Je Suis Charlie

This blog is now defunct, but it still stands with Charlie Hebdo, for whatever that's worth.

The End of Editorial Explanations

The post title says it all: there will be no more posts on Editorial Explanations from this point forward. The end of a year -- and, possibly, the beginning of another year, an election year, when the cartoons will get nasty and rude and personal for months on end -- seemed to be the perfect time to do that, and so it is.

Editorial Explanations, like most things, never quite lived up to its own image of itself -- you can see my second anniversary post, from last February, for the fullest explanation of what EE was intended to be, and how it didn't always live up to that -- but it was fun to do all of the time for quite a while, and then fun to do much of the time during and since the 2012 election. So I don't regret it.

But editorial cartoons are an arguably dying artform, and there are fewer cartoonists working than even when I started this blog in February of 2011 (and that was well after the first big wave of newspaper closures and layoffs and consolidations). As the field tightens, the scope for the kind of work that I really wanted to showcase here -- the local cartoonist for the Podunk Herald, doing a lazy cartoon about a dead famous person, or about a news story in a country he knows only cliches about -- shrinks and narrows until it has basically disappeared.

There are still bad editorial cartoons out there: they appear every day. But they are mostly deliberately bad cartoons these days, that take the opposite of the facts and turn that into propaganda to score points for a particular political team. I've spent more time on those deliberately bad cartoons than I've wanted to -- they are my own particular tar baby -- but it's time now to walk away.

Perhaps this is a case of Gresham's Law, but I don't think so: there's still also great cartoons almost every day. And the same cartoonists who do a deliberately bad cartoon one day can go a great one the next day -- I found myself laughing at an A.F. Branco cartoon only a week or so ago, showing that even our newest and most tendentious cartoonists can break out of the scoring-points mold now and again.

So I hope the few of you that read this blog will continue to read editorial cartoons: at their best, they crystallize complicated ideas and situations into a visual metaphor that can make us look at the world differently. And, yes, at their worst, they're purely cheerleading for their "team," mostly in the form of taunts about the opposing team. But every artform has both best and worst: that's what makes them art.

But you'll have to find those cartoons elsewhere -- I suggest my three major sources, AAEC, GoComics, and Cagle. And you'll have them without my snarky commentary...which may well be a plus.

Thanks for reading.

Possibly a Warning

I've set a few posts to go live tomorrow morning, in the usual manner.

However, I'm once again posting via an iPad from a remote, undisclosed location. I did this two years ago, with a first-gen iPad, and it worked, but the images came out wonky. I tried again last year, and couldn't manage to make it work at all. (Earlier this year, during other undisclosed-location trips, I just left the blog fallow until I was back to a real computer.)

This week, I have a somewhat spiffy iPad 3, and it seems to be all working correctly. But the images may well cause trouble again.

I tell you this because I know political-cartoon readers have delicate sensibilities -- like those of other breeds of political watchers -- and are ready to react badly to the least stimulation. Please be prepared with any necessary medicine; I don't mean to induce dyspepsia unintentionally.

The Gala Second Anniversary

Today marks two years of Editorial Explanations, which is a damn long time to do something that started randomly on an entirely separate blog. EE isn't ever quite what I want it to be -- it's too partisan too much of the time; in my head, you readers would never know how I feel about any issue -- and I've been debating in my head about ending it for more than six months now. (The feeling was particularly bad just before the election -- I almost quit then, but decided to stick it out to the end of the year -- and, since the partisan rancor quickly dropped in late November, reading several dozen cartoons was no longer as painful as it had become before.)

Once again I'll restate the purpose of this blog, in as close to an honest way as I can: many political cartoons are weaselly, sneaky things, that encode poisonous ideas, because of prejudice or malice or anger or fear. Sometimes that's deliberate on the part of the cartoonist, and sometimes it isn't -- though I don't claim I can tell the difference consistently. But I can point out those nasty cartoons, the ones with unexamined premises and massive leaps of logic and overweening special pleading.

