Over a Barrel

Josh Fruhlinger wants to know (and so do I):

I’m completely uninterested in discussing the didactic content of this cartoon, but it does bring up a question I’ve always found completely fascinating, which is: why are large, wooden barrels the Universal Comics Symbol For Poverty? I mean, I know I’m a decadent 21st century denizen who has grown accustomed to wearing garments that in relative terms cost very little, thanks to helpful Southeast Asian children with tiny, nimble fingers — certainly less than a finely crafted barrel. But is it possible that there was a time when a sturdy, wooden barrel with metal … circular dealies … that hold it together (boy, I hadn’t realized how weak a grasp I had of basic barrel vocabulary until just now) was actually cheaper than, you know, clothes? Did people really go into some kind of old-timey second-hand clothes store, sell all of their clothes (including the ones they were wearing), then walk, stark naked, up the street to the cooper (see, there’s a word that I know) to buy a barrel to wear, and have enough cash left over to afford life’s necessities? Did that happen? Because if not then, you know, barrels, what the hell?

Having recently drawn a cartoon employing this visual cliche (with some irony), I would really like to know the real answer to its origins. Which doesn’t mean that the possibilities — some plausible, others absurd — proposed on Josh’s discussion board aren’t incredibly amusing. Oddly, it may have something to do with Diogenes.

Also, Josh has written previously about this and other political cartoon cliches about poverty at Wonkette.

Fat So Funny

Election’s over, so what’s a political cartoonist to do? It’s not like there are any really important issues to consider. Could do something about the Congo or Rwanda. But, really, this is America: those places might as well be Oz, for all we care.

I know! There’s a new study about obesity! Several studies! Oh boy! Now political cartoonists can do what comes naturally: mock fat people, draw a newspaper with a headline and let a bad pun do the work.

Yes, apparently there is some study about teens getting fatter or something. Causes? Remedies? Flaws in the study? How studies like these fit in a larger culture neurotic about physical appearance, hyper-consumption, and fast food? Who cares? Let’s mock fat people — and teens, too!

Ha ha! Get it! Teens only want to get drunk!

But you know what’s missing? A tie-in with popular culture. It doesn’t have to be relevant, or insightful, or even current. It just has to stimulate some region of the brain that stores random images osmotically absorbed from the general culture environment. Hey, Bat-man!

Good thing the wind is blowing that newspaper high above the skyscrapers in such a way that we can read it. Otherwise I would have no idea what the hell this cartoon has to do with real life.

You know, you don’t have to be a hack cartoonist to squeeze out turds like these. You can be a well-respected, intelligent, and talented lion of the field like the great Clay Bennett, whose work I generally love:

Apparently Americans like to shovel their food served on plates decorated with the Presidential seal. Or something. It’s kinda abstract, really — so let’s go back to mocking fat youth!

Wow, okay, that’s enough. I could probably dig up more. If you feel masochistic, cruise through Slate.com’s health section of political cartoons and you will find 476 (as of today) that deal with general health issues, the majority of them focused on obesity. All of them will exploit some stereotype of fatness, teenagers or youth culture, consumption and gluttony for the sake of a cheap punchline and at the expense of insight, compassion, intelligence, context, and originality. As my friend and political cartoonist Barry Deutsch has pointed out many times, fat people are easy targets, perhaps the last “safe” target (along with the mentally ill and poor Southern whites) for comedians and other humorists to treat as an “other”, that slightly less-than-human category of people who deviate from The Norm and thus deserve mockery and marginalization. Of course, if these studies are true, then more Americans are getting fatter, so these cartoons act as a way of policing our behavior, inducing guilt and shame for being all-consuming gluttons. And there the conversation ends. But I’ll let Barry have the last word, because he puts it so well:

The reason fat activists have formed a movement is that it’s unjust to be denied good medical care because we’re fat; we think it’s unjust that we can get fired for being fat; we think it’s unjust that we face job and wage discrimination because we’re fat; we think it’s unjust that we can be charged more for basic services (like insurance) because we’re fat; it’s unjust that people glance at us and assume that we’re lazy and care nothing for ourselves; and yes, although you’ll sneer at this as “the right to feel good,” it’s unjust that fat people are taught from childhood to think of themselves as deficient, wrong, and disgusting.

