I was stumbling around the internet this evening and I happened upon a website with a compilation of political cartoons. Now, you might have read the title to this post and gone “Wait, ain’t Politico! a political cartoon?” I guess in a way it is, but really, the breed of political cartoon I’m talking about are the kind that are found in the Schenectady Union Times, or the Fort Worth Community College Examiner. Not high class stuff like my comic. These comics, limited by both their inability connect with funniness and an inability to wrangle more than a 2 x 2″ square of space from their editors, are hopelessly strangled in a format that they simply can’t succeed in.

The saddest part is that the premise is already done for them. If you’re reading the paper, then you are probably already familiar with, say, who Hillary Clinton is. But the authors, more times than not, tend to assume that we have no possible idea who the characters in the comics are.

The most egregious offense in all of this are labels. Labels pop up in all of the most terrible political cartoons. Let’s look at one for example:

Now look, Hillary Clinton at 60 isn’t the most attractive woman in the world, but she’s got a better body than the Barbara-Bush-alike up there. I suppose in a sense, the concept that you’d have to label that it’s “Hillary’s Closet” should be somewhat forgiven due to the crappiness of the art. However, she’s talking about things that would only make sense if Hillary Clinton was saying them. It’s basically showing a fundamental lack of respect for the audience to bring any part of their own experience with the campaign or the players to the table.

The second problem (aside from those dratted labels) is that they tend to overthink the comics. In order to follow the author’s logic here, I have to make the same leaps that he made - “Hillary twisted the facts, therefore I’ll show her riding a twister, but that won’t make sense unless I label it as a fact twister, but if I do that, then I need to add in some non-sensical Western jargon to justify someone riding on a twister, because Twister = Old West.” Oookay.

Even that’s not as big a stretch as this comic, however:

Imagine this comic without the labels - it just wouldn’t make any sense at all. The one asset you have in doing political cartoons is that you already have familiar characters. The candidates themselves are characters, people like Uncle Sam or the Statue of Liberty even can represent abstract concepts. But something like this is just overthought. Worse, it’s not even funny. Okay, the Clintons are sniping at truth by asserting that Hillary was sniped at 12 years ago. That’s really breaking new ground.

The worst I’ve seen though has to go to this one:

But actually, before I show it to you, I’ll show you one that gets it right:

Here, the caption provides the necessary information we need to process the comic (although I would have preferred to see it on the bottom). You might even be fooled into thinking that the USA on the chests are labels, but they’re not - just part of the uniforms. The best part is that the comic assumes that the reader is familiar enough with the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan situation that they don’t need blatant hand-holding to put the joke together. If anything negative could be said about this comic, it would be that the premise is a little too general to apply directly to this Bosnia situation. But kudos to Danziger.

Now onto the worst:

Just look at it… let it soak in. The comic, aside from being poorly drawn and confusing, doesn’t really make sense on its face - Why a series of exaggerations and possible lies would lead Hillary to make a claim that she was named after a man who she was born before, who is only a marginal celebrity these days is beyond me. And it seems like the author already went for that joke with the reference to Sir Edmund Hillary in the text on the left (implying that she was named after him, I am supposing?).

But the absolute, 100% worst part about this comic is the label on Rodman’s chest. We get it. His name’s not Dennis Rodham. There’s got to be some principle in comedy that says that it’s not worth explaining a joke to 10 people if it’s going to tick off 100 people by explaining it. Is it really worth intellectually insulting the vast majority of people who are going to know that it’s Dennis Rodman in order to reach the handfull of housefraus who could give a crap less who he is? And even when they realize what the big joke is all about, what’s the payoff? Rodham -> Rodman. It’s possibly the most clever joke that’s ever been crafted.

So yes, labels. Labels are why I hate political comics. Gary Larson wrote a single-panel comic for 15 years without resorting to labels to explain his premises, and he didn’t have the luxury of having an audience walk in with prior knowledge of the scenarios he was writing about. Here’s a thought: If you don’t have a talented cartoonist at your paper, maybe you don’t need a political cartoon. I’d rather miss out on the crappy illustration, crappy setups and crappy jokes than be intellectually insulted by some hack who can’t draw or write jokes labelling that the monkey that’s eating the black banana is actually George W. Bush eating an oil banana while a guy labelled “The American People” slips on the peel.

On second thought, I may be a political comic writing genius.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.