EE should not be me pointing out that a cartoonist is "wrong;" as I wrote on the comment page, way back in the beginning -- and still want to hold to -- "all cartoonists are completely correct, in their own worlds." I fail at that -- some weeks, several times a day -- but it's still the standard, even on days I miss it.

EE occasionally is there to make a joke that a particular cartoon missed, or (even more rarely) to point out a good cartoon. But, most of the time, the point is to shine light on people doing their jobs badly, because they're lazy or corrupt or axe-grinding or stupid or tired or whatever other reason it is today.

The days I'm happiest with EE are the ones when I get to pick on people on both sides; recently I was thrilled to get back-to-back (and diametrically opposed) cartoons by Gary Varvel and Bruce Plante that I thought were both dumb and poorly thought-out.

I admit that I do end up picking on right-wingers much more than lefties, though I have to point out that I'm still a registered Republican, as I've been for my entire adult life. (And I'm equally sure those cartoonists would call me a "RINO" at best.) That's partly because I mostly agree with Mann and Ornstein -- there's one party that shifted massively to one side over the past decade, not for the good -- and also for a few cartoon-specific reasons.

First, conservative cartoonists are uniformly unafraid to take strong stances, unlike some of their liberal counterparts. (Ted Rall is the great outlier there; he can be as radical as Chuck Asay or the McCoys or A.F. Branco are reactionary, and I'd pick on him more if he found anything else that infuriated him as much as drone strikes.) The right-wingers also cartoon in the old single-image tradition the vast majority of the time, making a single, stark claim and standing strongly behind it. The lefty cartoonists are more likely to do a wordy four- or six-panel novella, running around and around an issue as if to cover every possible objection ahead of time. Those are harder to make fun of, since they're already pre-digested.

Even more important is that well-known Republican political discipline -- and, as far as I can see, the conservative cartoonists do see themselves as Republicans (or as some subset, like "true Republicans" or "Tea Partiers") and follow the standard messaging on the news of the day. So there's often a set of right-wing cartoons each day, all trying to make the exact same point -- and, even if that's a good point, there's usually someone doing it sloppily. And that discipline itself causes trouble -- I can't believe their hearts are all in yet another bloody shirt run up the flagpole about Benghazi, five months later, and that lack of real fire is sometimes clear in the final product.

That's what led to the current glut of right-wingers on EE -- that's why the most commented cartoonists, right now, are Chuck Asay, Lisa Benson, Terry Wise, and Bob Gorrell. I have to admit that I've been following Asay for even longer than this blog has been around; he's a lovely draftsman whose thought processes I find deeply mysterious, and sometimes actively insane. Benson and Wise come across as just pure partisans, always ready to follow the Roger Ailles background memo of the day. And Gorrell is the most frustrating: he's got the drawing chops to be a great cartoonist -- he draws strong, iconic images day after day, either out of training or instinct, has a real knack for caricature, and keeps his captions simple and direct -- but his subjects and his angles are usually second-hand and flabby, and he's far too often reliant on the not-bothering-to-draw-something crutch.

But none of those things are inherent in cartooning, or in those particular cartoonists. Any of them could move to a different media outlet, with a different editorial slant, any day. Or the center of debate in Washington could shift yet again, making everyone shift with it. But I'm sure that, no matter what the topic, there will be a few really dumb cartoons in any given week. And, for now at least, Editorial Explanations will be around to find them, to point fingers at them, and to laugh one of those really annoying bully-on-Simpsons laughs at them.

Help Pay an Editorial Cartoonist's Salary

Editorial Explanations could not exist without the work of dedicated, professional, full-time editorial cartoonists. Sure, we might pick on them on any particular day, but we're all richer when there are more cartoonists, with more points of view, working and contributing to the discourse.

