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Cartoon Critique Returns

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Ted Rall

I don’t know if I will keep doing this, but the reaction to Friday’s cartoon critique was so interesting and mostly positive but I thought I would keep it up with this latest batch. If you’re just joining the program, you probably already know my own work. But what you don’t know is what I’m reacting against: the so-called mainstream editorial cartoons that run in most major newspapers and on most major media websites, almost always to the exclusion of the  good alternative stuff. Most artists get into an artform in order to build upon what came before. That’s also true of alternative artists, since our influences come from other places, but in the marketplace as it exists today, we are mostly defining ourselves by not being like this crap.

 

Cartoon by Steve Greenberg - Silencer

This is what I call the phony “I don’t care about politics” genre. After all, it’s by a political cartoonist. Someone who lives and breathes politics. Someone who is paid by a large daily newspaper, one that won’t even pick up my stuff for $20 a week via syndication even though I’m from the state that it’s in, and pretends that all he wants do is wallow in escapist television garbage. Sorry, I’m not buying it.

 

Cartoon by Jimmy Margulies -

This cartoon illustrates the problems with the metaphor-based form of editorial cartooning. It’s almost like you need that fancy Enigma code breaking machine from World War II to decipher the thing. And then, assuming that you’re smart enough and caffeinated enough to figure it out, you have to conclude that all that work probably wasn’t worth it.

 

130574 600 Terror Hill cartoons

I admit it, this one kind of freaked me out. It’s another metaphor. At first, I thought to myself that since Uncle Sam was involved, he was going to have to climb Capitol Hill and this had something to do with the failed vote on the gun background check bill. Then I realized what it really was, that terrorism would be a hard hill to climb. Again, you can really see how these metaphor cartoons are hard to pull off. I mean, if you follow the analogy, this means that Uncle Sam wants to become more of a terrorist? Or that terrorism is something that were just going to have to get over? I don’t know. Makes my head hurt. And I really don’t understand the whole enormous buried skull.

 

130573 600 Inspirational Marathon Runners cartoons I am guessing that this was probably an attempt to be emotional, but all it looks like to me is like a 1%er banker is running to the rescue. Did this happen? How did I miss this story? Very strange. Congratulations, by the way, to the cartoonist for winning the 2013 National Headliner Award. He already previously won two Pulitzer Prizes.

No alternative cartoonist – Tom Tomorrow, Matt Bors, Jen Sorensen, Stephanie McMillan, or myself – has ever won the National Headliner Award.

 

130571 600 Flag Waving cartoons

Another two-time Pulitzer winner weighs in with… What? I have no idea. Yeah, I recognize the national anthem. What exactly this has to do with the Boston bombing… What? Editors will no doubt love this.

Bear in mind, I intentionally chose cartoons by people who make a lot more money than I do and have won a lot more awards than I have and are much more successful than the best cartoonists in the business. According to the prize committees and the HR departments of America’s newspapers, this is what I should be doing instead of what I am doing. This is what gets rewarded.

 

The Chechen Connection

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Ted Rall

Beginning in the mid-1990s under the regime of President Boris Yeltsin and continuing into the early part of the 2000s under Vladimir Putin, Russia fought a so-called “dirty war” against Chechen separatists in a region of the world that military strategists have long considered among the most indomitable. Even in Afghanistan, where many Chechen fighters went to train in Taliban run training camps, they had a reputation for ferocity that frightened many war-hardened Afghans.

As the younger brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is the surviving suspect in the Boston marathon bombings six days ago remained silent and in serious condition in a Boston hospital, and apparently did not issue any public statement about motives, it is impossible to say why – if indeed it was him and his brother – they did it. So what follows is speculation.

We know that older brother Tamerlan – the name of the famous 15th century Central Asian conqueror – visited relatives in Chechnya for about six months in 2012, according to his father, in order to renew his Russian passport. Authorities are currently investigating the possibility that he connected with radical separatist groups during his visit. He posted videos by radical jihadi figures to YouTube when he returned.

Why might a Chechen resent the United States? After all, Russia – not the United States – blasted the capital city of Grozny into smithereens and made countless Chechens vanish into thin air, an act of ethnic cleansing similar to Kosovo. In fact, most Chechen resistance groups focus their rage – and terror attacks – against Moscow and other Russian cities.

Some Chechens charge the United States with a conspiracy of silence with Russia, which they see as an American ally. It is a credible charge. After all, the United States has maintained a close security relationship between the CIA and the successor to the KGB, the FSB, since 1994. That’s why, for example, Tamerlan’s trip to Russia aroused a query from the Russians to their counterparts in the American government.

