Open call: Ken Burns to make cartoon documentary
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Comic Riffs’ Michael Cavna has posted an open letter or invitation asking Ken Burns to consider making a new documentary of the American cartoon. Michael argues that such a movie should be made sooner rather than later for two reasons:
First, the state of the American cartoon is in such tremendous flux: Staff political cartoonists have been disappearing from the newsroom landscape quite precipitously in recent years, as the American newsroom itself has been remade for deeply transitional times. The American newspaper comic strip, to put it simply, is seeing great change in terms of syndication and online delivery. The New Yorker is a bastion for the American magazine cartoon, but such print outlets are fewer, many cartoonists say. Meanwhile, audiences for the comic book and the graphic novel have exploded in recent decades.
Second, there are some longtime cartoon legends who till walk, and talk, colorfully among us. At the National Cartoonists Society’s Reubens Awards some days ago, I spoke with sports cartoonist Bill Gallo, whose historic tenure at the New York Daily News stretches back to World War II; George Booth, a longtime cartooning icon at The New Yorker; and Mort Walker, whose strip “Beetle Bailey” is the last newspaper comic approved personally some 60 years ago by publisher William Randolph Hearst. All three cartoonists had so much boyish glee in their eyes, who knows — they might outlive both Ken Burns and myself. But the larger reality is, they represent a generation of near-nonagenarians (one that includes “Family Circus’s” Bil Keane, and the 80something Mell Lazarus, among numerous others) who have great stories to share now.
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