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| “You have to wake up every morning angry.” -- Pat Oliphant |
Last week I wrote an appreciation of the late great Pat Oliphant (1935-2026) in The Comics Journal.
While writing it, I was struck by the fact that Oliphant's long, successful career was the result of a total fluke of time and place.
He started out in a small town near Adelaide, Australia where nobody cared about current events. He worked his way up to a job with the biggest newspaper in town, the Adelaide Advertiser, which Oliphant recalled "came out strongly for the weather." His drawings were heavily censored, not for political content (because there was none) but to make sure his drawings of cattle did not reveal a glimpse of a bull's pizzle.
Following in the footsteps of other great political cartoonists such as David Low, Oliphant fought his way out of rural Australia in 1964 to find a country with a market for his biting political observations and powerful drawings. As I wrote in The Comics Journal,
It turned out that Oliphant’s talents were perfectly suited for the U.S. in the 1960s. If he had come to America today, when the newspaper industry is anemic and editorial cartoonists are on a tighter leash, he might have fallen flat and the world would’ve been deprived of thousands of brilliant and witty drawings. But the 1960s were a time of great political ferment and artistic audacity, a time of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war.... The combination of Oliphant and 1960s America proved combustible chemistry. Within months he was attracting national attention....
Oliphant's cartoons appeared in 500 newspapers around the world.
Today Pat Oliphant is in the graveyard, but so are the opportunities for talented political cartoonists whose pointed drawings used to shock millions of readers out of their reveries. Where does a political cartoonist with great talent go today to earn a living?
Not long ago, Jeff Bezos's Washington Post began following in the footsteps of the Adelaide Advertiser, censoring the brilliant conservative cartoons of Michael Ramirez and the brilliant progressive cartoons of Ann Telnaes leaving nothing but editorial cartoons with pablum suitable for the rapidly diminishing, addlepated American readership. Telnaes quit the Post on principle and turned to substack.
Looking back on Oliphant's 50 years of impressive drawings, it's painful to think how all that amazing content might never have materialized if Oliphant was off by a few years, or a few miles. It's even more painful to think about where such talent will be able to congregate in the future.
To quote my good friend Thomas Gray:
Many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
8 comments:
Oliphant was the greatest… I always loved Punk's little asides.
It's a goddamn tragedy. The public is getting illiterate and tasteless.
The problem isn't the newspapers, the problem is the reading public in the US. Newspapers just give the public what they want.
JSL
When I was a kid in the early 70's we lived for a while in Mexico. Every six months we did a visa run to the border and returned back the same day to stay visitor-compliant. During those trips Mom and I would hunt down used bookstores and we'd stock up on American magazines: crossword puzzles and women's magazines for her, a Mad magazine or some comics for me along with paperback editions of Peanuts comic strip collections. And always Time magazines. The current one and any older ones still around.
I remember an edition with Leonid Brezhnev on the cover (June 25, 1973) and inside, an Oliphant cartoon showing Brezhnev entering his hotel room ("VIP Suite" on the door; at that time he was on a historic visit to the US) and he pulls back a framed picture of the Statue of Liberty on the wall. Taped on the wall is a piece of paper that reads: "THIS ROOM IS BUGGED. We know you will understand". Brezhnev, with a wry smile, half turns and says to the redcap, "Tell my host I already feel very much at home."
I didn't know much about the dark underbelly of US-Soviet relations at 11, it wasn't by far the most mordant of Oliphant's offerings at the time, but I understood that this was dangerous stuff couched in grown-up humor, and it made me uneasy. It also made me read the article around it.
Pat Oliphant always had a way of igniting a placid conscience with images that ruled the page space--masterfully absurd, always visually impactful. His editorial shorthand included camera angles and juxtapositions of the serious with the inane that in its own way rivaled Welles, De Sica, et al., at least to me. His genius was in not only capturing the grotesque lethal ballets of power but distilling them in a stark way that instructed across any demographic that cared to pause and learn. There will never be another one like him.
(Hopefully this link works, here is the image itself, courtesy of archive.org)
https://ia600608.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/8/items/time-1973-11-12/Time%201973-06-25_jp2.zip&file=Time%201973-06-25_jp2/Time%201973-06-25_0032.jp2&id=time-1973-11-12&scale=2&rotate=0
Vanderwolff-- Your story (the link worked fine) supports my long held view that images get burned into our brains in a way that words never can. We never forget that impression of "dangerous stuff."
JSL-- Unfortunately you seem to be right.
Safe target. Do the muslim men of Rotherham.
Even less likely is a WaPo cartoon about the Shakeshaft Report.
~ FV
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