It's no secret that editorial cartooning is under serious stress -- every piece of the traditional newspaper is, from classified ads to the sports pages. But cartoonists, who tend to be a bit odd, and tend to poke at the foibles of the powerful in ways that often make them lightning rods for reader anger, are perhaps under even more stress, and in our current heavily-syndicated world, more and more papers are doing without their own dedicated cartoonist.

We can deplore that -- we do deplore that -- but there's not a lot we can do about it. (Well, if we're in a position to buy lots of newspaper ads, that would help. But most of "us" aren't.)

Bill Day was the staff editorial cartoonist for the Commercial Appeal of Memphis (after a 30-year-long career that also included a stint at the Detroit Free-Press) until early 2009, when he was laid off in a round of recession-caused job cuts. He's not the only one who lost a job, certainly, but he's been without a regular gig since then, and he's now close to losing his home.

Now Daryl Cagle, of CagleCartoons, has launched a crowdfunding effort, hoping to raise at least $35,000 to keep Bill Day cartooning, at least four times a week, for another year. That campaign, on Indiegogo, will run for another 52 days, and it's just over halfway to its goal.

If you like editorial cartoons -- or even if you just like seeing them made fun of -- please consider contributing to this campaign.

Metapost

There will be no Editorial Explanations today; your humble explainer is on a pilgrimage to the seat of American power -- yes, Washington, DC, itself -- and there chaperoning several busloads of fourteen-year-olds through a whirlwind tour of the highlights of our civilization.

Regular service will definitely return on Monday, and there may be some catch-up posts over the weekend, depending on how egregious Thursday's and Friday's cartoons are.

Gone Fishin'

Editorial Explanations is on vacation this week, so you'll all have to deal with the flood of bizarre, tendentious, unfathomable, and insane cartoons without me for a couple of days.

The regular mocking of this nation's fine and hard-working cartoonists will return sometime in the middle of next week.

I'm Not Dead! I'm Getting Better!

Editorial Explanations has been quiet lately, for unavoidable reasons related to my professional life -- namely, that I'm in the middle of a two-week business trip -- but I am playing catch-up today.

To avoid a flood of week-old cartoons, all dated today, I'm sticking the oldies on the days they were originally published and marking them all "Backfill."

Service may be spotty for the next four or five days, but should return to normal for the second half of June and forward. Your forebearance during this time of great national trial is greatly appreciated.

Very Interesting...But Still Stupid

I see that the posts I put up this week -- from my iPad, my portable computing device of choice when I'm at an undisclosed location -- all came out with unpleasant formatting on the images, so that they muscle their way out of their designated space and sit uneasily behind part of the right sidebar as well.

This is unpleasant and unfortunate, since I don't know how to fix it. I will, though, try not to blog from the iPad except during undisclosed-location emergencies, which will keep those ugly posts to a minimum. And if Google wants to make a Blogger app for the iPad -- hint hint -- I'd be happy to try that out, instead of running through a Safari window.

An Introduction

This world is full of editorial cartoons, designed to prove to all of us the immediate, blinding insight of their creators, and cause us to instantly be a convert to whatever particular political philosophy the cartoonist happens to hold. Well, they would, if only we could understand them -- but, all too often, we can't.

No one is out there explaining what those bizarre pictures of three monkeys (labeled "Soros," "Queen Elizabeth," and "the Yen") are doing with that nuclear weapon, nor why they're making those famous three-monkey faces. And so I'll just have to step up and do it.

Sure, there's The Comics Curmudgeon, but he focuses on strip cartoons. And there's Comics I Don't Understand, but he only rarely attempts editorial cartoons. And Daryl Cagle posts a lot of political cartoons -- his own and from others -- with some commentary, but he never explains them. So there's clearly a need unfulfilled here.

If I were a smarter, more mercenary man, I'd spin off a whole new blog for this idea, with a fancy design and lots of Google Ads. But I'm not, so it gets rolled into Antick Musings like every other random whim and thought.

Edit: And so I was.

With the hope that this will continue, whenever and as long as confusing editorial cartoons appear, let's begin.