If you think back to the Carter administration, which made human rights a top priority (albeit inconsistently), there was a time when political dissidents might be able to expect – not in all situations, but often – the US to decry human rights violations such as those that occurred in Chechnya in the late 1990s. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, however, US policy was to refuse to comment or to issue low-profile denunciations that escaped the notice of the media. In the same way that so many governments failed to step up and help Jews escape Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, to do nothing (or very little) is to tacitly enable murderers. Silence equals consent.

Now scroll forward to 2013. The United States, which had nothing to say about Russian policy in Chechnya, is engaged in an epic clash of civilizations against Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. (Just yesterday, an American terror drone killed two people in the Obama Administration’s extrajudicial campaign of slaughter of Yemenis.) It’s not a big stretch to imagine the suspects in the Boston marathon bombings thinking that the reason that the United States doesn’t care about what happened to their homeland is that it’s all part of the same policy, that the US and Russia are on the same side, that these two countries are more friends than enemies, Western powers who are trying to destroy Islam.

So why blow up the marathon? If you’re in Boston, you go with the targets that you have. That’s where you live. Why blow up innocents? Because you can’t get at those who were truly responsible, the policymakers in Washington and Moscow. And anyway, you tell yourselves, Americans aren’t really innocent. This is a democracy. We’re responsible for our government. We vote for our leaders. We should rise up and overthrow them if we don’t like them; otherwise, we’re responsible for them. This notion of “collective guilt,” after all, is how the Allies during World War II justified targeting civilians with bombing raids. Osama bin Laden made analogous claims that Americans deserved to be targeted because of their collective guilt.

Ultimately, you wage attacks in order to get attention for a cause that has been ignored. To get the issues you care about discussed and talked about. That’s the purpose of terrorism. Terrorism is the tool of the weak and oppressed against the strong and powerful. It’s asymmetric warfare.

While it will always be impossible to stop terrorism, it’s a fallacy to argue that we can’t reduce its frequency and the likelihood of American targets being attacked again, that we’ll always be targeted no matter what. It just isn’t true. Luxembourg doesn’t have a lot of terrorist bombings. Neither does Belgium – but it would if it still had its big colonial empire. If you don’t invade other countries, if you don’t engage in aggressive foreign policy, if you’re not financing and arming oppressive regimes, you tend not to piss people off.

One could argue that we shouldn’t give in to terrorists by changing our policies. But if our policies are brutal and counterproductive to begin with, it’s a discussion that we should be having.

Right now, to watch the news and watch the so-called experts talk about Boston, it’s pretty clear that they don’t get it. Skirting the issue, they talk about the psychological component, that the two brothers from Chechnya were to some extent alienated from American society. They talk about the success of law enforcement. They talk about privacy and cameras. The Republicans are even talking about this as an excuse not to legalize 11 million illegal immigrants.

But all of these issues are beside the point. The only surprise about Monday’s attack is that such horrific events are so few and far between.

My Thoughts: Boston Suspect is from Kyrgyzstan

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Ted Rall

Note: the following relates to a rapidly developing breaking story. At this point, there is a lot of speculation and a lot of reliance on official government reports which, as we know, are not always reliable.

According to media accounts based on police reports, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings is a 19-year-old man named Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, a resident of Boston who lived in the former Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan and may or may not be Chechen in origin. He identifies himself as a Muslim.

In anticipation of media queries due to his Central Asian origin, I thought I would post the following impressions and thoughts about his possible motivations.

Obviously no one knows, if in fact he is guilty, what his motivation was for helping his brother to set off bombs at the Boston Marathon on Monday. That said, a lot of people are unfamiliar with Kyrgyzstan so I thought I would set up a little bit of light on the subject since I have been there many times and have studied Central Asia, its politics and culture.

Generally speaking, Kyrgyzstan is divided between its secular Sovietized North, centered around the capital of Bishkek, and its conservative Muslim south, centered around the Fergana Valley city of Osh. Throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Kyrgyz Republic represented one of the great hopes for democratization in former Soviet Central Asia. It had a flawed but democratically elected president, one of the least corrupt police forces in the region, and was relatively peaceful. Largely it was free of Western influence because it did not have oil or natural gas reserves coveted by Russia or the United States. Therefore, it did not suffer from the famous oil curse.

In recent years the most important political development in Kyrgyzstan was the 2005 Tulip Revolution, which saw radical Islamist insurgents and financed by the American CIA and based around Osh topple the regime of Pres. Akayev, who fled into exile rather than order his security forces to fire upon his people. Nobody can be 100% certain why the United States decided to repeat the same mistakes that it made in Afghanistan during the 1980s, but it isn’t a huge stretch to assume that the fact that Akayev was demanding increased rent on the US air base at Manas that was established after the 9/11 attacks may have had something to do with it.

Since 2005 the political situation in the Boston suspect’s homeland has deteriorated. Some analysts consider it nearly a failed state. Certainly the central government has lost control of much of the South. For example, when I tried to cross from Tajikistan into southeastern Kyrygzstan at Sary Tash in 2008, border guards informed me that they had not heard from Bishkek in years. In fact, they no longer even had a passport stamp. It was very clear that local warlords were in charge of mining and other concerns there.

