Distracting Drones, Sept. 26, 2012. Cartoon by Matt Wuerker/Politico
Click on the
Flip-Flop icon on the iPhone or iPad app, POTUS Pick, a digital platform
created by Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, and an
image of President Barack Obama appears. It is an adroit caricature,
emphasizing his brooding eyebrows and pokey ears. “We can’t just drill our way
out of the problem,” we hear the president say. Suddenly Obama springs into a
gymnastic flip, and intones, “I believe that we should continue to expand oil
production in America.” Telnaes has scored her point: Obama is a flip-flopping
president on the hotly contested issue of exploiting domestic oil deposits.
Welcome
to the brave new world of political cartooning. With the decline of print
media, where the art form has flourished for two and a half centuries, the
future of political cartooning has been thrown into doubt. There are fewer than
twenty-five full time staff editorial cartoonists working in the U.S. today,
down from some three hundred as recently as 1990. But true to their combative
spirit, American cartoonists are hardly going down without a fight. Growing
numbers of them are finding creative ways to survive and flourish in the era of
digital media, using innovative apps to display their wit, posting cartoons on
new websites, and in some cases becoming gainfully employed by online
publications. It may turn out that rather than killing the political cartoon by
hastening the demise of the printed page, the Internet may revitalize the art
form with an infusion of young, independent and more diverse voices.
Illustrated
commentary is an American tradition dating back to at least 1754, when Benjamin
Franklin published a wood-cut cartoon titled Join or Die in the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Depicting a snake severed into eight parts representing different American
colonies, it implored colonialists to unite in preparation for what the
Americans called the French and Indian War. The editorial cartoonist holds an
esteemed mantle in America; more vaunted than a mere satirist or illustrator.
He or she is an ombudsman, holding public servants accountable for policies and
gaffes. An exemplar of the craft was
Thomas Nast, who launched his arrows from the pages of Harper’s Weekly in the late
nineteenth century. Nast cartoons like one titled Who Stole the People’s Money
famously helped bring down William M. “Boss” Tweed of the corrupt Tammany Hall
political machine in New York. (Tweed purported demanded: “Stop them damned
pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents
can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!”)
Generations
of editorial cartoonists like Paul Conrad, recipient of three Pulitzer prizes
while working for the Los
Angeles Times, have followed in Nast’s footsteps. Conrad took on
eleven American presidents, most notably excoriating President Richard Nixon
for the criminal abuse of power known as the Watergate Scandal—an act that
landed Conrad on Nixon’s infamous Enemies List. Long before the decline of
print media, cartoonists battled for editorial space against editors fearful
that their work would offend powerful interests or advertisers. “The way to
succeed in this business is to play it safe, to crank out boring, derivative,
redundant, often even plagiarized work,” explains syndicated cartoonist Ted
Rall.
Gary
Trudeau’s Doonesbury has gone a long way toward opening editorial cartoon space
for dissent and controversy since he first published it in 1970. A fearless master
of the art, his strip is syndicated to nearly 1,400 publications globally—and
available online on the Slate website
and at gocomics.com. His taboo-breaking mention of drugs (“fine, uncut Turkish
hashish”) in a 1972 strip ignited protest from readers of family newspapers. He
was the first syndicated cartoonist to draw an openly gay character. In
2003, Trudeau drove conservatives mad with an anti-war series that
incorporated the names of U.S. soldiers killed in the American invasion of Iraq
into his panels. From Richard Nixon onwards, he has consistently taken on
American presidents; his strip once featured a contest asking readers to submit
proof of George W. Bush’s military record, service that seemed to elude
official documentation. Frequently, Trudeau has even annoyed the editors who
contract his strip. Nearly thirty papers refused to publish a recent Doonesbury
lampoon of Republican-backed legislation that Trudeau likened to a war on
women’s reproductive rights.
Some
of the hardest-hitting political analysis out there can now be found on
left-leaning web sites like the Daily
Kos, which features comics drawn by such artists as Jen
Sorensen and Matt Bors. Sorensen’s SlowPoke comics, named for her measured
drawing pace, are loaded with voluminous commentary, Simpsons-esque
caricatures, and cynical wit. No fan of conservatives, nonetheless one of her
cartoons featured a text-intensive chart showing how the policies of “Obama at
his best” are remarkably similar to “Romney at his worst.” Bors is currently experimenting
with online animations, a medium for which Mark Fiore was the first cartoonist
to win a Pulitzer, in 2010. Bors’ Avenging Uterus superhero, mocking some
Republican politicians’ obtuse statements about rape and abortion, is bound to
offend.
Carving
out a niche is not an easy thing for a cartoonist in an online environment
saturated with wisecracks from anyone with a blog site or a Twitter account.
But illustrators like Matt Wuerker are proving up to the challenge. He draws
five cartoons a week for Politico, a
high-end news organization that started up as an online outlet and now also
publishes a print edition. Wuerker, who was encouraged as a child by his
neighbor Paul Conrad, was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Price for Editorial
Cartooning for, “for his consistently fresh, funny cartoons, especially
memorable for lampooning the partisan conflict that engulfed Washington,”
according to the jury’s citation. “Cartoonists were creating memes before
anyone had a clue what a meme was,” Wuerker wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review.
“They were the original tweeters, long accustomed to boiling a thought down to
140 characters.”
