On June 11, 2016, the San Diego Union Tribune (
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"Pen-and-ink political provocations
San Diego State’s downtown gallery showcases 75 years of cartoons
Mugshot of Peter RoweBy Peter Rowe | 7:19 p.m. June 11, 2016 | Updated, 7:21 p.m. | June 21, 2016
People seem drawn to editorial cartoons, even though these works have a tendency to raise our blood pressure.
“Cartoonists generally don’t set out to offend people,” said Liz Benson, a conservative syndicated cartoonist, “but in today’s world it’s hard to avoid.”
That’s especially true during presidential campaigns, when cartoonists turn candidates into caricatures. Hillary’s pantsuits and pearls, Trump’s hair and squint — this year, they’ll make regular appearances on newspaper editorial pages.
Such irreverent, amusing and enraging artworks are an American tradition, as shown in “Party Lines: The History, Art and Politics of Editorial Cartoons.” The exhibition, which opens this week at San Diego State University’s downtown gallery, covers more than 75 years of pen-and-ink provocations.
The exhibit also takes a brief detour from presidential campaigns to a hot-button issue of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: women’s suffrage. The half-dozen drawings, spanning 1888 to 1920, are on loan from Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
All of the other 130-odd cartoons were inspired by presidential campaigns. They start in 1940, when the GOP’s Wendell Willkie vainly attempted to deny FDR a third term, and continue through this year’s tussle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
For all the passion displayed in these drawings, most of them loaned by the artists, this exhibit is a labor of love. Jim Tiffany, 76, is a lifelong fan of editorial cartoons who spent decades collecting them. His trove was destroyed in a fire 30 years ago, but his dedication to the work of Herblock, Jeff MacNelly, Pat Oliphant and others never died.
A few years ago, he proposed this exhibit to San Diego State, arguing that it would be a natural attraction during an election year.
“And now we’ve got 14 or 15 active editorial cartoonists,” said Tiffany, who is retired from the travel industry. “Six or seven of them are Pulitzer Prize winners.”
These all-stars include the late Herbert Block, known as “Herblock” during his five decades-plus at The Washington Post, and the late MacNelly. Each received three Pulitzers; Herblock shared a fourth for his contribution to the Post’s Watergate coverage.
The artistic styles are as varied as Oliphant’s fine black-and-white detailing and Jen Sorensen’s candy-colored four-panel sets. The cartoonists’ allegiances vary, too, as seen in Benson’s sly takedown of Clinton, MacNelly’s muscular celebration of Ronald Reagan and Matt Wuerker’s exuberant mugging of Trump.
Displaying cartoons from across the political spectrum “was something I endeavored to do,” Tiffany said. “It would be easy to show my politics, and that was something I didn’t want to do.”
Pinning down an editorial cartoonist’s politics also can be tricky. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Steve Breen, a two-time Pulitzer winner, is usually considered conservative. Yet his work in the show takes aim at Republicans as well as Democrats.
“My favorite cartoons are about presidential politics,” Breen said. “These are the cartoons that seem to hold up.”
They’re also popular on social media, earning scads of Facebook “likes” and Twitter retweets. By making it easier to produce and share cartoons, new technology has thrown a lifeline to an embattled profession.
In 1900, 2,000 cartoonists were employed by the nation’s newspapers. In 2011, there were roughly 40. These dwindling numbers can be traced to the sagging fortunes of the industry.
“Because of the economics of the newspaper industry, the publishers are very, very skittish about pissing people off,” said Rob Rogers, the editorial cartoonist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “And that’s what we do.”
They also draw eyeballs, especially young orbs scanning the Internet, argued The Sacramento Bee’s Jack Ohman, this year’s Pulitzer winner. “It’s an evolving medium,” he said. “The other night I did three cartoons on an iPad, and you can actually record them and track them as they are being drawn.”
Social media also means that the distance between pen and publication can be measured in seconds. Lalo Alcaraz, the San Diego State graduate who draws and writes the comic strip “La Cucaracha,” also draws editorial cartoons. After Trump complained that a judge was biased against him because the jurist was of Mexican descent, the artist dashed off a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal. The candidate was shown in court before “Judge” Danny Trejo, the actor whose roles have included a menacing vigilante in the movie “Machete.”
“It’s a pleasure when one of those goes viral,” Alcaraz said.
Barbed humor is not always accepted with good humor. The 2015 massacre of cartoonists and other staffers at Paris’ Charlie Hebdo magazine stunned the victims’ American colleagues, who are accustomed to hostile, occasionally threatening, letters and email.
“After that happened,” said Adam Zyglis, the Buffalo News’ Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, “you do kind of look at those comments in a different way.”
Still, few cartoonists can afford to spend time fretting. Sharpening their pens and wits, they set out to entertain and provoke — in a hurry.
“I do 250 cartoons a year,” Breen said. “Is every one of them a masterpiece? No. The nature of the beast is meeting your deadline and trying not to embarrass yourself in the newspaper.
“But there are days when a great idea meets great art to produce a masterpiece.”
There are days when those masterpieces adorn museum walls."