In the 1980s, there were two comic strips about the White House. One was well written, the other was well drawn.
Doonesbury was brilliant, witty satire. Its caustic humor revolutionized the comics page (and in fact, some newspapers moved it from the comics page to the editorial page). It developed a huge following. However, the drawing in Doonesbury was always mediocre at best. Artist Garry Trudeau could not draw a decent caricature to save his life, so he would always draw the President off screen, either with a word balloon above the White House...
... or a word balloon from outside the panel at a press conference.
As the decades went by and Trudeau's drawing didn't improve, he compensated by drawing George H.W. Bush as a disembodied voice (to connote his lack of substance), or Dan Quayle as a talking feather or Bill Clinton as a talking waffle. As with many artists, necessity became the mother of invention.
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| Rather than draw George W. Bush's face, Trudeau drew an empty warrior's helmet. |
The comic strip Benchley by Mort Drucker and Jerry Dumas had the opposite problem. The drawings by Drucker were impeccable-- every day there were fresh caricatures of Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Tip O'Neil and many others.
Unfortunately, the text from Jerry Dumas tended to be corny, old fashioned pablum. Drucker described the strip as "somewhat like a mild roast....Newspapers don't want to alienate their readership, whether it's Democrat or Republican. Therefore you have to be a bit milder....For now our intent is to do a humorous strip and possibly at some later date do more political social satire." But the strip ended after 3 years, in 1987. Doonesbury is now in its 55th year.
As it became clear that Benchley was not going to make it, Dumas and Drucker allowed themselves a biting remark or two about their competition:
The newspaper comic page has its finger on the pulse of America. It seems America has voted. Audiences no longer care about (or even recognize) bad drawing.
The excellent comic strip artists who continue to uphold the dignity of good drawing seem to do it for the sake of their own conscience; it doesn't appear that they are particularly rewarded for it. Comic strips are smaller, of course, so the images must be simplified. Today quick, sloppy drawing-- even stick figures-- will do. Repetition of the same drawing in multiple panels is another common time saver. Today it's the text that matters.
23 comments:
Compared to Mort Drucker, NOBODY can draw a decent caricature. He was the GOAT.
Never saw these amazing Drucker strips. I can't believe how good his Reagan is. Especially the "Okay, you can have..." panel. Every line on that face is worth its weight in gold. Nobody is even close to him.
“ Today quick, sloppy drawing-- even stick figures-- will do.”
Why do you think that is?
David Rowe is my favorite, love his style! He's an Aussie, but tackles US politics too (but who can resist?)
"Meme" images, which can be put together in seconds by anyone with internet access and a clever idea, have supplanted political cartoons. These typically constitute an image swiped from the internet (could be a movie still, news photo or random snapshot) with a clever caption commentating on a social or political issue. The cheapness of the production somehow makes it even funnier than if an artist had done a really nice drawing. The good ones spread like wildfire, are borrowed, modified and repurposed; their manifold authors are almost always anonymous. And now there are meme videos as well. I don't like it — or rather, I don't like the general devaluation of artistic ability — but such is the way things are going. Political cartoonists nowadays have even less influence than the downsizing newspapers in which their works are published.
The exterior drawing of the White House (repeated four times) functions like an establishing shot in a TV sitcom, where you could have the dialogue track over the image before cutting to a shot of the people inside the building. Except Trudeau doesn’t cut to the people inside because why bother ? He can’t draw the president very well (as you said David), and the dialogue is doing all the work anyway.
To be fair, this is a problem with dialogue-driven comic strips. Made worse if two characters are sitting or standing in one place while talking for a long time.
The Drucker’s (the desk scene) - although nicely drawn - still struggle with the same problem, despite using a slight variation of the static shot with a close up.
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Charlie: "The cheapness of the production somehow makes it even funnier than if an artist had done a really nice drawing. “
There’s a lesson in this observation which the realism-or-die types never get.
Marcos and Kev Ferrara-- Agreed, he's pretty darn good.
Movieac-- A lot of theories about that have been traded on this blog. I guess I'd say fast moving computer games and videos have shortened out attention spans and reduced our sensitivity and appreciation for qualities that are best observed in a quiet, thoughtful manner. How can a delicate drawing by Durer compete with blinking lights and dolby sound? I also think that the expansion of photography, which has enabled everyman to create, fast, inexpensive likenesses of everthing that once required an artist has de-mystified art and eroded our reverence for the artist. Finally, let's not leave out the role of abstract art, which wrongly persuaded a large sector of the population that they never needed to be ashamed of their taste or their lack of drawing ability.
Charlie-- I agree with your perspective on the sad state of political cartoons, which once played a vital role shaping civil discourse. I'd only add that political cartoons also bump up against an angry, polarized (stupid) audience that is intolerant of "micro-aggressions." More than one political cartoonist has been lost to fatwas in the last few years.