Wuerker
meanwhile has taken his cartoons digital with animations and even interactive
games. His OBAMAgrams iPhone app enables the user to craft an animated telegram
to the president in the Oval Office. Choose from a handful of actions for Obama
to perform (answer the red telephone, hold a birthday cake, launch a missile,
etc.), record your own dialogue, and then post it to YouTube or Facebook.
The
new generation of editorial cartoonists is exploiting the advantages of speed
and space afforded by the World Wide Web. Veteran illustrator Steve Brodner
covered the 2012 Republican and Democratic conventions like a beat reporter for
the Nation,
posting 152 sketches in real time on the publication’s website. Quick pencil
drawings of American ‘pols’ at work, which might have languished unseen in his
sketchbook, appeared instantaneously on the Nation’s Live Art Blog. Brodner, who pioneered
the animated cartoon for the New
Yorker online, also regularly posted one-minute animations about
the 2012 election on the website of the Washington Spectator. In one video, Brodner conducts
the final interview with the Romney’s dog, famed for having traveled on the
roof of the family’s car during a 1983 road trip. From the elderly care home,
Seamus the dog laments, “I don’t know about forgiveness, but you got to salute
[Romney] if just for his nerve,” then lifts one of his hind legs next to a
television set flashing the candidate’s image. Likewise, Ann Telnaes, who
publishes her cartoons on the Washington
Post’s website, posts up-to-the-minute sketches on her personal
blog. One doodle depicted President Obama as he prepared for his debates
with challenger Mitt Romney. It showed Obama downing dozens of cups of
coffee—the deep shading on the mugs and on Obama’s face capturing the
incumbent’s angst. When Obama was re-elected a month later, she posted a simple
sketch of the president’s ebullient smile, with its toothiness taking up the
entire frame.
The
web’s supremely visual and interactive nature is inspiring a genre in which
cartoonists take on the role of reporter-storytellers. Susie Cagle, a staff
writer at the Grist, an
online environmental magazine, dodged police batons and teargas canisters
covering the Occupy Oakland protests in 2011. She has also filed illustrated
reports from places like medical marijuana centers that typically forbid
cameras from capturing images. Her scoop on a chain of faith-based crisis
pregnancy centers, which allegedly dispensed bogus medical advice to young
women, led the San Francisco district attorney’s office to investigate. Another
notable example of the genre is the Cartoon Movement, a collaborative web
platform for cartoonists from around the world. It has published long-form
comic reportage on irregular Mexican immigration into the U.S., the Army of God
in the Congo, and the London Olympics. A group of cartoonists traveled together
to Afghanistan in 2010 for a series of illustrated dispatches on America’s
longest war. But it’s not so easy to travel abroad to a conflict zone on a
cartoonist’s budget. Thus, Kickstarter, an online fundraising platform, was a
major source of financing for their Afghan expedition. Similarly Bors is
crowdfunding his ongoing work with the Cartoon Movement; in less than a month,
he exceeded his $20,000 goal, the minimum required to publish Life Begins At Incorporation, a
book of his cartoons and essays.
Even
in the New York Times, once
dubbed the Gray Lady for its text-heavy columns and dearth of images, we are
seeing a nod to digitally inspired visual narrative in the form of a weekly
comic strip, called The Strip, by Brian McFadden. That McFadden, whose weekly
Big Fat Whale strip appears in alternative weeklies like the Boston Phoenix, now illustrates
for the Sunday Review signals a new appetite for edge, rather than a safe
roundup of syndicated cartoons.
Although
McFadden has landed one of the most coveted jobs in the business, he remains a
freelancer—the gig’s benefits don’t include a subscription to the Times, much less
benefits like healthcare. Not to worry, the Boston-based cartoonist is covered
by “public option” health insurance in Massachusetts, enacted when Mitt Romney
was governor of the state—a fact that McFadden has used to mercilessly skewer
Romney’s opposition to Obamacare.
McFadden titled his talk at the recent American Association of Editorial
Cartoonists’ annual confab in September “The Future of Freelance: Brought to
you by RomneyCare.” “I have health insurance thanks to Mitt Romney,” McFadden
deadpanned. Introducing his slideshow, he projected his Commonwealth Care card
on the wall to drive the point home, before getting into a selection of his
comics.
McFadden is taking on the media as well as politicians.
In a multi-panel October strip, for example, he took a swipe at journalists for
becoming too obsessed with the pyrotechnics of partisan rhetoric; The Strip led
with a posted sign reading: “Lost: Issues,” which were “last seen before the
G.O.P. primaries.” In the following panels, a voter, whistling while walking
down the street, is not fazed by the incapacity of Obama and Romney to address
vexing issues like income inequality, the Syrian war, indefinite detention
(“Since it’s indefinite, I can worry about that later,” says the voter), and
more. In the final panel, a TV broadcaster announces, “The candidate you don’t
like committed a gaffe today.” The voter cheers. It is, indeed, one of the more
astute insights into the sorry state of American politics in the presidential
election year of 2012.
The
Cairo Review is grateful to
Matt Wuerker for his permission to publish his cartoons.
Jonathan Guyer is associate editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs and a Fulbright fellow researching
political cartoons in Egypt. He previously served as a program
associate for the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force in
Washington, DC, and as assistant editor of Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel. He has contributed to the National, Guardian,
and Daily Beast. On Twitter: @mideastXmidwest.