WARNING! Graphic Content: Political Cartoons, Comix and the Uncensored Artistic Mind

Author

Introduction

The Artist in Front of His Work, c. 1863, Honoré Daumier

According to a report titled The Golden Age for Editorial Cartoonists at the Nation’s Newspapers Is Over, issued by the Herb Block Foundation in 2012, there are fewer than 40 staff cartoonists employed by newspapers in the United States, which is considerably fewer than the approximately 2,000 counted at the beginning of the 20th century. Add to that the several thousand papers that have gone defunct over the last 100 years and the tripling of the country’s population and one wonders how—or even why—an editorial cartoonist might be expected to survive, let alone thrive, as a viable contributor to the national debate about who we are as a tribe® and what we are as a democracy.™

Howl, 2014, Mr. Fish

But, of course, the editorial cartoon—defined simply as political or social commentary rendered in pictorial form—predates the advent of the newspaper industry, so there should be no reason to assume that by getting rid of news printed on paper we are ushering in an unprecedented mass extinction of the editorial cartoonist. After all, if the Chicxulub asteroid hadn’t slammed into Mexico 65 million years ago and obliterated more than 70% of life on Earth, the dinosaurs would’ve never been encouraged to diversify and become the worldwide bird population that we so enjoy today as singers, delicacies, beggars, companions, mimics, and multicolored metaphors for freedom. In other words, while very specific circumstances might determine the particular actions of a cartoonist and classify his or her work in accordance with the very precise demands of a contrived occupation or lifestyle, the instincts of the artist are much more innate and predisposed to creative expression regardless of financial compensation or celebrity incentive.

In fact, an argument could be made that it isn’t even the profession of editorial cartooning that typically attracts an artist into launching a career as one.

Duck Amuck (Still), 1953, Animators: Ben Washam, Ken Harris, and Lloyd Vaughan; Director: Chuck Jones

In 1953, Warner Bros. Studios produced a Merrie Melodies animated short called Duck Amuck that featured Daffy Duck and an unseen animator (later revealed to be Bugs Bunny) who tormented his subject as he attempted to demonstrate his range as a thespian. The animator erases and redraws background scenery inappropriate to Daffy’s antics, erases and redraws him in preposterous and aggravating ways, and alternately ignores and deliberately misinterprets his every demand for cooperation and respect. Similar to Groucho Marx’s frequent breaking down of the fourth wall to address moviegoers for one reason or another—I may be stuck here, but there’s no reason you can’t go out into the lobby until this all blows over—Duck Amuck was the first cartoon I ever saw that, with a wink to the audience, both acknowledged the creative omnipotence of the artist and demonstrated a radical break from the traditional narrative structure upheld by every other animated short in popular circulation, the resulting message to young viewers everywhere being: Anything is possible given the right combination of mischievousness, drawing ability, and disdain for mainstream storytelling.

Nearly every other cartoonist I’ve ever spoken with from my generation regarding his or her chief inspiration for entering into the profession of editorial cartooning places Duck Amuck somewhere at the top of the list, despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing overtly political about it. For older cartoonists, such as Daryl Cagle, David Levine, and Richard Guindon, inspiration came from artists such as Winsor McCay, Gustave Verbeek, and Rube Goldberg, each renown for rejoicing in the absurd, combining innovation with renegadism, and celebrating the delightfully nontraditional aesthetic—again, not specifically political, though, like Duck Amuck, reflective of a radically independent mind, artistic fearlessness, and an appetite for intellectual frontierism, none of which is cultivated or encouraged by conventional society.

Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905, Winsor McCay

The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, 1904, Gustave Verbeek

(Author’s note: Verbeek’s six-panel comic, which ran in The New York Herald from 1903 to 1905, was first read right-side up and then turned upside down for reading the second half of the story. Remarkably, the drawings were completely different and legible both ways.)

The Self-Operating Napkin, c. 1915, Rube Goldberg

(Author’s note: Goldberg’s cartoons depicting impossibly complex contraptions devised to accomplish simple tasks were so popular that the Merriam-Webster dictionary eventually adopted the cartoonist’s name as an adjective meaning ingeniously or unnecessarily complicated in design or construction.)

One might argue that it is precisely that discordance with the status quo that makes for the clearest perspective from which to observe political activity as an editorial cartoonist, for it is typically the outsider looking down at the chessboard who recognizes the folly of the game well before the pawn, king, queen, or bishop does. Indeed, the best way to recognize the unsettling stench of burning flesh is to remain well beyond the influence of those engaged in the type of activity that relies on the steady and monotonous lighting of matches to make human combustion normal and predictable and constant. That said, this book was written in contempt of the rampant misconception that cartooning, like dentistry, began as a savagely ignorant practice that demonstrated ape-like incompetence before advancing through to modern times and exemplifying a level of expertise celebrated for its precision and sophistication.