Radical Islamists, always active in the southern part of the country, have become emboldened since 2005. One insurgent group, the Islamic Movement of Turkestan, formerly known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, has attracted self radicalized Muslims from all over the world, including a substantial faction from Chechnya. Chechnya, well-informed readers will recall, was destroyed by forces under the direction of Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin. While we in the West may have forgotten this episode, Chechens are well known as ferocious fighters who never forget a grudge. Jihad is alive and well for them.

Why did Mr. Tsarnaev blowup the marathon? Assuming, of course that he did?

It may well be that his trajectory as an ethnic Chechen brought him into contact with radical Muslims in Kyrgyzstan. Although it seems like a stretch for Americans, Muslims around the world often see America and Russia acting in concert. It would then be another logical leap to attack America here – yes, including attacking innocent civilians, because after all, Russia attacks innocent civilians in Muslim countries and in places like Chechnya, and the United States does so in other places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Of course, all of this is conjecture.

Anyone interested in a broader look at the Soviet legacy in Central Asia, including countries like Kyrgyzstan, may be interested in checking out my book “Silk Road to Ruin: is Central Asia the new Middle East?”

Media may contact me via the contact form at rall.com.

 

As of 10:45 AM: this is an update.

So there is also a conflicting report that the brothers lived in Kazakhstan after leaving Chechnya in the early 2000s. The political situation in Kazakhstan could not be more different than in Kyrgyzstan. Although the two countries are closely related ethnically, and many many Kyrgyz live in Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan is the beneficiary of one of the biggest oil booms in the history of mankind. The economy is booming, although oil wealth has not been shared. Also, Kazakhstan is ruled by an authoritarian dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, a US ally who has run the country since independence in 1991 and was a former Soviet party boss. He is ruthless – he is even accused of executing rival presidential candidates months before an election – but he hasn’t had much of an Islamic insurgency to deal with, unlike neighboring Central Asian republics. If in fact the brothers are from Kazakhstan, they probably did not have the opportunity to meet many radical Islamists.

Cartoon Critique

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Ted Rall

When I talk about shitty editorial cartooning, there is no better time to point to examples of the crap that ruin this profession then the maudlin pabulum that follows tragic mass deaths. The bombing in Boston earlier this week was a boon to America’s imagination-challenged political cartoonists. Those of us to actually care about this field sent a bunch of these around by email to make fun of them, but I thought it would be interesting to share them with you to see your reactions. I’m always amazed to read the comments section under these things when they appear online. So many people like them! Is something wrong with them, or is there something wrong with me? You be the judge.

 

130399 600 Boston Marathon 911 cartoons

A number of terrible editorial cartoons have drawn parallels between the Boston bombings and 9/11. This was our 9/11, Bostonians said. Well, sorry, what happened earlier this week really really sucked and was really really wrong, but you guys didn’t lose an entire ZIP Code and 3000 people. Not to mention, the political implications probably won’t be nearly as profound either. I don’t think were about to invade a couple of countries because of what happened in Boston.

 

130428 600 Boston Marathon Memorial cartoons

What the hell does this even mean? That there are memorials? That people are running past the memorials? It certainly doesn’t make any kind of political statement. It’s not a political cartoon. It’s just a pastiche of an illustration, and not a very good one.

 

130318 600 Boston Marathon terror cartoons

There were tons of these abandoned sneaker cartoons. I just picked this one out at random. Aside from the fact that it’s really stupid and doesn’t say anything, it makes no sense whatsoever. Nobody lost their sneakers running away. Sneakers are tightly laced on. Even if your leg got blown off, it was still attached to your sneaker. So aside from this being schmaltzy, it’s totally stupid.

 

130332 600 Boston Marathon Bombing cartoons

Again, I just have no idea what these things are supposed to mean. Is Boston metaphorically limping across the finish line? What is the finish line? The successful apprehension and execution of whoever is responsible? I feel like a lot of editorial cartoonists simply slap together a bunch of random images. It’s almost like random free association.

 

 

130325 600 Boston Terrorism cartoons

Admitted plagiarist Bill Day – scratch that, now he has de-admitted it – weighs in with a cartoon that  will no doubt be repurposed thousands of times for other unrelated issues. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but how exactly does this say anything other than terrorism is bad?  I think we knew that. Bear in mind, this guy has worked at numerous newspapers. I’ve never gotten a single one to offer me a job.

 

130396 600 Crying Lady cartoons

You would think that the parody cartoons in the Onion would have caused cartoonists to stop using cheesy weeping Statue of Liberty cartoons after tragedies, but cartooning’s master plagiarist continues. Well, it’s all good times when you’re counting the $42,000 you extracted from suckers on Indiegogo.

