Giant Mosquitoes in Tall-Tale Postcards

Many tall-tale postcards, which flourished in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, used manipulated photos to portray the rich bounty of various locales (often in the Midwest): giant animals, fish, fruits, vegetables, eggs, etc., all products of a supposedly super-fertile environment.

Notably, some postcards deviated from this boastful promotion of local wildlife and crops by depicting the farmers’ nemesis, the ravenous grasshopper, in giant form. Perhaps on some level it was beneficial for its victims to imagine themselves successfully battling a single huge grasshopper rather than the innumerable real-sized ones that regularly ravaged their crops.

Whereas postcards of giant grasshoppers were plentiful, apparently there were none of giant mosquitoes. I failed to find a single instance in Roger Welsch, Tall-Tale Postcards: A Pictorial History (1976) and Cynthia Elyce Rubin and Morgan Williams, Larger Than Life: The American Tall-Tale Postcard, 1905-1915 (1990). It may be that at the time it was too difficult or even impossible to photograph these tiny insects, but there were also no postcards I am aware of with drawings of them. I suspect that if more makers of exaggerated postcards had been based in wetter regions of the U.S., monstrous mosquitoes would been given their due. There certainly are very many entries under X1286.1. Lie; the large mosquito, in Ernest Baughman, Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America (1996); so the folklore existed, but the postcard makers chose not to exploit it.

A couple of early drawings of giant mosquitoes:

Life, August 20, 1891. In Conrad Groth, ed., A Cockeyed Menagerie: The Drawing of T.S. Sullivant (Fantagraphics, 2021), 15. 

Library of Congress. Cartoon of giant mosquito stinging a man sleeping (between ca. 1900 ca. 1930).