Comics Touching on Political Issues

There are a few stories about comics touching on political or otherwise sensitive issues, all of which would be worthy of top-of-blog status on a given weekday, but I think are worth collecting here for the sake of exploration and comparison.

* The last two days of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury are gaining attention for the declarations outright that both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney be impeached, which I guess for some people crosses a line that makes it worth noting. I would suggest a just-as-interesting notion is that Trudeau is directly engaging the thought that his feature is relentlessly political and confrontational -- when considering the climate of the times, some people might see it as reserved.

* Matthew Bors takes note of Media Matters targeting a cartoon on a conservative site that features the Osama/Obama gag. Bors questions whether or not it's worth wasting time getting riled up about something like this, indicating that cracking down on blunt humor takes a set of tools out of the hands of cartoonists on all sides.

* John Kovalic offers up one of the better blog entries on a common sentiment that the bulk of editorial cartoonists' initial cartoons on the horrifying incident at Virginia Tech are pretty lame, particularly those with a crying mascot. (Mason Adams points out you can get a local cartoonist's version by clicking on the get image button here, and that it's amazing Staunton has its own cartoonist.)

While like Kovalic I prefer the more serious cartoons, the problem with doing one of those is 1) it's hard to come up with a good idea on something so horrible so quickly, and 2) there's a significant number of people that will likely hate anything non-banal, probably tagging it as inappropriate. Daryl Cagle has some commentary from one such cartoonist in the April 17 entry on his blog, and throws in someone mad at a Johnny Hart-related cartoon for good measure.
 
posted 2:20 am PST | Permalink
 

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