I learned to read, standing between my father’s arms, as he leaned his palms on the dining room table, and every morning we read together every one of the Washington Post’s five (5!) pages of comic strips. Equally important, he taught me about intellectual courage — how Herblock and Walt Kelly were the bravest people in the country, as they took on Joe McCarthy with pointedly accurate ridicule before anyone else dared.
Political cartoons have always been - must always be - transgressive, and transgressive speech is simply no longer welcome in the big national media that now pay cartoonists' bills. And no one really wants to look at non-transgressive political cartoons.
You mentioned Bill Mauldin. I think he is now one of those personalities who, seventy-five years later, is sort of famous for being famous, and we have all seen one or two of his cartoons. But to get your hands on his book Up Front, which was published during the war, is to demonstrate the power of truly transgressive cartooning. At a time when all published speech was officially regulated and self-regulated to follow a we're-all-in-this-together line, Up Front (text and cartoons) took a fearless position alongside the fighting dogface against, not so much the Germans and Japanese, as the incompetent, uncaring officers who led them and an often foolish, ignorant and complacent population on the Home Front (after all, the Willie and Joe cartoons were produced for Stars and Stripes, so the original audience was meant to be the dogfaces themselves). That small book is a national treasure, as was Mauldin himself.
In Majority/Minority societies cartoons which denigrate the minority group present serious issues. They can create tremendous tensions between the Majority and the Minority as was the case in Denmark. These divisions can have serious consequences. No cartoon of Black people hanging in a tree should ever be published in the United States.
Cartoonists destroyed themselves, in the same way that newspapers destroyed themselves. Cartoonists and newspapers have been 'punching down' for decades, viciously and grotesquely insulting their READERS instead of insulting the elites who pay them. Too fucking bad. No fucking sympathy. You deserve to lose.
I learned to read, standing between my father’s arms, as he leaned his palms on the dining room table, and every morning we read together every one of the Washington Post’s five (5!) pages of comic strips. Equally important, he taught me about intellectual courage — how Herblock and Walt Kelly were the bravest people in the country, as they took on Joe McCarthy with pointedly accurate ridicule before anyone else dared.
Political cartoons have always been - must always be - transgressive, and transgressive speech is simply no longer welcome in the big national media that now pay cartoonists' bills. And no one really wants to look at non-transgressive political cartoons.
You mentioned Bill Mauldin. I think he is now one of those personalities who, seventy-five years later, is sort of famous for being famous, and we have all seen one or two of his cartoons. But to get your hands on his book Up Front, which was published during the war, is to demonstrate the power of truly transgressive cartooning. At a time when all published speech was officially regulated and self-regulated to follow a we're-all-in-this-together line, Up Front (text and cartoons) took a fearless position alongside the fighting dogface against, not so much the Germans and Japanese, as the incompetent, uncaring officers who led them and an often foolish, ignorant and complacent population on the Home Front (after all, the Willie and Joe cartoons were produced for Stars and Stripes, so the original audience was meant to be the dogfaces themselves). That small book is a national treasure, as was Mauldin himself.
"subconsciously aware I would be inundated with hate from 'Bernie Bros' and the far left."
Jesus Christ, this BS again? As if Clinton's bros and bro-ettes were not ten times as nasty.
In Majority/Minority societies cartoons which denigrate the minority group present serious issues. They can create tremendous tensions between the Majority and the Minority as was the case in Denmark. These divisions can have serious consequences. No cartoon of Black people hanging in a tree should ever be published in the United States.
Cartoonists destroyed themselves, in the same way that newspapers destroyed themselves. Cartoonists and newspapers have been 'punching down' for decades, viciously and grotesquely insulting their READERS instead of insulting the elites who pay them. Too fucking bad. No fucking sympathy. You deserve to lose.