Anit-fat bigotry isn’t wrong because it’s the same as facing lynch mobs. It’s wrong because it’s unjust. It’s unjust because we’re human and don’t deserve to be treated as second-class people because of the shape of our bodies.

Tags: politicalcartoons, obesity, fat activism

Attack Dog Meme

With Tuesday’s cartoon I managed to beat one of my political cartooning heroes, Ben Sargent to the attack dog meme by one day. That said, he draws way better than I do.

Meanwhile, speaking of memes, here are a few more Halloween cartoons.

Mike Luckovich. A 401K costume.

John Branch. Another 401K costume.

Nate Beeler. Financial adviser costume.

Tom Toles. This one isn’t bad. I like the use of a Halloween display as a chamber of horrors for the next president. It’s better than his predictable 401K gag. (At least he was first out of the gate on that one.)

And a Joe the Plumber toon I actually like, courtesy of Auth.

Meanwhile, how many different ways is this Gordon Campbell cartoon utterly racist!? Come on, Gordo, isn’t it possible that Colin Powell endorsed Obama because they share similar foreign policy views? You would know that if you had paid attention to Powell’s comments on foreign policy for the last, oh, four years since he left the BushAdmin.

Tags: politicalcartoons, halloween meme, cartoons, attack dogs, racism

The Halloween Cliche

It’s October, so that means every political cartoonist in the nation must draw at least one trick-or-treat cartoon. It’s the same cartoon every time: a suburban home, the door open, and someone dressed up as something scary, labelled “Recession” or “Mortgage Crisis” or some trite crap like that. Here’s a typical example:

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/61091/

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/61183/

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/61077/

Below the cartoonist takes a few satirical swipes at candidates he opposes. All fine and dandy. I don’t know who these people are, because I don’t live wherever Varvel lives, and I don’t care. What I do care about is that there is nothing at all insightful, funny or clever about this whatsoever.

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/61178/

There are variations on the theme.

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/61173/

I kinda like this one (above), but not for reasons that the cartoonist intended. It’s the unsettling, rather uncanny sight of John McCain wearing an Obama mask. In rendering the mask, the artist uses the same caricature style for Obama’s face that he uses for McCain’s without adding any texture or other technique to suggest “mask.” As a result, it reads more as “skin pulled off the skull of the living Obama.” Which makes McCain a creepy serial killer — and that makes me laugh.

Meanwhile … what?!

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/61099/

What is Plante trying to say? Anything? What does Plante think about the bailout? About the mortgage-backed securities crisis? About Paulson’s plan or Bush’s performance or a home owner’s plight or – well, anything? What does he think?!?! We have an allusion to Hurricane Katrina and FEMA’s botch-up under Michael Brown’s leadership (or lack of.) But what about it?

And that’s the problem with relying on cliches for inspiration. Nothing is really said, no opinion is made, no risks are taken, so nothing really funny happens; the brain doesn’t light up with connections nor does the heart ignite with fury or indignation. It’s just a chuckle, if that, a harmless non-thought sandwiched between editorials, letters to the editor and syndicated columns that, for all of their faults (and there are many), at least show engagement with the world around them and strive to advance a position, however futile. Is it any wonder more professional political cartoonists are losing their jobs?

Caricature Appreciation

I have always admired the ability of Tom Toles to capture a caricature in as few lines as possible. Here he renders McCain as what I can only describe as Stay-Puft Marshmallow Skull. The little wisp of hair on his head is artfully done, only a couple of overlapping lines. And that under-bite? Five lines. Excellent.