I don’t understand the argument against Trudeau’s art and style. He’s developed by his own efforts a slew of graphic conventions, as all the best comic strip artists do. And that’s what his pictorial world is now wholly comprised of; those conventions.
If a competent journeyman were to step in to the artistic role at Doonesbury Inc. – and for all I know one or more has – he would know exactly how to proceed. Learn the conventions until they are second nature, and then go forth and produce.
Such is, as far as I can tell, the nature of the lexical aspect of the medium; the hieroglyphics of it. You can’t rethink Garfield’s ears two years into the strip. The established cartooning is comforting and expected. It's a daily sit-com built of short hand symbolic storytelling, necessarily full of stock elements utterly known. Everything is built according to the developed formula because tomorrow keeps on coming and the artistry, such as it is, is entirely the style that was developed for the strip as it became popular. In service of a certain comic tone in service of the kind of jokes the writing delivers.
I’m far less forgiving of the ready-made techniques used in the more realistic strips because those are pretending to have some naturalism. I think it is an issue that the artists of those strips don’t actually believe what they are drawing and so rely on conventions. For stylized cartoon symbol art, why bother trying to believe what is obviously and pointedly only silly abstractions codified into utterly predictable comic foils.
I remember being instantly put off forever - after reading just 2 or 3 strips - by the truly dreadful namby-pamby writing in Benchley. Drucker drawing it (in a somewhat rushed, simplified style) somehow makes the writing seem even worse. It's like a golf strip. I've vastly enjoyed much of Doonesbury and never even reflected that the choice of e.g. the helmet for W. was due to artistic limitations (absolutely true!). Many great comics artists found extremely successful ways to transcend their somewhat limited drawing ability, resulting in far better work than someone with more technical talent might do.
On the other hand: I love the late Alex Raymond drawing on Rip Kirby, but the writing is pedestrian and the visual continuity doesn't flow. It's impossible to read Rip Kirby with enjoyment, but almost every individual drawing is magnificent. Perhaps the best results come when drawing and writing level aren't too far apart (preferably all created by a writer-artist who has learned how to compensate weaknesses in both areas).
Anonymous-- Thanks for suggesting David Rowe
Laurence John-- Agreed. His "establishing shot" is all there is. He never gets past it. The technique of using the identical drawing three or four times is used by Jim Davis (Garfield) and others quite a lot. Davis is open about his reasons. He says he has to streamline the strip because if it takes the reader more than 5 seconds to finish, the reader will already have anticipated the punchline, so he can't have the reader lingering over different drawings, changes in perspective, etc.
Kev Ferrara-- I agree that Trudeau has "developed by his own efforts a slew of graphic conventions," but they are in the style of a capable high school student. The "conventions"-- flat figures, simplistic anatomy, poses designed to conceal weaknesses in draftsmanship, tortured perspective, all heads drawn with the same formula-- could be found in many a sophomore class notebook. This was acceptable when Trudeau was drawing Doonesbury as a student at Yale, but over 50 years of daily drawing one might be justified in expecting a little growth.
I agree with your basic point about graphic conventions, which is why we applaud Charles Schulz, Lichty, Hank Ketcham, Ernie Bushmiller, Harold Gray and so many others whose odd conventions became hardened in concrete. These are all artists who, like Martin Luther, cried out, "Here I stand, I can do no other." I don't put Trudeau in their class at all.
Anon: “ the visual continuity doesn't flow…. but almost every individual drawing is magnificent. Perhaps the best results come when drawing and writing level aren't too far apart…”
For me, the best example of ‘flow’ is Calvin & Hobbes. The writing and drawing work beautifully in tandem. The drawings are a counterpoint to the words, adding additional information, allowing time to pause for thought, or imagine movement between frames (pacing). The drawings are simple and economic with a lot of empty/white space (allowing the reader room to imaginatively ‘fill in’ what is missing), but also nuanced, not rubber-stamped, full of interesting re-framing compositionally (e.g. as characters move through outdoor locations).
All the Sunday Funnies™ art styles are childlike or juvenile. And stuck that way. That's the fun of them. It's cartooning. What makes them professional is that the style is consistent in its idiosyncrasies - there is a self-similarity to the design of all the components resulting from the same steadily silly sensibility and practiced hand being on tap for all of it - and so has a certain unique overall tone to it.
The reason Maus is so bad is because it lacks consistent conventions. That is its basic ineptitude. It isn't even functioning at the level of design. But all cartooning derives from artistic elision. Cartooning is, after all, a species of dogma. Conventions are dogma. Dogma is absolute confidence under conditions of informational deficiency.
The better the cartoonist though the more we don't care about what has been left out. It is equivalent to recognizing that all comedians are unbalanced and unfair in their commentary. And so what?
If you put any single figure from any established strip into any other strip, it would, and should, stand out like goggles on a vampire. Doonesbury has that idiosyncratic self-similarity.
