February 21, 2006
Mostly About Cartoons
It's clear from an essay by cartoonist Scott Stantis entitled "Why Cartoons Still Matter", that fundamentalist Muslims are not the only group who have an aversion to the form:
"While rioting packs of Muslim men in Afghanistan, Syria and Iran shout 'death to cartoonists' newspapers in the United States have been doing exactly that for years with lay-offs, buyouts, firings and dropping cartoons from the editorial pages.
Altogether, the ranks of American full time staff editorial cartoonists has shrunk from a high of over 200 in the 1980's to under 80 today.
Newspapers with a long and storied history of cartoonists have seen fit to cut loose this valuable resource. Papers like the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun are now without a staff cartoonist. The Chicago Tribune, which recently dedicated a room honoring the late, great cartoonist Jeff MacNelly while at the same time mocking his legacy by leaving the editorial cartoonist position open since his death in June of 2000.
These same newspapers now go days without running any cartoon on its opinion sections. Presumably because the editors believe that nothing attracts and engages readers better than massive stretches of gray type.
And the cartoons that do find their way into print are more often jokes then commentary. Guy Cooper, former editor of the popular Perspective section in Newsweek magazine, told a gathering of editorial cartoonists that he would never run a hard hitting, substantive editorial cartoon on his page. He viewed them strictly as entertainment. The New York Times, which runs a small number of editorial cartoons in its Sunday Week-In-Review section has recently renamed the collection 'Laugh lines'. .......... Talk of relevance, (or lack thereof), has been grinding on the editorial cartoon profession for years.......'Do we matter?......
To answer this question editors might ask themselves: Do you think the streets of the Arab world would be ablaze if that Danish newspaper had run a series of editorials on the same subject as those cartoons?"
Undaunted, political cartoonists around the world are drawing cartoons about drawing cartoons (be sure to scroll down and follow the arrows). In fact this activity isn't limited to political cartoonists alone.
An Israeli group has launched an antisemitic cartoon contest -- you have to be Jewish to enter, but it's a terrific idea. Have you noticed that fundamentalists of most sorts, are not known for their rollicking senses of humor? That probably means that other sites of this ilk are unlikely to follow.
And then there those, like Mary Matalin who seem to be morphing into a cartoon characters-- maybe it's just the face lift and the corsage. (Watch the Meet the Press video for the full effect, and don't miss Maureen Dowd's response, our sultry and incisive goddess of truth --Mmmmm....Mmmm)
While I'm at it, I thought I'd throw in a few other comic notions that have recently landed in my vicinity, before I lose track of them.
frosting on the cake
citrus constructions (scroll down and click on the slide show on the lower right)
corporations for president
Photo note: This is a real building that just looks like a cartoon, which I found while getting lost behind MIT. Maybe Mary Matalin lives there. It's hard to look up a building on the internet when you don't know its name.-- This is the best I could do,