Editorial Cartooning Editing No-No

 I ran across this while researching 100-year-old cartooning this week. 

"Will Such Stuff Calm Her Appetite" by William Morris, altered by Sapulpa (OK) Herald, Feb. 27, 1922

The editors of the Herald of Sapulpa, Oklahoma, have here taken an editorial cartoon that clearly showed German President Friedrich Ebert serving something unpleasant to French Marianne, and superimposed labels on it to force it to apply to a local issue.

This is a no-no.

At least they didn't edit out the signature, but it is unlikely that the editors of the Sapulpa Herald checked with cartoonist William C. Morris to see whether he had any opinions about the town's referendum whether to change to a manager-led civic government. The editors probably figured that Morris would probably never see their bowdlerization of his cartoon anyway.

With the easy availability of image editing software, this sort of thing happens way too often nowadays. A cartoonist slaves away at his or her drawing board or Wacom to produce an editorial masterpiece of biting satire, and some schmuck with Windows Paint slaps a couple of their own Comic Sans labels over it, making the completely opposite point or making it about some completely unrelated issue entirely. They then tweet it out or post it on Facebook, and their friends help it go viral.

Somewhere along the line, a cartoon about a woman confessing that she voted for Obama becomes instead a call to assassinate politicians, and gets published in a church newsletter. Really. Sometimes nobody knows who stole the cartoon. Sometimes the thief turns out to be the richest man in the world.

Now, you may have noticed that my Saturday retrospective a couple weeks ago included a cartoon of mine that copied a classic cartoon by Sir David Low. I'll have you know that I did not photocopy or trace that, or any other cartoon I've drawn that directly references another cartoon or cartoon character. I'm also fairly confident that Sir David would not have disagreed with my criticizing an American Nazi by comparing him to Hitler.

We cartoonists pay homage to the greats — Low, Darling, Nast, Daumier, Tenniel, Seuss — all the time. To make it clear that we are not being completely original, we credit the original artist: "With apologies to... " ... "After..." ... "Stealing brazenly from..."

If you need to figure out who The Greats are, I'd say that the first criterion is that they're dead. I'll go out on a limb here and stipulate that even though Pat Oliphant was a great cartoonist before he retired, he's still alive, so his cartoons are out of bounds.

Of course, referencing pop culture is fair game, which is a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. (Truck driving simile used with apologies to Shakespeare.) Some cartoonists are bound to draw  Batman cartoons this week if the latest movie does well, and they're not going to credit Bob Kane. 

Just be very careful about borrowing Disney characters. Disney can afford better lawyers than you can.

Unless you're the richest man in the world.

In which case, I was only kidding about calling you a thief.