 

 

130355 600 Boston Marathon cartoons

One wag commented that a giant blue Anaconda appears to be loose on the streets of Boston. I would also add that a little bit of Ralph Steadman appears to be loose in the lower left-hand corner. Justice, apparently, is blind but really really hot and buff. Anyway, what does this mean? That justice is moving swiftly?  Bear in mind, the artist is a lot more successful than I am. He managed to get himself fired on staff at the Columbus Dispatch and was considered on the shortlist for the Pulitzer Prize in a piece by the Washington Post this year.

 

130287 600 Boston Marathon Attack Runners cartoons

Another piece by someone who has had more success than me. He’s on staff at a big daily newspaper. Full medical benefits. Retirement plan. He doesn’t have to worry about how to pay his rent every month.  He won the very prestigious Herblock award, which if I’m not mistaken, was worth a cool $10,000 at the time. Might be $15,000. Not sure. Anyway, yeah, this is just an illustration of a story that anybody who has been watching the news has been following. The first responders ran toward the blast while the runners were running away. Very hot runners. But when I want to know is, is not the way it’s supposed to be? Most of the time, cops and firefighters don’t have anything to do. They’re paid a good deal of money to spring into action and risk their lives every now and then. That’s the job. They agreed to do it. How exactly does that make them heroes? And anyway, the idea that first responders are heroes is hardly something that needs to be said in an editorial cartoon. This is just pandering.

 

130358 600 False Flag cartoons

Another one by the same guy. By the way I always kind of liked his loose drawing style, though it doesn’t really work very well here. Anyway, I really hate these kind of metaphors. You know because there were a lot of flags at the marathon, or at least in the photographs of the marathon that went out over the Associated Press wire service. And because a lot of conspiracy theorists say that this is a false flag operation… Well, you know. Again, it’s not very risky to say that conspiracy theorists are dumb. More pandering.

 

130357 600 Boston Tragedy cartoons

More bullshit patriotism. One of the things I hate more than anything is when terrorists are called cowards. As Bill Maher pointed out, the guys who flew those planes into those buildings were a lot of things but they were not pussies. And again with the heroes! Enough. Shut up. Oh, I should point out that this guy works at one of the few new gigs in the business, at the Hill newspaper. I sent them a bunch of my stuff when they launched. They weren’t interested. This is the kind of stuff that they would rather have.

 

130303 600 Comfort cartoons

So apparently the metaphorical embodiment of the Boston Marathon is homely but with huge breasts. But you would really think that it would be hard to run 26 miles without a jogging bra. Also, I want to know how Uncle Sam is exactly comforting the Boston Marathon. Or is he just hitting on her?

 

130295 600 Boston Marathon Humanity vs evil cartoons

So wait, why is humanity crossing the evil finish line? Is evil the goal that we all run 26 miles to try to achieve?

 

130342 600 Boston Marathon cartoons

Um… What? What do the Boston Red Sox have to do with this? And anyway, just another illustration. Makes no point. Tragedy is sad. Blood is bad.

 

 

130363 600 Boston cartoons

When JFK died, cartoonist Bill Mauldin drew a famous cartoon of Abraham Lincoln on the Lincoln Memorial weeping. Unfortunately for the rest of us, we have to live with the zillions of cartoonists who want to redraw that same exact cartoon every time something like this happens. This one is a huuuuge stretch, though.

 

130321 600 Boston Marathon Bombing cartoons

Apparently what it really takes to bring us all together is schmaltz. Notice, by the way, that the Democrat is a black guy. Also, is it me, or is this a little bit gay marriage-y?

What Makes a Good Editorial Cartoon?

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Ted Rall

Earlier this week, I posted a couple of long essays about the anticipation of the announcements for the Pulitzer prizes in editorial cartooning as well as the results, which could easily have been the same had they been announced 20 years ago, completely ignoring developments that have modernized the profession.

So it occurred to me that I should probably weigh in on what I think an editorial cartoon should be – or even more importantly, what it should not be.

I had a boss – not a very good boss, but still, what she had to say stayed with me for a  long time – who was fond of saying that a business was defined not by the assignments and lines of business that it accepted, but rather by the business that it refused. That is so true of so many things. When it comes to editorial cartoons, I think that you can define good ones by what they are not.

Mostly, I think editorial cartoons tend to be really awful. More so than in the usual way that most of anything is awful. All you really have to do is look at any round up of mainstream editorial cartoons online or in a newspaper or magazine to see what I mean. So when I say what I think editorial cartoons ought not to be, I am mainly reacting to what they mostly tend to be.

