Gustave Verbeek (August 29, 1867 – December 5, 1937) was a Dutch-American illustrator and cartoonist, best known for his newspaper cartoons in the early 1900s featuring an inventive use of word play and visual storytelling tricks. Biography Verbeek was of Dutch ancestry. He was born as Gustave Verbeck () in Nagasaki, Japan in 1867, the son of Reformed Church in America missionary Guido Verbeck and Maria Verbeck (nee Manion). He grew up in Japan, but went to Paris to study art, and worked for several European newspapers, creating illustrations and cartoons. In 1900 he moved to the United States, where he did illustrations for magazines such as Harper's, and produced a series of weekly comic strips for newspapers. In the 1910s he abandoned cartooning and became a fine artist. He was noted for his expressionist monotypes, which were the subject of an article in The Century Magazine in June 1916. He was ill for two years, and died on December 5, 1937 at the Home for Incurables, on Third Avenue and 183rd Street in the Bronx, New York City. He had been a patient there for two months. Comics Verbeek's first strip was Easy Papa, a fairly conventional strip about two mischievous kids and their father, similar to the highly popular contemporary strip The Katzenjammer Kids, which ran in a competing newspaper. Easy Papa appeared in The New York Herald from May 25, 1902, through February 1, 1903. Verbeek is most noted for The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a weekly 6-panel comic strip in which the first half of the story was illustrated and captioned right-side-up, then the reader would turn the page up-side-down, and the inverted illustrations with additional captions describing the scenes told the second half of the story, for a total of 12 panels. His signature usually appeared at the top of the first/last panel, upside down. The two main characters were designed such that each would be perceived as the other character when inverted. For example, in one often-reproduced panel, Muffaroo appears in a canoe next to a tree-covered island, and is being attacked by a large fish. When inverted, the image shows a later scene of Lovekins in the beak of a giant roc: Muffaroo's canoe has become the bird's beak, the fish has turned into the bird's head, the island has become its body and the trees its