Instead of chapters, the book is organized nonchronologically into acts, like a play, that track the exposition, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the dénouement of this improvised drama that we so generally refer to as art, which exists simultaneously as an object and an act of communication that is unparalleled in its ability to resist an explicit definition. And similar to the experience of witnessing a play by Sophocles, Stoppard, Strindberg, or Simon, which succeeds in resisting an explicit definition by being open to an infinite number of interpretations, there are distractions embedded within the main body of the text that serve to remind us all of those moments when what is happening on the stage triggers a rumination that is separate from the production unfolding before us and we are made to suddenly consider the viability of other thoughts and feelings that somehow relate to our experience of everything that’s not going on in the theatre, that may be the sound of our own voice boldly taking a stab at comprehension—or wisdom, even. Or defeat—the admitted permanence of relentless and perpetual bewilderment over everything: everything being just another word, of course, for "nothing in particular."

The Interview (Detail from The R. Crumb Handbook), 2005, Robert Crumb

Act 1, Exposition—A Cartoon by Any Other Name

art, n. This word has no definition.

—Ambrose Bierce

I’m Not Here to Be Polite (Detail from the R. Crumb Handbook), 2005, Robert Crumb

The word cartoon derives from the French carton and the Italian cartone, meaning a preparatory drawing on strong paper used as a model for a piece of fine art, such as a painting, fresco, tapestry or stained glass. The word originated in 1671 at the height of the Age of Enlightenment, the same year that hack poet and mediocre dramatist Jean-Baptiste Rousseau was born to a poor shoemaker in Paris. Rousseau, though well known as a quick wit, was not famous for contributing anything but average plays and poems with startling flashes of blandness to an audience with equal access to Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu, but rather for being exiled from France for allegedly writing and circulating defamatory poetry that lampooned his literary rivals, detractors, and critics. Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue, he said, perhaps in deference to his circumstance as an expatriated literary caricaturist, inadvertently defining both the albatross and the Excalibur that political and editorial cartoonists have been equally cursed and blessed to carry since the first poison pen was laid to crosshatch, exclamation point, and speech bubble.

Rousseau, in that way, might rightly claim relevance not for succeeding in helping to propagate the well-reasoned skepticism and poetic rationalism and rudimentary 18th century science essential to the intellectual significance of the Enlightenment, but for both demonstrating a tournament-level skill at pissing off the gentry and naming precisely how the impulse to voice an opinion might sometimes supersede the attempt to refrain from doing so. His impudence in the face of decorum and convention might also be considered an early example of the sort of idiosyncratic mind keenly tuned and uniquely wired for the production of improvised jazz, action painting, and open-air public speaking—the self-guided Tourette’s of the disenfranchised and the radically unafraid. Likewise, the 17th-century cartoons, because they were seen as preparatory drawings, enjoyed a similar abandon by being separate from the priggish misconception that artistic self-expression must adhere to certain highbrow qualifications before being considered legitimate.

Put simply, unlike the finished pieces of art for which they were rendered to blueprint, the purpose of a cartoon was never to embody perfection but rather to use imperfection to communicate possibility.

Act 1, Distraction 1—Watching Cartoons

Indeed, it wasn’t until 1843 that the definition of cartoon, in one fell swoop, was expounded upon and forever disengaged from the aforementioned process of making art when John Leech published an illustration (then known as a penciling) in the British satire magazine Punch called Cartoon No. 1: Substance and Shadow. The drawing depicted a rabble of lame and destitute peasants attending an art exhibition comprising portraits—cartoons in the original sense of the word—organized by the houses of Parliament to showcase preliminary sketches for new paintings and murals planned for the Palace of Westminster, which had been destroyed by fire in 1834. In delicious mockery of the government’s very public self-aggrandizement and bemusing refusal to recognize the reprehensible class gorge separating the haves from the have-nots, the editors of Punch decided to run a series of their own cartoons—with Substance and Shadow being the first—for the purpose of portraying the grotesque disparity between rich and poor, even offering, by way of an explanation for Leech’s artwork, the addendum that the government had determined that as they cannot afford to give hungry nakedness the substance which it covets, at least it shall have the shadow. The poor ask for bread, and the philanthropy of the State accords—an exhibition.

Cartoon No. 1—Substance and Shadow, 1843, John Leech

Ergo, for the first time in history there was suddenly something called a cartoonist, the designation having been born gloriously from a compassionate act of nonviolent antiestablishmentarianism.

Act 1, Distraction 2—Nasty Behavior

Of course, as it is with most things endemic to the most fundamental aspects of human self-expression, cartoons and cartoonists predate their formal classification by hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, it’s arguable that cartooning, in one form or another, has been with us ever since, to paraphrase Mark Twain, God made the mistake of preserving sin by not forbidding Eve to devour the snake, an act of bureaucratic mismanagement so fundamentally destructive that our sense of moral self-determinism has never been the same. Nor, thankfully, has our belief in the absolute wisdom of our authority figures.

