rant on cartoons

[Vedius Pollio]

In another thread, Honor mentioned that the humour is only the chocolate coating of most political cartoons.

This got me thinking.

Has political satire (in visual/caricature form) declined over the past few hundred years? I personally think it has, and quite drastically.

My avatar is from William Hogarth's Marriage-a-la-mode, which is a satirical painting from the 18th century. (William Hogarth's page on Wikipedia is surprisingly good.) In a Hogarth painting, there's an incredible amount of attention to detail:

In one of his paintings (the second marriage-a-la-mode painting), an upper-class husband and wife are shown inside their home. Every little detail in the painting hints at the couple's degeneracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_% ... _T%C3%AAte

In another painting, the second Rake's progress painting, the main event is a young man holding a levee (a kind of morning get-together). But there are subtle jabs at 18th century classical music as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Will ... essors.jpg

The point I'm trying to make is that:

Most contemporary political cartoons are one-dimensional. They only show a single action, with a single punchline.

Hogarth may have been very conservative, but his paintings were three-dimensional. Some had a central action, some didn't. But the WHOLE PAINTING was full of political jabs. He never really attacked a single thing, but the entire society around him.

I think this is because his paintings had a foreground, a background, and framing objects (following the rules of traditional European visual composion). So all of those elements are caricatures in their own right.

I think that political cartoons should simply be larger, with more stuff going on, and more thought than a simple punchline. Instead of drawing Bush with big ears and a cowboy hat, someone should draw him slumped on the Oval Office desk, while various sinister characters cavort around him.

[Lulujayne]

If you're looking to newspaper cartoons to be anything like Hogarth then you're always going to be disappointed. Editorial cartoons are jotted off day by day - whereas Hogarth illustrates broader concepts. Also, news traveled slower then, he had time to engrave every pore on the gin drinkers faces.

Besides, Hogarth helped define the genre of "cartooning" and also bridged the divide between "high and low" art. You're asking a big thing for every newspaper to have a Hogarth inking away

[Aeridus]

If you're looking for good satire, Pratchett is the way to go. I like how he references a lot of today's issues indirectly by showing how they affect Discworld, obviously without using actual names of real people. As for "standard" political cartoons, I have seen very few that are any good at all.

[Kittyboymuffin]

I second the Pratchett suggestion. One of the more ingenious recurring themes, I think, is using an aspect/invention/concept/whatever from our world, apply it in the Discworld, and let the way it works differently illuminate something about it in our world. (Pizza, for instance. Sure, it's a "medieval-to-Victoriean Europe mashup" fantasy setting, and pizza as such seems to be a modern construct, but all you really need to make pizza is bread, tomato sauce, cheese, optional toppings, and a recipe. Then there's the various plays on fairy tales, the Gordian knot, "barbarian heroes", etc ...)

[Vedius Pollio]

Also, news traveled slower then, he had time to engrave every pore on the gin drinkers faces.

Those aren't pores

I'm not asking for the toonist to produce realistic paintings (with a vanishing point and chiaroscuro). What I'm referring to is the scope of the narrative: all the little details,
the silly clock with the Buddha,
the broken branch in Lord Squander's family tree,
the coronets on Lord Squander's crutches,
Junior's painted heels and French bow,
Lady Squander's paperwork,
the Masquerade ticket,
T. Rakewell's donation to the composer (seen only in the engraving),
The dog eating Nero's heart,
The degenerate man sharing his bone with a dog in Gin Lane,
The Frenchwomen adoring the stingray in "The Gate of Calais",
The Roman Catholic procession in the background of the same painting

Sort of like "Where's Wally" really. (Or "Where's Bin Laden")

(FIND THE FOLLOWING: "Oddlaw chased by a caveman.")

[Lulujayne]

I'm not asking for the toonist to produce realistic paintings

Yes, I'm aware of what you meant.

What I said was that I don't believe it is possible to achieve Hogarth-like satire and commentary in modern political cartoons which are needed to be inked within 24 (more often than not less than this) for publication.

[Crushogre]

If you're looking for good satire, Pratchett is the way to go. I like how he references a lot of today's issues indirectly by showing how they affect Discworld, obviously without using actual names of real people. As for "standard" political cartoons, I have seen very few that are any good at all.

Although, quite often the book was written long before the event it seems to be satirizing.

[Indigo Violent]

If you're looking for good satire, Pratchett is the way to go. I like how he references a lot of today's issues indirectly by showing how they affect Discworld, obviously without using actual names of real people. As for "standard" political cartoons, I have seen very few that are any good at all.

Although, quite often the book was written long before the event it seems to be satirizing.

I don't know if you've ever heard of Dario Fo, but if you ever get the chance to see Accidental Death of an Anarchist, you should. Fo wrote the play around the time that anarchist workers' movements were sweeping Italy. The plot of the play is that an activist, falsely accused of bombing a plaza and taken into custody, died under suspicious circumstances and the cops are trying to hush it up - based on true events. Fo released the play into the public domain and gave permission for theatres to pretty much alter it at will so that it could remain up to date. When I went to see it at my university's theatre, they changed the word "anarchist" to "terrorist" in several strategic spots and felt very topical.

[Vedius Pollio]

I don't know if you've ever heard of Dario Fo, but if you ever get the chance to see Accidental Death of an Anarchist, you should.

I've seen it, and I don't really like Fo that much. The topicality of "Accidental Death" is a very plain, generic topicality: "Beware of the authorities, because they will take advantage of society's fears to gain unneccessary and oft-abused powers."

This sort of "topical" message has existed since at least the French Revolution, and undergoes booms and busts (McCarthyism, Nazism, the PATRIOT act).

"Accidental Death" is continually topical, but only because it sacrifices vast amounts of detail and specificity. It's a sort of re-usable commodity, and feels numb and artless. I like detail and complexity, anyhow.

My favourite satirists would have to be:

Dickens

Flaubert (especially read "The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas" which is much funnier than Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary" and predates it by several years. The concept is a very good one, and it would be nice if someone writes a sequel. "Madame Bovary" and "Bouvard and Pecuchet" are also superb.)

Petronius (A Roman author whose work anticipates Flaubert's and Hogarth's in a lot of ways.)

Hogarth (Possibly the greatest caricaturist in history. I prefer him to Honore Daumier, who in the next century is already beginning to produce one-dimensional cartoons.)

Voltaire (I like Candide the novel, because the prose is top-notch. The musical version isn't really as funny. It can make an audience laugh, but it isn't as detailed, and with Voltaire, the fun is all in the details.)

[I like these people not just because they're funny, but because they're artistic. I think a joke that is also a work-of-art stays funnier for longer, and even if it *god forbid* stops being funny, then people can still admire the artistry.

Another note: while I bemoan the lack of narrative artistry in today's cartoons, I like the drawing style of quite a few artists. Colleen Coover manages to convey an amazing amount of emotion and facial detail with just a few crisp, 1950s-style, lines. I'm also fond of Osamu Tezuka, although he's been dead for like 20 years, and his stuff has nothing to do with newspaper cartoons.