A new feature: Readers’ Picks. Send me copies or links to catoons you love, hate, find interesting, want to share. We inaugurate this feature with a pick from Horace, a cartoon by Art Spiegelman on the fate of the refugee ship, St. Louis.
To my eye, this cartoon has it’s pluses and its minuses
- It gets points for an awareness of history and is a lovely study in the way cartoonists respond – or fail to respond – to the events of the day. Herblock is a fave, and seldom off the mark. He deserves and will get at least one post of his own.
- Do I really want a cartoon to talk this much? I guess there’s a place for it. But it’s hard for anything over a couple of panels to have the grab factor.
- Even more important, this cartoon understands history isn’t over, and the failures of the past are playing out again all around us.
- Nast is undoubtedly one of the greats, but what you can’t tell from the reference here is surely a flawed great. Drove Boss Tweed out of power, into jail and the long arm of his cartoons dragged him clear back from Spain after he escapedl. So far, so good. But his depictions of the Irish are, well there’s no way around it, they’re pretty racist. Nast, too, deserves a post here.
- The final gag – the bomb on his own head – just looks like he is flailing around in desperation for a punch line, and this one just doesn’t work.
So that’s my opinion. What’s yours?
I think Speigelman’s tradition is that of an illustrated storyteller. As such, he’s always pretty wordy. Maus was a masterpiece in the genre, in my opinion. I was puzzled by his depiction of the jews as mice, though. Mice are typically unwanted rodents and cats are typically seen as the solution to unwanted rodents. Probably, he was drawing a comparison to the “final solution,” but it can also be read as a somewhat self-depricating.
I agree that political cartoons should do their work in one or two panels and with very little dialog, although some of the work in the 18th and 19th centuries was quite verbose.
I actually liked the bomb on the head gag. To me, it works on a couple of levels. It suggests that what you say could be the wrong thing and blow up on you. It also suggests (and I like this one better) that it’s necessary to say the right thing, even though it may condemn you in the court of popular opinion.