters is still going on in places around the country.

This story doesn't show Nast, but mentions him. Here are a couple of his Tweed cartoons, which helped people of the time recognize the “boss”. Do you think Tweed really had that remorse filled soliloquy in his cell as shown in that last panel? In a perfect world, maybe.


“Boss Tweed”, attributed to Dan Barry-with-a-question-mark by the Grand Comics Database, is from the 1948 Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 3 No. 2.