My Left-wing Cartoons and Francisco

Pope Francis died in the wee hours of Easter Monday after having greeted Vice President Shady Vance and the throngs who came to celebrate the Resurrection with him the previous morning. I didn't get invited to the funeral at the Vatican today, so instead, I've got a look back over his papacy for this week's Graphical History Tour.

March, 2013

I caught a little bit of flack for this initial response to Cardinal Bergoglio’s election to the papacy in 2013, but I thought it was a light, whimsical cartoon to celebrate Catholicism’s first Latin American Pope. Besides, I happened to be discovering the music of Astor Piazolla just then. 

for Q Syndicate, August, 2013

Taking his papal name in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, Bergoglio quickly showed himself to be a very, very different pope than Benedict XVI. The archconservative B-16, breaking with longstanding tradition, had resigned the papacy rather than linger in the position while cruel age slowly robbed him of mind and body. (As critical as I was of Pope Benedict, I credit him with a selfless decision many aging politicians would have done well to emulate.)

for Q Syndicate, September, 2013

Conservative Catholics in America, who had weaponized their faith to impose their beliefs on pro-choice and LGBTQ+ fellow citizens, came to be extremely disappointed in the new pontiff... 

for Q Syndicate January, 2014

...and eagerly searched for another.

Here I suggested that Minnesota Archbishop John Nienstedt, Catholic League professional umbrage taker Bill Donahue, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, anti-marriage troublemaker Maggie Gallagher, and Senator Rick Santorum would be happy to invest Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson with the scepter of St. Peter.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2015

Rowan County Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who worked her refusal to issue to issue same-sex couples marriage licenses into national fame, subsequently boasted of having a private audience with the Pope. It eventually came to light that her private audience was shared with dozens of other Vatican visitors, and was private only in the sense that she hadn't brought the right-wing media along.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2020

Pope Francis gave his blessing to "civil unions" rather than marriage equality for same-sex couples in the fall of 2020 (although some conservative Catholics disputed the translation in English-speaking media of the papal Latin "convivenia civil"). A majority of the Catholic majority on the McConnell Supreme Court have been itching to overturn the 2014 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling favoring marriage equality in this country.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2021

Franciscan liberality notwithstanding, Catholic orthodoxy continues to condemn homosexuality as "intrinsically disordered."

As with the Anglican, Methodist, fundamentalist, and other denominations, antigay animus is especially dominant among Catholic clergy in much of Africa. Pope Francis's dialogue in this next cartoon is a direct quote, somewhat edited between panels two and three:

February, 2024

Ninety bishops and cardinals published a letter strenuously objecting to that papal pronouncement. They will be speaking up loudly as their conclave meets to elect a successor to this modern-day Pope. 

Don't be surprised to see someone more in the mold of Benedict XVI... if not Innocent IV.

✍

When I scour newspapers and magazines from 100 years ago for these Graphical History Tours, I never come across Pope Pius XI in U.S. editorial cartoons. I suppose that Protestant cartoonists didn't pay much attention to what Pius XI had to say about anything, and any Catholic cartoonists never presumed to differ with him. He did issue encyclicals criticizing capitalistic greed and warning against socialism and communism.

After initially supporting fascism in his native Italy and in Germany, Pius XI would issue an encyclical in 1937, smuggled in to Nazi Germany, lashing out against violations of a concordat between the Nazi state and the Holy See. In Mit brennender Sorge, Pius condemned "pantheistic confusion," "neopaganism," and "the so-called myth of race and blood," which he called a form of idolatry.

I bring that up in regard to modern-day cartoonists such as Michael Ramirez, who apparently believe that papal pronouncements on current politics are something new with Pope Francis.

"You'll Have to Leave That Behind" by Michael Ramirez for Las Vegas Review Journal, April 21, 2025

Pius XI never stood up to Benito Mussolini, although he was scheduled to deliver an address on February 11, 1939 in which he was expected to denounce il Duce's laws aping Nazi Arianism. The Pope died on February 10, however, and Mussolini tried to have all 300 copies of the address destroyed.

Under the next Pope, Pius XII, the Roman Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the atrocities of Mussolini and Hitler. 

Today's Republican Party and its Amen Corner cartoonists, teledemagogues, and duck dynasts would most certainly have approved.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Surely you didn't think I would pass up this story, did you?

I had a brief argument with someone on counter.social last week about cartoons, caricature, and racist stereotypes. (It might have been a longer conversation if my phone hadn't forgotten my counter.social password; counter.social seems to think that the password I have written down is wrong. I'm fine until my desktop computer forgets the password, too.)

We were talking past each other, anyway. The other person seemed to be arguing that all caricature deserves condemnation. Which is fine if you're a cartoonist who merely adds a Photoshop filter to a photograph and calls it a cartoon.

