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Image taken from Cagle.com
At last I’ve come up long enough for air to be able to post the notes from my interview with Daryl Cagle earlier on in the week, as promised. Daryl is MSNBC.com’s chief editorial cartoonist – click here for a vast catalogue of editorial cartoons about anything and everything topical, which is aggregated and licensed out to hundreds of different papers and websites around the world.
While to many, what Daryl and I do (single panel editorial cartoons vs. multiple-page journalistic comics) seem to be very closely related, I was surprised at how differently we approach our respective forms. It reminded me of friends and family members who interchange “animation, cartoon, comic, illustration and graphic novel writing” when asking me how my work’s going. The most obvious example of this was Daryl’s confession that:
“I don’t think our role is to inform – we hit people with our opinion…I don’t consider it my role to teach”.
Which was very interesting for me, as I consider the educational value of my work to be one of its most important aspects: how can we combine artistic and journalistic practices to create a more accessible, didactic -not to mention engaging- experience for the apathetic/inundated reader? Daryl went on to say that an editorial cartoonist’s role was “to make graphics that stand apart” from the rest of the text on the op ed page. But isn’t that selling the power of art form short? One of the fiercest contrasts with the UK in the US political forum is the vitriol that’s so liberally (no pun intended) showered on each and every polemic by the ever-burgeoning number of celebrity pundits. Combine that with the incessant torrent of the 24-hour news cycle and the average newsreader ends up being force-fed opinion without being given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a topic. Not that the art doesn’t look fantastic and stir a great deal of lively debate – I remember my editorial cartooning days from Uni and was proud to be a Times Young Cartoonist runner-up some years back for a cartoon that featured Blair and Brown on X-factor reality show. But much like X-factor, a lot of the editorial cartoons that I’ve seen feel more like graphic gimmicks – a sort of knowing wink that at best raises a chuckle and at worst reads like a expository diagram delivered by a smug stand-up comedian convinced of his own mirthsome genius. Matt Bors, who treads the line between multi-panel comics and single panel editorial cartoons (a la Lloyd Dangle, Tom Tomorrow et al) skewers the worst offenders over at his blog if you want examples.
Still, a lot of the work Daryl’s doing as an ambassador for the form (not to mention the US State Dept) is heartening, and the global prominence of the form is something that he thinks will sustain well into the future, even if its practitioners have to be flexible to make it work financially: Daryl admitted that roughly only 75 editorial cartoonists make a living, and that “all income is from print clients”. How? By producing work with the highest resale value: cartoons on global issues, that don’t take up a lot of space, with few words. Is that really what “art for the masses” should be about?
