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Front Lines: Political Cartooning and the Battle for Freedom of Speech

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D. D. Degg September 24, 2019 1 minute 0 comments

If you are headed to the AAEC Convention/CXC Festival be sure to pick up this limited edition, soon-to-be-collectors’-item book available only there this weekend.

As the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists tweeted:

Politico’s [Matt Wuerker] & a slew of guest cartoonists have put together a book that ties into “Front Line: Editorial Cartoonists & the First Amendment,” now showing at the Billy Ireland

There are “100 cartoons in the book not counting Matt’s cover cartoon. It also has essays by Joel Pett, Lucy Caswell, Roslyn Mazer, Rob Rogers, Ann Telnaes and Matt.”

ComicsDC and Mike Rhode went behind the scenes,
conducting a fascinating interview with the book’s designer Barbara Sutliff.

I didn’t know whether the book included everything from the exhibit, since I didn’t see the show, but Matt says, “No…. And many of the cartoons in the book are not in the show. It’s by no means a catalog of the show. We just used that as a jumping off point.”

The tricky thing for me was incorporating many horizontal cartoons into the design without having the option of going across the gutter of a perfect bound book like I might when designing with photographs, which can have impact across a spread—but obviously that doesn’t work with cartoons with words.