Nigga, Pleeze!, 2010, Mr. Fish

It is not beyond comprehension, in fact, that we have never been without cartooning, particularly when we consider the more contemporary definition of the word, the one describing it as an editorial drawing intended as satire, caricature, or humor. If we are to understand the word editorial as the exposition of a personal opinion and cartooning merely as the rendering of that opinion in pictorial form, we come to find that the earliest practitioners of the art form were editorializing on the walls of limestone caves in the south of France some 33,000 years ago, eons before the Bible places the events that took place in the Garden of Eden. Of even greater significance is how these cave drawings predate the invention of the written word by the Sumerians of Ancient Mesopotamia by 30,000 years, proof that when it comes to the mode of recorded communication upon which human beings have historically most relied, it is the visual depiction of our lives’ experiences that have proven themselves most deeply meaningful to the species rather than phonetic symbols arranged on a straight line. In fact, given the unparalleled longevity of pictorial art and its unique ability to record history, communicate both literal and abstract ideas, express complicated emotions, and render complex feelings that eclipse the limitations of the linguistic form, it is imperative that the cartoonist, just like all visual artists, be recognized as a purveyor of an actual language no less legitimate than French or Persian or Mandarin or Gaelic or Bantu or Winnebago. Furthermore, just as it is with the articulate languages, the ocular languages as practiced by visual artists should only be considered decipherable to those willing to dedicate sufficient attention to learning at least the basic vocabulary—including something of the regional history and aesthetics—of the specific language being portrayed in the artwork.

How to Draw an Owl, Date unknown, Artist unknown

Just as one who doesn’t understand Russian would never presume the authority to criticize the grace or insight of a poem composed by Alexander Pushkin using the Cyrillic alphabet, one should never claim the ability to judge any piece of art while being completely illiterate of the time and place and extenuating circumstances during which the work was inspired to spring into existence. After all, only when one is able to understand the language with which a sentiment is cast can one criticize the clumsiness or the bombast or the pointlessness, or appreciate the poetry or the wisdom or the sheer intelligence, of what is being offered by the composer. Understanding too the universality of how all languages constitute a singularity of human communication, it makes the definition of cartooning as an editorial drawing intended as satire, caricature, or humor precisely as nebulous and broad a definition as the classification of music as the art or science of combining sounds to produce an expression of emotion. In other words, as it is with all things, the meaning of a thing, whether literal or conceptual, has more to do with the circumstantial usability of the thing at any given moment than it does with the rigid elucidation that insists all things have an intrinsic value that is fixed and namable and unalterable by the multiplicity of innumerable subjective translations.

In addition, because the imagery contained within an editorial cartoon must first be experienced by the senses before it can be interpreted by the intellect, a cartoon will resonate as a physical thing within one’s physiology before being converted into an idea that is then translated by one’s psychology and turned into a conceptual reality that is alterable by mood and opinion and imagination. A cartoonist, like a musician, an athlete, and an actor, much more than functioning merely as the creator of an object whose significance is determined upon reflection, will create an actual moment in time wherein a person can interact with reality in the present tense. Consider the divinely perplexing encounter with the sublimely baffling universe inspired by a pair of headphones, a dimly lit room and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, or consider the value of watching a live sporting event as it unfolds in real time, or consider the depth with which Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy, as performed by a competent Hamlet, will transcend the language in which it is literally written and enter the theatergoer’s soul like an existential vertigo that awakens one’s natural fear of heights above and below and to either side of humanity’s precarious perch atop its own conceit.

Act 1, Distraction 3—Space Oddity

So again, an editorial cartoon is less a drawing rendered merely to illustrate an opinion and more an artistic contrivance that attempts to marry a cartoonist’s experience of an authentic moment with a concept that labels and then dramatizes that experience in some meaningful way.

Court Ladies Playing Double-Sixes, 8th Century, Zhou Fang

Thusly, other examples through history of editorial cartooning must include the ancient Chinese wall scrolls from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), which were, put simply, drawings, often captioned, detailing commentary about life, politics and philosophy—a format that every contemporary cartoonist considers absolutely essential to the practice of his or her craft. Then there are the Japanese Shunga erotic prints dating back to the Heian period (794–1185), the earliest of which depicted sexual scandals of the imperial courts and monasteries, not in condemnation of those portrayed but in celebration of both eroticism and how deliciously lascivious the private experience of sex can appear when engaged in by those whose public persona is typically considered beyond the lure and lurch of such naked passion: an aesthetic that we see repeated most notably during the Underground Comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s by such artists as Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson.

Komachi Biki (Picture Book: Pulling Komachi), 1802, Kitagawa Utamaro

Big Healthy Girl, 1998, Robert Crumb

Untitled (detail of ukiyo-e print), c. 1870, Hiroshige III

From Racism/Sexism/Ageism/Demonism/Jismism, 1985, S. Clay Wilson

There is also the Egyptian storyboarding carved into the tombs and monuments of pharaohs, members of the nobility, and government officials, each carving little more than serialized comic strips designed to comment on one’s interaction with the celestial power structure and ethereal elite.

Grape Cultivation Mural, c. 1500