The item on the right in this picture is something I'm going to be getting in from eBay in a few days. It's a printing plate for a cartoon drawn by Cy Hungerford, who had a very long career doing editorial, sports and comic strip cartoons for Pittsburgh papers, most notably the Post-Gazette. In studying this printing plate, I realized that, unlike many cartoons, there was a definite shot at pinning down an exact date, both from the standpoint that newspapers dot com has a long run of the P-G, and the subject matter had a person that would have been in the news only at certain times.

Gen. William F. Dean (Sr.), the figure striding away from the ghostly soldier, was, during the Korean War, the commander of the 24th Infantry Division, and his unit was one of the units fighting in the Pusan Perimeter in the early weeks of the war, desperately buying time until Douglas MacArthur could launch Operation Chromite, the landings at In'chon, which would temporarily turn the tide of the war. Dean was captured -- a fairly rare occurrence, post-Civil War, save for the fall of Manila -- and spent the next few years as a PoW. When he was released after the armistice in 1953, he was given the Medal of Honor. Unusually, he was also given the Combat Infantryman Badge, which as a general officer he would not, ordinarily, have been entitled to.

As you can see, I was able to pin down the precise date of the cartoon, and see how it was finally presented. You can see that for the expanses of "blank" space, the engravers cut out the plate to register nothing but that blank space. You can also see the contrast of the dark ground with the clouds and the ghostly soldier. I presume this was photo-engraved.