Tags: TomToles, caricature, cartooning

For Worse

The best final installment of a popular comic strip appeared in January, 1996. Calvin and Hobbes hopped on their toboggan to discuss life’s possibilities and headed down the slope into a blank canvass of snow. Eloquent, understated, and poetic. Clearly Bill Watterson had other projects waiting for him on his easel, but he ended his ground-breaking strip with the dignity and respect it deserved.

Charles Schulz wrote a simple thank you to Peanuts fans that appeared the day after he died. The timing was accidental, yet fitting for a man who had devoted 50 years to the strip and his entire life to comics. Sadly, the syndicate continues to run the strip like a zombie cow from which it squeezes undead milk.

Berkely Breathed ended Bloom County on a sad, bitter note. Familiar locations such as Milo’s Meadow showed none of the strip’s popular characters, only a cold wind blowing through. In the final panel, toting a suitcase and donning his flower hat, Opus walked off into the sunset. Of course, Opus came back — not only once, but twice. Breathed has revived a few old faces, most notably Bill the Cat and Steve Dallas. Some characters stay with their creators, demanding new life and speaking with their unique voices on the world as it carries on. Sometimes a creator discovers new reasons to return to beloved characters.

That said, I don’t know what to make of this Sunday’s installment of For Better or For Worse. While I patiently await Josh Fruhlinger‘s acerbic assessment, I’ll do my best. It’s a mess. A giant, unattractive, wordy mess. As anyone who has been following the strip in the papers (or through Josh’s curmudgeonly lense), the wedding scene is no surprise. If I had been reading Lynn Johnston’s website, with it’s long-winded character profiles and even blogs from the characters themselves (sure, Achewood does it, but then Achewood is a creature of the InterNetz), maybe I would have been better prepared for panel after panel of “future lives” for each one of Johnston’s increasingly tedious characters.

There was a time — a long time ago — when I enjoyed FOOB. The kids were funny, the humor was grounded in real life, at least insofar as suburbanites experience it. Gentle, yet realistic, Johnston’s humor was grounded in human folly. And as she allowed her characters to age — a bold move, even after Gasoline Alley — they grew more complex and her humor more nuanced. There was plenty of cornball slapstick and schmaltz, but even these were informed by real life. Johnston’s most controversial story line, the coming out of Lawrence, was daring, respectful, and truthful in its depiction of the conflicting emotions families and friends go through when forced to confront their own homophobia.

Somewhere down the line, the strip jumped a shark. I don’t know if it started with the creepy relationship between Liz and Anthony, but I remember the strip slipped into melodrama around the time Johnston killed off the family dog, then replaced it with a nearly identical model. Then Liz got too old to be the cute little one anymore, so Johnston brought in April. It was as if Johnston retreated to the cute kid antics for a breath of saccharine “reality” while the soap opera lives of her adult characters spun into the absurd. Better minds than mine have dissected the self-loathing and misogyny of Johnston’s later writing. I’ll only add that for all of Johnston’s overworked puns, the strip stopped being amusing just as it stopped being realistic.

Well, it’s dead. But, wait, no it’s not! “Please join me on Monday as the story begins again,” Johnston invites. “Looking back looks wonderful!” So it’s the worst of both worlds: a zombie strip — like Peanuts — that it’s creator won’t stop tinkering with — like Breathed, only lacking the nostalgia of the former nor the creativity and relevance of the latter. Switching media, it’s more like George Lucas adding unnecessary scenes and background clutter to Star Wars. Yet even he managed to move on and create new characters and new stories; crappy characters and stories, true, but still new!

Johnston requires a therapist. The comics require new talent, but not until someone finally and completely slays the undead roaming the funny pages.

Tags: LynnJohnston, For Better or For Worse, comics, comic strips, cartoons

The New Yorker Cover — Because Nothing More Important is Going On!