Meanwhile, Newsweek gave Michael Ramirez a column to talk about his spiked cartoon this week, and accompanied it with a sampling of his caricatures, so readers can decide for themselves whether there is anything exceptional about his caricature of Ghazi Hamad.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Friday, I posted a fictional complaint about a real editorial cartoon by Republican cartoonist Michael Ramirez. The fictional complaint was based on a real complaint about a more recent cartoon of his, into which I crammed bits and pieces of other complaints about it.

In his cartoon, a man with a large nose and snarling mouth, labeled “Hamas,” stands bound with ropes to four alarmed children and a cowering woman in a hijab. “How dare Israel attack civilians …” he says.

On social media, several readers called it “in poor taste.” In a post on Instagram, Palestinian American poet Remi Kanazi wrote: “This is the Washington Post. This is the kind of anti-Palestinian racism that’s acceptable for publication.” Left-wing British activist Owen Jones called the cartoon an example of “racist dehumanization.”

Those complaints got the cartoon yanked from the Washington Post's website, only for it to be more widely circulated elsewhere than it might have been otherwise.

In old Blighty, the Guardian fired editorial cartoonist Steve Bell after Bell went public over a spiked cartoon of his based on the famous David Levine cartoon of Lyndon Johnson showing off his gall bladder operation scar shaped like Vietnam. Bell's cartoon had Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to remove a Gaza-shaped scar on his own belly; a Guardian editor thought it reminded him not of LBJ, but of the Jewish lender Shylock in Merchant of Venice demanding his "pound of flesh" — an allusion made nowhere in the cartoon.

Charging a cartoon of being anti-semitic, or anti-Arab, or racist, may be unfair when that was not the cartoonist's intent, but it works. Whatever argument the cartoonist intended to forward is immediately shut down, discarded, and forgotten, and the subject is changed to How Dare You, You Fiend!

Granted, there are cartoons that are genuinely any or all of those things. I see plenty of them when I'm rummaging through the century-old cartoons for my Saturday postings.

But the point I was trying to make Monday is that Michael Ramirez (with whose viewpoint I generally disagree) belongs to a school of cartooning that routinely if not always employs gross caricature. That school and its alumni include Clay Jones, Ted Rall, Mike Lester, Chris Britt, Joey Weatherford, Mike Peters, Tom Toles, and just about every British and Australian editorial cartoonist who has ever wielded pen and brush.

Critics who seize upon every oversized nose to censor any cartoon they think offensive remind me of a cartoon Signe Wilkinson drew when faced with similar attacks.

"My New Caricatures" by Signe Wilkinson in Philadelphia Daily News, 1992?

Antisapientic Cartoon Decried

To the editor of the Warshinton Post-Malone:

I was profoundly dismayed over the blatant mockery of human beings in the January 20 editorial cartoon. This caricature is outrageously offensive, despicable, and blasphemous, not only to the human beings who are unfairly and racistly portrayed, but also to the countless innocent homo sapiens, living and dead, who have ever existed since the beginning of time. It is a morally reprehensible depiction that implies a justification for the drawing of antisapientic editorial cartoons by "quote" editorial cartoonists "end quote," including women and children. An apology, not just to readers, but to the countless victims of editorial cartoonists, is in order.

Why can't we see more courtroom sketches and cartoons about kittens?

Severely,

Tigger McBoots, editorial illustrator (Mrs.)

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.

Almost This Week's Q Cartoon

This is the cartoon I was drawing for Q Syndicate last week in hopes of being able to send it to Q Syndicate before the July 4 weekend. My preference was to have something about Rhode Island's new civil partnership law, but I wasn't happy with the ideas I had been working with. Eventually, of course, I came up with the idea for the cartoon I posted yesterday; that idea was more relevant to LGBT issues than this one, so I put this cartoon aside.

I've commented before that I find women harder to caricature than men. Beyond the age of, say, 25, men don't change their hairstyles as often as women do (except insofar as nature forces change upon us); and women wear make-up to alter the perception of their facial contours.

So far, the best caricatures of Michele Bachmann I've seen have been by John Branch, Taylor Jones, and, not surprisingly, Minneapolis Star Tribune cartoonist Steve Sack, who has had the most experience drawing her. (The June 16 cartoon linked to above, however, isn't a great example, but she has not been inspiring him much lately, I guess.) The rest of us cartoonists are still flailing about trying to fit her features together.

Meanwhile, there is this bizarre cartoon from Terry Wise, trying to nominate himself for a Pulitzer. (It would run counter to the conservatives-get-no-respect meme to remember that doctrinaire conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez is a two-time Pulitzer winner, as are Steve Breen and the late Jeff MacNelly.) His point, aside from Any Two Things Make a Cartoon, seems to be that it's sexist for liberals to point out the ditzy things that come out of the mouths of Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin.

Conservatives, as you will all remember, have been perfect gentlemen about female politicians. Conservatives in the media have never said a sexist thing about Hilary Clinton, Janet Reno, Sonya Sotomayor or Nancy Pelosi, have they?