A good editorial cartoon should never be fair, balanced, moderate or so evenhanded that it is impossible to tell what the political orientation of the cartoonist is from that cartoon. This rules out a lot of them. Unfortunately, cartoonists believe – and editors have given them a lot of reason to believe – that they tend to be more successful when they avoid strong or strident political opinions. The result is that you get a lot of work that simply illustrates the news, in other words, it shows what is going on without stating that anything is wrong or, if it does state that something is wrong, fails to place the blame on who is responsible. One of my first tests when I am judging an editorial cartoon – as I sometimes am as a contest judge – is to ask myself: does this cartoon express a political point of view, or does it illustrate the news? If it illustrates the news, then I don’t consider it to be an editorial cartoon at all and I tend to disqualify the artist right there.

A good editorial cartoon should never squander an opportunity to say something that matters about an important issue. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues miss a lot of chances to make a point. There are a lot of topics that simply should never be fodder for an editorial cartoon. For example, Steve Sack’s winning portfolio for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize includes a cartoon that simply depicts people mobbing stores as they are trying to buy the new iPhone 5. Not only does this cartoon not make any political stance – my colleague Matt Bors, on the other hand did a fantastic job when Steve Jobs died of making a point that Apple uses slave labor in China – but the mere topic of the iPhone 5 release takes up space that would have been better used for any number of more important topics: the environment, unemployment, drones, torture, Guantánamo, hell, just about anything else. If I had sat on the jury, the iPhone cartoon would have immediately caused Sack’s portfolio to be set aside and disqualified from the award. Go through the portfolio. Sack is a liberal, but it’s not evident from his cartoons. For the most part, these cartoons simply depict. They don’t comment.

Originality counts for an awful lot, at least it does with me if not for the jurors of the major prizes and the editors of major newspapers. If I have seen a cartoon structured exactly or very closely to one that is presenting itself as something new, I turn away in disgust. This is a very small profession, most of us see other people’s work, and we know when gags are lifted. Not cool.

On a meta-level, originality and style also matters. Although every artform has mainstream tropes and styles that defined them, editorial cartooning is a particularly generic artform. This is because back in the 1960s, Chicago Tribune cartoonist Jeff MacNelly revolutionized the form. Before him, most cartoonists drew in a vertical style using ink smudge pens. He turned things 90° to the horizontal form that we know today and introduced what we call the crosshatch school of cartooning. Many of today’s cartoonists began by copying him, and you can really tell. For me, you get extra points either for having developed your own style from the start or at least for having abandoned the old house style of American editorial cartooning that has prevailed over the last 40 years.

There are, of course, a lot of highly subjective and taste related considerations when it comes to judging an editorial cartoon, and I am just as opinionated as anyone else. I simply don’t relate to the metaphor school that the older cartoonists use: donkeys, elephants, labels, etc. I don’t know many people who do. At least people under 50. Younger readers, those under 30, often tell me that they don’t even understand them. There is no doubt about it, that format has a long history dating back at least 200 years. But it just doesn’t make any sense to me, anymore than opera does. Maybe it mattered once, but it just isn’t relevant anymore.

I had an interesting conversation with Matt Bors. Sometimes it’s really hard to see how editors can look at the kind of work that he and I do and dismiss it in favor of the kind of work that, well, they like better – the older stuff. And what really mystifies us, and especially me, is that the old-school cartoonists look down on us, don’t think we’re really serious. I had a very good friend, one of the older guys, tell me that I shouldn’t be surprised that I wasn’t winning awards because, after all, I was essentially doing avant-garde work and being surprised that it wasn’t being recognized as mainstream. Of course, in my mind and certainly in those of my readers, what I do is hardly esoteric or avant-garde, just trying to reach as many people as I can.

But anyway, Matt made an interesting point: the older cartoonists and us alternative cartoonists – at 49 years old, I can only say that I feel young, only in editorial cartooning could anyone say or think they are young at my age – are in a completely different business. What those guys are trying to do is continue a tradition. It might be a tradition, like driving a penny farthing bicycle or smoking cigars or ventriloquism or phrenology, that we deem archaic and passé, but that’s what they’re trying to keep alive. For us, we’re trying to be sarcastic and ironic and meta – in other words speaking to current generations using current visual and other language. Needless to say, when we argue about the future of the form, we talk past each other because we’re really not even in the same line of work. So really, it may be that it’s time to start thinking of the Pulitzer Prize as the Pulitzer Prize for old-fashioned cartooning rather than the Pulitzer Prize for all editorial cartooning. Or maybe it’s time to start thinking of editorial cartooning as something else, and political cartooning as what we do. So much editorial cartooning has become so devoid of politics.

So what is a good political cartoon?

To me a good political cartoon is something that makes you think about things in a new way. It’s not necessarily going to change your mind. But it might get you thinking, get you started along a line of thinking, that causes you to check things out more thoroughly. It might make you more able to articulate opinions that you already had. It doesn’t regurgitate talking points, it doesn’t reflect conventional wisdom, it doesn’t say things that you already know – like a lot of people want the iPhone 5.

