Plagiar-Vu All Over Again

I just received my copy of The Best Editorial Cartoons, 2012 edition from the publisher the other night. Its founder, Chuck Brooks died shortly after the deadline for submissions, so one wonders how many more editions of the book there will be.

There are more on-line only cartoons in the book than ever before, and a few idiosyncratic choices -- there is only one Tom Toles cartoon, for example (aside from the one in the chapter for cartoons which won awards this year), but five by Chuck Asay. In my humble opinion, Toles is far and away the better cartoonist, but Asay's worldview is more in line with the late Mr. Brooks's.

I was struck by two cartoons: one by Jeff Stahler and another by Steve Breen. Mr. Stahler just lost his job at the Columbus Dispatch over charges of plagiarism -- charges which have relaunched a debate over what in fact constitutes plagiarism. Accusers pointed out cartoons which seemed to echo New Yorker cartoons, although some of the questionable cartoons involved ideas which easily could have occurred to multiple cartoonists independently (what Daryl Cagle calls "Yahtzees"). Cartoonists have also been debating where to draw the line between a plagiarized idea and a common meme.

The Stahler and Breen cartoons in BECY illustrate the murky of this delineation. Stahler's cartoon shows presidents from Nixon to Obama saying one word each of the sentence "We must reduce our dependency on Mideast Oil." To my mind, that recalls a Mike Peters cartoon about the Vietnam War, drawn for the Dayton Daily News and reprinted in Time magazine and other national outlets, in which presidents from Eisenhower to Ford said one word each of the sentence "Victory is just around the corner." (One of them must have had two words, but I don't remember which.) Other cartoonists besides Jeff Stahler have used the same gimmick since -- at least once on the topic of energy independence -- and it just seems to me to be lazy to swipe Mr. Peters's basic idea to rehash it as your own.

Steve Breen's cartoon is more disputable. He substitutes President Obama for the hapless boatman in Winslow Homer's painting "The Gulf Stream." Breen duly credits Homer, as he ought, but I was instantly reminded of the 1974 cartoon by the late Jeff MacNelly depicting President Nixon in the exact same painting.

Is that plagiarism? Just about every editorial cartoonist in the country, myself included, has drawn some parody of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" to comment on every topic from the weather to inflation to marriage equality. The same with several of Norman Rockwell's paintings, da Vinci's "Last Supper" and James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray and Black: The Artist's Mother." But any first grader is bound to recognize those paintings to some degree or another, whereas many adults are not familiar with the works of Winslow Homer at all. Some cartoonist, forgotten to history, was the first to draw each of those parodies, and the rest of us have, let's face it, swiped those ideas.

Does the fact that an image is already well-known make it okay for a cartoonist to swipe it? Aside from paintings, many cartoonists have borrowed and re-borrowed many images from movies. I have no idea who the first cartoonist was to draw Toto pulling the curtain aside to reveal the humbug behind whatever politician is projected as the Great And Powerful Oz, but many have drawn that same cartoon since. (There's one in the new BECY about Newt Gingrich, who has also inspired a new round of Grinch Who Stole Christmas cartoons for anybody who missed them back when he was Speaker of the House.)

We cartoonists traffic in cultural images all the time, so it makes sense that we'd reuse images that everybody knows. The tricky part is reusing less well-known images that only Art History majors and other cartoonists will recognize.

Oh, and I have one cartoon in the book, by the way. Most of my favorite 2011 cartoons before the book's deadline were about flash-in-the-pan stories (does anybody remember the Craigslist Congressman any more?) which would have required a paragraph of explanation, so I'm not at all disappointed.

Republicans Have a Suggestion

I drew this cartoon in response to a cartoon by Chuck Asay (a link to that cartoon is in yesterday's blog entry, below). You don't see cartoonists openly referencing other cartoonists in argument the way you see, for example, Keith Olbermann criticizing Glenn Beck, or Ann Coulter mocking Frank Rich.

In part, that's because it's no longer common for a city to have more than one newspaper, let alone more than one editorial cartoonist. Even where that is the case, few readers subscribe to both papers. Olbermann can tell you what Beck said, but I can't necessarily reprint Asay's cartoon within mine. So I tried to draw a cartoon that stands by itself, but I thought it was professional courtesy to indicate that the inspiration for the cartoon derived from someone else's cartoon.

A similar point came up recently over a cartoon Darryl Cagle drew critical of what he saw as lazy cartooning by other cartoonists over the Catholic Church's sex scandals. He drew five panels showing common themes such as Pope Benedict walking blind, with devil's horns, hiding boys underneath his robe, etc., with the conclusion that anybody can be a cartoonist. A Virginia newspaper which ran his cartoon asked him to respond to the avalanche of complaints about it from people who thought he (and that newspaper) were endorsing those caricatures of the Pope.

Cagle runs an on-line syndicate for editorial cartoons, so he sees lots of cartoons every day. The editor of the Virginia newspaper sees several cartoons every day from whatever syndicate(s) to which the paper subscribes. But the readers of that paper only see the one cartoon printed per day, and I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the newspaper did not print the cartoons which inspired Cagle's cartoon.

Well, back to the subject of my cartoon. Until recently, Chuck Asay was the longtime cartoonist of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. He's a consistently conservative cartoonist on any subject you care to name; his approach to cartooning has always reminded me of a stodgy old Sunday School teacher. They're the sort of cartoons that say, "It's all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out," or "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would that mean you'd have to, too?" His cartoons lack the bite of Mike Lester's or the minute detail of Michael Ramirez's, but they do have the same slavish devotion to the Party Line.

But fellow cartoonists tell me he's a genuinely nice guy. And you can't say that about all of us cartoonists.

His cartoon yesterday illustrated the Republican talking point that Democrats don't let Republicans contribute to legislation. Leaving aside the fact that when Republicans were in power, they completely shut Democrats out, Asay's cartoon ignores the fact that when Congress was trying to put Health Care Reform together, they passed several Republican-sponsored amendments and bent over backwards in a futile attempt to get any Republicans on board. Asay's cartoon is specifically about Financial Reform, and conveniently overlooks Senator Chris Dodd's efforts to have input from Republicans such as Tennessee's Bob Corker as the bill was being written.

But Republicans these days have painted themselves -- or have been painted by the Tea Party -- into a corner of having to oppose everything Democrats do. Heaven forfend that they contribute anything other than "Hell no!" to the discussion.