Creating good Trump cartoons is so hard it’s not even funny.
The ironic thing is, drawing him is easy. The pursed lips, the puff of golden hair, the iconic hand gestures – they beckon the pencil. A cartoonist might chortle to himself, This is going to be huge! HUGE! We’re going to draw tremendous cartoons. Because that’s what our great country needs. We’re going to make America laugh again!
But President Trump has stolen their thunder.
“How do you caricature something that’s a caricature of itself?” asks Nate Beeler, editorial cartoonist for The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio. “The stuff that he does, a lot of it … is even more hyperbolic than I would draw.”
The Christian Science Monitor talks to some political cartoonists about working in such a volatile environment.
Mr. Trump, with his unorthodox style and disdain for political correctness, might seem like the perfect gift for saving a nearly extinct species: the staff editorial cartoonist. (There are fewer than 30 left in the US, according to several cartoonists interviewed for this piece.) But in fact, his ascent has proved challenging in many ways.
Cartoonists Nate Beeler, Christopher Weyant, Jeffrey Koterba, and Scott Stantis and scholars Jenny Robb and Sara Duke discuss some of the challenges.
Stantis…says the cartoonist species has come a long way and will likely survive both the demise of newspapers and the rise of Trump.
“We’re never going to go away,” says Stantis. “There’s always one of us in every tribe.”
Elsewhere, but connected, the Chaska Herald asked a few area residents about their hopes for a new year. First up is cartoonist Dave Granlund:
I’m a political cartoonist, so you’d think I’d be enjoying all this daily chaos, incivility, polarization and stock market jitters. There’s certainly lots of fodder to keep my cartoon ideas and ink flowing. Too much in fact.
The 24/7 news cycle of the knee-jerk backwards, forwards and sideways events makes my head spin. I start drawing a cartoon at 10 a.m., and by noon, it’s reversed … then reversed again at 2 p.m.
So, my hopes and wishes as we move forward into 2019, are that we all stop and take a deep breath. Slow it down.
Dave continues about the the lack of compromise and overblown divisiveness.
Presidents aren’t supposed to be outrageous, editorial cartoonists are.
But they sometimes step over the bounds of correctness and a newspaper has to apologize.
Augusta Chronicle Apologizes for Word Choice in McKee Cartoon
The cartoon has disappeared from most sites.
What I found funny is that PoliticalCartoons.com deleted the cartoon but left the offending title in place.