Guest Blogger: The Lowdown on Thatcher

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Susan Stark

Susan here. Now that the Margaret Thatcher funeral celebrations are winding down, I think it best to present a passionate disection of her character by someone who has fought her for 40 years:

Please watch the entire episode before commenting. It’ll be worth the time spent.

Why Does the Pulitzer Prize Committee Hate “Alternative” Editorial Cartooning?

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Ted Rall

Every year there is angst-filled anticipation over the announcement of the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, and every year the results are greeted with a collective shrug. Someday, one hopes, people will learn not to anticipate something that proves so disappointing so frequently. You know, like the State of the Union address. It’s never good. It never makes news. Yet everybody thinks they need to pay attention. And everyone is surprised by the letdown.

This year’s selection for the editorial cartooning category, Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, alongside his two co-finalists, Jeff Darcy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, continue a decades long trend. Nothing new here.

Steve Sack has been around a long time, is a nice, unassuming guy who is personally popular among the older generation of “mainstream” editorial cartoonists, so his win has been largely greeted as long overdue, sort of a lifetime achievement award as these things often are, a recognition of the fact that unlike many other political cartoonists who slavishly copied the artistic style of deceased Chicago Tribune cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, Steve developed his own drawing style. Like many other cartoonists at the so-called B papers, those in midsize cities, the finalist win has to come as a relief to Jeff. Clay Bennett, who has won every major and minor award in editorial cartooning, and whom I count as a friend, is in a tricky position. Personally, I think that once you win the biggest prize in journalism, it’s time to retire your contest applications, let other cartoonists have their chance, and focus on your work. After all, once you are a so-called Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, no one really cares whether you are a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist. But there’s also a tactical consideration, one that Bennett coming in as a finalist highlights: for a previous winner to come in as a finalist makes him look like his career is on a downward trajectory. But there’s no way to avoid that risk when you apply for a second Pulitzer. Another reason that it’s better not to apply.

What’s depressing is that, once again, the committee has decided to snub my entire genre of editorial cartooning, the so-called alternative school of political cartooning. It’s not like we are new kids on the block. Jules Feiffer started it at the Village Voice in 1955. Matt Groening and Lynda Barry really launched the modern era of altie editorial cartooning in the 1980s, and things  took off  throughout the ’90s, with half a dozen cartoonists at the center of the scene: myself, Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, Ward Sutton, derf, Lloyd Dangle, and I’m probably forgetting a bunch of others. After 9/11, it could be argued – and I would – that the only relevant, truly hard-hitting,  challenging, vibrant editorial cartooning being done in the Western world has been this genre, based in the comics rather than older traditions dating to the early 18th century. Out of this scene have come younger artists like my friends Matt Bors and Brian McFadden.

Eschewing labels, metaphors, donkeys and elephants, Uncle Sam, etc. in favor of multi-panel, word-dependent, ironic, sarcastic and cynical takes on America and its politics, the alternative genre and its practitioners – Tom Tomorrow, myself, Ruben Bolling, Matt Bors, Brian McFadden and so on – have reinvigorated and breathed life into a hoary artform that has generified itself into virtual oblivion. Unlike many of the older mainstream cartoonists, our work is opinionated. (Most big-city daily cartoonists illustrate the news, showing what happened and/or making jokes about it, without making much of a political point.)

Yet the gatekeepers at the major daily newspapers, and the prize committees that are made up of editors from those same print publications, have repeatedly and carefully refused to acknowledge that we even exist. In the entire history of the Pulitzer Prize, for example, there have only been three finalists from the alternative category: Jules Feiffer, who won in 1986, myself, a finalist in 1996, and Matt Bors, a finalist for 2011. Many editorial cartooning prizes have never had either a winner or a finalist from the alternative category: the Fischetti award, the National Headliner award, and before last year, the Herblock award. Makes it pretty hard to get editors to take a chance on you when you can’t get validation.

Part of the problem is that many of the editors who judge these things don’t know a lot about editorial cartooning. Some judges at the Pulitzer Prizes work at newspapers that don’t even run them, and if they do, they certainly never see the alternative stuff. Still, given a lot of the results year after year, it’s pretty clear that some very mediocre finalists and winners are prevailing over some really excellent alternative cartoonists. Given the fact that the alternative field is much more popular online – where there is a true meritocracy because people can look at anything that they want there – it seems obvious that there is a conscious decision on the part of prize committees to exclude a lot of the best work in the field.

Why? Because it’s edgy? Because it’s left of center? You can’t get a straight answer. When you ask jurors who were there, who sat on the prize committees, they always say that alties were seriously considered, that many of us came very close but just didn’t make the final cut. Sorry, but when that happens 20 years in a row across half a dozen major prizes – 120ish times – it’s hard to believe.

