comic cut

plural comic cuts

1. A drawing or engraving of a humorous nature.

   A humorist by necessity, he is a classic by feeling, and it was not until his imagination was allowed full play and the "comic cut" idea was put aside, that he developed at the rapid rate which is so remarkable in looking over his work.

   1891, “Punch And His Artists”, in Littell's Living Age, volume 190, page 441

   2 more examples

   The drunken man is always the comic cut in the terrible book of life, and an old soldier who knew Portsmouth well in those days, described to me how he had constantly seen men, in a hopeless state of muddled intoxication, climb the trees in Elm Grove under the delusion that they were going upstairs to bed , and on flinging their weary limbs on the imaginary couch come crashing down through the branches on the heads of unwary passers-by.

   1883, Ellice Hopkins, “Our Soldiers And Sailors At Home”, in Good Words, volume 24, page 172

   Unusually for a black and white artist, Sambourne used a huge library of photographic images to give accuracy to his work, which was characterized by a vivid and decisive linearity as well as an artistic inventiveness that took his images far beyond the simple concept of a cartoon or ‘comic cut’.

   2009, Marysa Demoor, Laurel Brake (editors), Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, page 554