Matt is ranting, Barry is patiently explaining a joke, Ruben is making a fair criticism (though I disagree), and me? I’m with Gary Kamiya:

After 9/11, some pious nitwits, suffering from an America-centrism akin to the medieval belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, intoned that “irony was dead.” Seven years later, they’ve been proven right — but not in the way they intended. Irony may have been killed, but not by sincerity — it’s been killed by cynicism. Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine, that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.

Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits. Or, at least, all satire except that which the cowering — but oh so semiotically sophisticated — left-wing commentariat deems to be sufficiently broad-brush and polemical to pass its funny test. There’s no arguing taste in humor, of course, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that those who find Barry Blitt’s drawing completely unfunny have traded their appreciation of subtlety and nuance for an instrumental, ends-obsessed, political-unto-death worldview.

I’m pissed that my copy of the New Yorker bearing the provocative Blitt cover hasn’t showed up in my mailbox yet.

I’m also a bit taken aback by the notion being swung around in some blog comments that only people of color are capable of correctly measuring offensiveness. Certainly white assholes too easily dismiss black folks’ claims of racism when they deserve to be heard. But let’s not overcompensate by granting some magical offensiveness divining power to people from historically oppressed groups. It is possible that a person of color, by virtue of being first and foremost a person —fallible, limited, subjective, feet of clay, etc.— could be wrong. Or that person of color (or not of color, whatever that really means) who are not offended could reasonably disagree.

For the record, irony ain’t dead. It’s been thriving well enough, and this latest sandbox kerfuffle is but a small instance of its vitality.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: BarryBlitt, New Yorker cover, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, racism, satire, humor, leftist cant

Count the Negative Stereotypes

Lessee here:

1. Hillary as a witch
2. Bill as an Arkansas redneck (note the goiter)
3. Hillary as a front for Bill’s ambitions
4. Hillary as amoral political striver

What have you got?

Man, I love Pat Oliphant. I really do. His caricatures are rivaled only by Steve Brodner’s and Kurt Anderson’s, IMHO. And there is nobody with as bitter, as acerbic writing political cartoons, save for maybe our friend Ted Rall.

BUT Jesus-Mary-onna-Donkey-Ride! It IS possible to do all those things AND avoid negative stereotypes at the same time. In fact, it IS possible to criticize Senator Clinton — and the Clinton spouses as a political team — without resorting to such imagery.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: PatOliphant, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, stereotypes, political cartooning, sexism, classism

How to be a Political Cartoonist

Surprisingly, no Cartoonist With Attitude – or just a cartoonist with a love of snark – has linked to this commentary by college editorial cartoonist Ryan Rosendal on the requirements of the profession.

It’s pretty funny.

Link found via Journalista!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: cartooning, political cartoons, politics

Will Elder is Dead

I just learned the news from The Daily Cartoonist that Will Elder has died. Alan Gardner links to a great tribute by MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond. Tom links to Mark Evanier, as well as some great stories about Elder at Journalista!.

For those who don’t know, Elder was among the original stable of MAD Magazine cartoonists and a frequent collaborator with Mad founder Harvey Kurtzman. As a kid of the 1970s, I grew up reading MAD, absorbing stylistic tics from Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones, Al Jaffee, George Woodbridge and, of course, Don Martin. Then one day, I picked up one of MAD’s anniversary issues that had a bonus reprint of one of the original incarnations of the magazine from the 1950s – the Kurtzman era. It was like a whole other world, a completely different take on a magazine I had known so well. It was wilder, more anarchic, more irreverent, and screamingly funnier. I loved this MAD. I wanted more of this MAD. At the time, I didn’t know where to look, so I re-read that one issue, trying to suck in through my eyeballs all the drawing lessons I could absorb from both Elder and Wally Wood. To this day, as I draw I consciously and sometimes unconsciously ape elements of the detailed, gorgeously rendered yet highly energetic style Elder pioneered.