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.

BECY 2014

Pelican Books' Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year for 2014 is out, and I'm pleased to say that I have four cartoons in this year's edition.

The 2014 edition skews conservative when it comes to the Obama administration. It is tempting to attribute that to its editor, Dean Turnbloom, a naval civilian who was, briefly, a dogmatic conservative cartoonist. (To the best of my knowledge, at least, he no longer draws editorial cartoons.) A conservative bias on Turnbloom's part might explain why there is only one cartoon in the book by brilliant liberal cartoonist Pat Bagley.

But 2013 was, on balance, not a good year for President Obama, so there are plenty of cartoons in this book attacking him not only from the right but also from the left. Yet for all the cartoons lambasting Obama for the clumsy launch of Obamacare, drone strikes, and supposed scandals over the IRS and Benghazi, there are no cartoons lampooning Chris Christie's Bridgegate, Senate Republicans' abuse of the filibuster, or the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the ensuing Republican push to disenfranchise voters. *

Self-selection could also be a factor in a conservative bias in this year's BECY. The cartoonists themselves pick some of their own cartoons to submit to the book's editors (as contrasted with the Best Political Cartoons of the Year, published from 2005 to 2010, for which editors Daryl Cagle and Brian Fairrington determined which topics would be in the book and selected cartoons from Cagle's stable of cartoonists to illustrate those topics).

To demonstrate how this self-selection process plays out, here are the topics of the five cartoons in Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year 2014 by rigid conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez:

• Mocking Obama's claims that he had no prior knowledge of "Fast and Furious," leaks of national intelligence secrets, a Benghazi cover-up, IRS targeting conservative groups, or Justice Department phone taps of Associated Press reporters.
• Blasting Obama as a fake Superman amid a rubble of debt, incompetence, scandals, lies, foreign policy, spending, IRS, jobs, and economy.
• Depicting the problems of the Obamacare website as merely the tip of the iceberg.
• Showing Obama blithely riding an Iranian nuke a la Slim Pickens as it falls toward the U.S. Capitol.
• An anti-abortion cartoon.

Compare that with the cartoons by persistently liberal cartoonist Joel Pett:

• Decrying an ineffective social safety net.
• Alleging that the Republican elephant would deny Pope Francis a green card over his statements on social issues.
• Lamenting the illegal ivory trade.
• Apologizing to Martin Luther King Jr.'s statue for the plight of African-Americans 50 years after his "I Have a Dream" speech.
• There are only four Pett cartoons in the book. Son of a gun. I thought there were five.

Yes, there are cartoons criticizing Congress, albeit mostly from an "A pox on both your parties" standpoint. And, yes, there are cartoons criticizing the Tea Party, but mostly in a generic sense; there are but two cartoons critical of Senator Ted Cruz and only one cartoon critical of Michele Bachmann. There is no criticism of any Republican that quite equals the harshness of Mike Lester's cartoon of President Obama feeding a huge, vicious IRS attack dog from a bag of "Pure Tyranny."

The BECY series has always been edited by a conservative, and for the most part, it showed. From its initial 1972 edition until his death, it was compiled by Birmingham (Alabama) News cartoonist Charles Brooks. Last year's edition was edited by Steve Kelley, late of the New Orleans Times Picayune, earning him praise for a well-balanced tome. I've been trying to find R.C. Harvey's review on line, but apparently it's behind a subscription wall. (It should be at the February 13, 2013 post's link down this page.) I'd like to quote from the review anyway:

"To the extent that Kelley's selection reflects a bias, it is probably a bias in favor of cartoons that attack, which editorial cartoons are better at than they are at supporting a particular point of view. Based on the content of this book, I find it impossible to determine which side of the political aisle Kelley favors, which is undeniably a desirable outcome."

I look forward to Harvey's review of the Mr. Turnbloom's work.
* Rereading the book, I see that there are one cartoon about the Supreme Court decision and one cartoon about the new voter disenfranchisement law in Texas.