Drawing Power
And Ted Rall of Universal Press Syndicate asserted, “If a single image does convey the real deal, it’s the New York Daily News’ photo of a severed hand lying on the street next to cigarette butts, and not even that does it. The Statue of Liberty crying, with a hole in her chest or with a model airplane smashing into her side only conveys one concept: Lazy Editorial Cartoonist.”
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By then the on-line battle of the cartoonists had run its course. T. Brian Kelly of the Bay Area Independent Newspapers had responded that the Statue of Liberty belongs to the “collective memory data” that all Americans draw from when they react viscerally to “horrific shared stimuli.” And John Kovalic had written a second time, this time allowing that even banal symbols can be the stuff of great cartoons. He cited, among others, Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News. “Signe’s cartoon of a torch rising above the smoke was brilliant.”
Syndicated cartoonist Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the 50 who drew the Statue of Liberty. He drew her face, actually, with a tear on one cheek and the assaulted towers reflected in her round, horrified eyes. “That was a difficult image not to use,” he tells me. “It was in the harbor there and bearing silent witness to what was occurring. What other image could be more fitting? I was trying to come up with a way of showing the pain, the anger, and the shock I was feeling. In a case like that cartoonists look for a simplistic but stark image. There were three main themes. Pearl Harbor, a day that will live in infamy, was used in various ways. There was also a number who used the American flag. The majority who used the Statue of Liberty–90 percent of them had her with her head in her hands.”
“Editorial cartooning is in some straits,” says Scott Stantis of the Birmingham News, who’s president of the AAEC, “when you see the editors of the Chicago Tribune saying for 15 months, ‘No big deal.’”
How many are there?
One problem, Stantis thinks, is that editorial pages are being run by editors who don’t understand what an editorial cartoon can and should be–a statement, not a diversion. “My position,” he says, “is get someone who kicks ass and takes names.”