Why do we even bother? That’s the question that my alternative editorial cartoonist colleagues and I ask ourselves every year. Even last year, when Matt was a finalist, we knew that this was a quantum singularity, that it didn’t mark anything other than a bizarre aberration. And in fact, here we go again.

Obviously what keeps us going is our love of the field, and the fact that drawing cartoons that make fun of the President of the United States sure beats holding down a real job. Still, there’s no denying that it’s  hard on the psyche to be repeatedly told, to be repeatedly sent the message, that the kind of work that you do isn’t serious, that it doesn’t deserve to be seriously considered.

It isn’t that I didn’t win. Although obviously I would’ve liked to have won. It’s that what I do – the way that I do it – my entire artform – has been shunned. Again. If one of my alternative cartooning peers wins, at least we know that the prize committee isn’t against what we do on an existential level. As things stand, we have to assume that the people who decide these things – our mainstream editorial cartooning peers, the academics who study the field of editorial cartooning who serve on these juries, and the editors and publishers who join them every year – think that what we do is somehow offensive and inherently unworthy.

That’s not a lot of fun.

More importantly to our culture, the committee that picked the three finalists for this year’s and previous years’ Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning once again missed an opportunity. Awards make a statement. Remember last year, when they decided not to award a prize for the fiction category, how independent booksellers and fiction writers were insulted by the idea that there wasn’t’t a single novel in the United States worthy of such an award? By repeatedly shunning new developments in the field of editorial cartooning, the prize committee is discouraging stylistic growth, stunting the development of the field, quashing new careers and stopping the careers of alternative editorial cartoonists from moving forward, and most of all sending the message to younger cartoonists considering the field that they had better copy the old styles rather than develop new ones of their own. Moreover, these committees are contributing to the death of editorial cartooning, by making it harder for new cartoonists to initially get hired. This is because the vast majority of winners and finalists already work on staff at papers. No alternative cartoonist has ever worked on staff at a paper or magazine. It is not inconceivable that an alternative cartoonist who won, for example, the Pulitzer Prize, might be able to convince an editor or publisher to take him or her on. But that is never going to happen unless an alternative editorial cartoonist wins such a prize.

Let me be very clear about this: there is nothing new about what happened this year.

These are the kinds of choices that I have seen over the last two decades as a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist. These choices were no worse or better than any other year that I can remember. Just same old, same old. And that’s the problem. And that’s the point.

Safe and staid = old and boring.

You could draw a comparison to the Oscars, which haven’t done a great job of rewarding the most experimental and groundbreaking movies, but it would really be a false comparison since the quality of the work that wins is usually respectably solid. It’s not like Battlefield Earth is going to win an Oscar. Similarly, you could make a comparison to the Grammys, which are really a joke, but those seem to be based more on sales and popularity and again, the artists who tend to win the Pulitzer Prizes and who are named as finalists often have little to no fan base in the real world other than the couple of editors who hired them.

Congratulations to all the winners.  It’s always nice to be appreciated.

Not that me or my friends would know.

So what to do? This may be a question of what not to do. They say that you can’t win unless you enter, but the way things look after all these years, it seems pretty clear that you can’t win even if you do enter unless you draw in the same styles that have been around for decades. It may be that the best Pulitzer Prize that you can win is the $75 entry fee that you pocket, not to mention the time that you save, by doing something else rather than putting together a prize entry.

Of course, then they’ll blame us for not playing their sick game.

Why I Draw Like I Do

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Ted Rall

So the topic of artistic style in editorial cartooning came up over the weekend, and it occurred to me that it has been a long time since I stated publicly my personal philosophy of how and why I draw in a certain artistic style. In my case, it’s a combination of what I like to see personally – the kind of cartoons I like to read – and what I think goes best with the message, obviously affected by my personal limitations as an artist. That said, as the cartoonist Tony Millionaire learned when he commissioned me to substitute for him on Maakies one week, I can draw a lot more detailed and tightly than I do.

I have noticed that a lot of editorial cartoonists, and most notably the newer alternative ones whose work is, I think the best in the profession these days, tend to work in a cleaner, tighter, more cartoony style than I do. I have a theory about why that is. I think that what they have learned, and I agree with it, is that most readers tend to find that the rough edges of harsh commentary about American culture and politics goes down more easily with art that is pretty and round and fun to look at…easier on the eyes.

I’m a little bit older than most of my alternative cartooning peers, with the exception of Tom Tomorrow. Both he and I came out of the punk rock and New Wave periods of the late 1970s and 1980s, and we are much more into the harsher angular look that reflects the harsh times that we grew up in and obviously the very tough society that we have before us as America becomes increasingly authoritarian.