Now I don't like the art style of Doonesbury, and I never have. But it is a legit Sunday Funnies™ cartoon art style. It is far more rigid and timid than my preference, but clearly there are bunch of people who respond to it. Presumably the same people who respond to Chris Ware or Scott McCloud.
> "Meme" images [...] have supplanted political cartoons.
Well, yeah. They're funny, and cartoons aren’t.
People would happily read funny cartoons if they existed. The same problem affects movies and TV, professional writers simply can’t compete with the crowd when it comes to generating quality laughs.
Big studios have all but stopped making comedy movies. Bridesmaids came out in 2011. I don’t think there’s been a major comedy since... maybe Step Brothers a couple later. Funny for the time, but can't compete with a 5 minute scroll through Tiktok for laughs.
It’s hard to see how this is a bad thing. Were they ever fit for purpose? Doesn't seem like the right medium for the job, just a pointless fusion of forms. Like comedy songs. Let singers make beautiful music, and let funny people be funny. There's no reason to mash them together, it just ruins both.
Richard,
Memes are cheap hack trash; insta-clichés; a rote way for untalented and lazy online midwits to communicate in pre-made content. Often used to 'zing' enemies in a high-handed and superior way without having to have any actual superior wit or imaginative merit one's self. Another lying online avatar form, another mediocrity mask.
If you find derivative distractions funny, then I guess you're this moment's man. Congratulations on your bounty. You get a mindless distraction a second for every second of your life until the second you die. Open wide.
Comedy is the Rosetta Stone of the arts. It goes with anything because, in comedy, every rule or principle of art can be broken. There's funny songs, funny dances, funny movies, funny sculptures, funny wallpaper, funny novels, and on and on. The only rule of comedy is serious creativity.
If you don't think there are any funny examples of songs, books, movies, comics, dances... look a squirrel! Go chase the squirrel! Go on, chase it!
"Surely, you can't be serious?" "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."
Behold, the superior wit and imaginative merit of True Art!
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
Bwahahaha! Smelt of elderberries! I'm dying!
>>> "Behold, the superior wit and imaginative merit of True Art!"
Since your line isn't funny either, I guess there's no such thing as comedy. (These are brilliant arguments.)
~ FV
Since your line isn't funny either
Certainly not. Real intentional humor is exceedingly rare. It takes an internet with billions of people on it documenting the world and coming up with jokes all day long, to unearth the occasional chuckle.
Our species' greatest living humorists spend literal man-years crafting and perfecting a 40 minute standup routine, that on average contains maybe 10 really solid jokes. And that's the best we hominids have to offer.
It's no wonder SNL hasn't had a single funny joke in 15 years, despite every economic incentive to do so.
Nothing's funny unless you say it is. Hell of an argument.
~ FV
What’s the last thing you watched that had you laughing out loud for multiple minutes? I can tell you mine, it was TikTok. What’s yours?
The Super Bowl halftime show I just watched.
~ FV
"Surely, you can't be serious?" "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."
As with everything in art, there are levels involved. There is technique, facture, and craftsmanship; the surface crust. There is the overt literal content in the middle mantle zone. There is the outer core; possession of the artist by his narrative material (which we’ll call belief) which is where things start to get hot. And then there is the molten core of expressive abstractions and subliminal information beneath, between, under, behind, suffusing, and comprehending everything. The latter we may call the music of the art.
A great deal of comedy seems to rely on words. Seems. Words deliver content but they are also quite textural; in the sense of both descriptive and tactile, which is to say detectable immediately through conscious inspection. So words sit very close to the surface, whether written or spoken or sung. We are utterly conscious of them; they are pre-mades, with codified meanings, and extremely easy to remember; our primary memes.
Thus word-based jokes have little mystery. They are easily decoded and remembered, and go stale very quickly. The aesthetic effect of them lasts the duration of a laugh, pretty much. The important point is this: Generally when we go back to hear a joke several times, we only think it is to hear the words. But actually it is to hear the song of it. And the song of it is much deeper than the words.*
The great comedians have great material, often. They must be great comic tunesmiths, if you'll allow it. But what they do to the room spiritually is actually their most important ability, far more important even than how they sing the words. Norm MacDonald was a master at this; he considered the problem of live comic performance philosophically. Comedians talk of Norm reverently; often saying that with Norm they “never knew where they were in the joke.” Like Ricky Jay he was a magician’s magician; misdirecting even about his misdirection. Or as Joseph Pennell put it, “Art is the hiding of art by art.”
Anyway, to academically extract the words from a comic melody, comic song, or comic context - in order to prove that they aren't funny, only proves that you don't understand funny in the first place. That goes for your sock puppet too.
*The deeper/implied meaning of a joke is a different kind of song, which I'm not discussing here. Belief also gets into further complexities.
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