I like artwork that reflects and challenges more than art that goes down easily. I don’t feel that the American public deserves or needs to be catered to, but screamed at and shouted at. Obviously a lot of readers agree, which is why I have a fanbase, but it’s still interesting that this is not a topic that people talk about a lot. For the most part, there’s just aren’t many political cartoonists who draw in a rough, punk rock-influenced edgy style anymore. Someone like Ralph Steadman, who obviously was a brilliant artist and illustrator, is an exception.

Given everything that’s going on, from Guantánamo to Iraq to Afghanistan to drones to domestic spying and torture screams for a look at the country that makes people understand that they do not live in a pretty place. That’s why I show everything scuzzy and litter-strewn and broken down, and as the Empire crumbles, I try to do artwork that reflects that.

The Pulitzer Prize Makes Journalists Miserable

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Ted Rall

It’s a beautiful day in New York, and I presume in a lot of other places across America. But for thousands of journalists, it is a miserable time. We are on tenterhooks awaiting tomorrow’s announcement by Columbia University regarding who won this year’s Pulitzer prizes.

You might think of the Pulitzer Prize is an honor, a great reward for a job well done, the epitome of a journalist’s career. And of course, that’s what our moms and dads think. In reality, the Pulitzer Prize exists to make us all miserable.

The truth is, journalism would be much better off if the Pulitzer and all prizes simply ceased to exist. The worst aspect about it is the fact that it transforms everybody except one – or three, if you include the finalists – practitioner of a given category into a loser. It’s really no different than the high school homecoming dance; that guy is handsome, that girl is beautiful, and obviously you are not. Or anyway, you’re not as handsome or beautiful. And worst of all, all of your classmates have validated that decision by voting for it.

In any given category, whether it’s biography or criticism or editorial cartooning, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of people creating brilliant work every single day. But only one will win the Pulitzer Prize in each category. It’s shitty.

And that’s assuming that there is a way to judge the handsomest or prettiest homecoming king or queen in any kind of objective way. Often the people on the committee to elect these things choose their friends. And even if they can avoid that, parochial tastes always come into it.

The Pulitzer Prize and other awards in journalism and in other fields, of course, are no different. You know that. Over the years, as an editorial cartoonist, I have spoken to many people who have been on the committee that judges the editorial cartooning category. The small group of editors, cartoonists, and academics who are tasked with picking the three finalists that are then sent up to the main committee, which can then decide which of the finalists will get a prize, to not award in that category at all, or, as in the year that I was a finalist, pick someone else entirely, someone who was not one of the finalists.

I’ve heard some amazing stories. One year, when I filed comics journalism daily by satellite phone from Afghanistan, one of the members of the committee dismissed my entry because it was vertical. Editorial cartoons, apparently, are supposed to be horizontal. Another year, the year that I was a finalist, the reason that the main committee decided to snub me personally – and I did hear that it was personal – was because I didn’t draw in the same exact drawing style as most other editorial cartoonists. I have heard stories of drinking buddies being awarded Pulitzer prizes, plagiarists getting Pulitzer prizes after their plagiarism was known, and worst of all, that the methodology of selection almost guarantees middlebrow results. You’d expect to see a “12 angry men”-throwdown from time to time over who should win these things, but that’s not at all how it is. In fact, everybody’s eager to kick off to the free open bar at the end of the day, and no one wants to spoil the mood by getting into a fight over who should have won their category. So instead, everyone’s really collegial. The results tend to be three people that everyone can agree upon, not the best of the best. And you can really see the results. If you look at the list of Pulitzer winners in any given category over the years, you’ll certainly see some deserving names, some of the top practitioners in the field, but you also see a lot of people whose work is mediocre, and some that are downright embarrassing. I personally think of the American editorial cartoonists who won during World War II for editorial cartoons that were – yes, really – sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis. What the hell were these guys thinking?

But even if it were possible to objectively decide who does the best novel or play or poetry of the year – and obviously it isn’t – there’s something incredibly depressing about an event that stands to disappoint so many people year after year after year. The results matter, of course, because the public and employers care about such things, and it’s possible to use an award or prize is a way to promote your career. I’ve won more than my fair share of awards, and they have certainly helped me. But the truth is that every cartoonist and every other creative person writes or draws their own Pulitzer prize every single day, when they start out with a blank piece of paper and then decide what goes on it. We are all going to be judged by our body of work. There are brilliant cartoonists and other creators who never received prizes; and then there’s of course the Nazi guy.

So to any journalists or anyone else fretting over tomorrow’s announcements at 3 PM Eastern time tomorrow, try to remember a few things. First, you’re probably not going to win. Second, if you do win, you probably don’t deserve it.

Third, there is something seriously wrong with the kind of good fortune that makes all of your best friends and colleagues miserable. So to you winners out there tomorrow, send your favorite losers a bottle of champagne. They deserve it more than you. They certainly need it more.

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