The Anniston Star from Anniston, Alabama • Page 48

ANGE Sunday, November 7, 1999 Page 3F Editors: John Fleming and Bruce Lowry: 235-9206 (Tlje JVmttBton Star Reflections: Editorial cartoons chart societal change HYP From Page 1 Journalese 101 TRkHSlMlOH HCM PARE YOLl MAKE MORE AWEyfHAN Mtw mtB bettektwan me 4. scruffy popular art form as upper-case Art. Feiffer raised the bar for us all. Without him there would be no Garry Trudeau, no Art Spiegelman. David Levine, Feiffer's contemporary on New York's Upper Left Side, blazed away like Daumier from his garret at the New York Review of Books.

Levine squeezed more juice and social commentary into a single Crosshatch on one of his exquisite caricatures than could be found in volumes of Victor Hugo. The influence of these two master satirists, Levine and Feiffer, echoed far beyond the limited circulations of their home-base publications. Meanwhile, in the straight press, while Herblock imitators proliferated, two originals stood out: Paul Conrad and Pat Oliphant. Conrad, who had absorbed the jangled drawing style of the Des Moines (Iowa) Register's J.N. "Ding" Darling growing up in Iowa, planted his "If you draw it, they will come" confidence and sprawling Midwestern expansiveness at the Denver Post, where he made a name for himself before joining the Los Angeles Times.

There his uncompromising Catholic moral compass, cornfed Midwestern sensibility and fearless prophetic stance became as foreboding a presence in LaLa Land as the San Andreas fault. Oliphant, an Australian misanthrope, took over from Conrad at the Denver Post and introduced America to his peculiarly down-under style a mix of the British cartoonist Giles and Mad's Jack Davis. Oliphant touched off a frenzy of stylistic experimentation in the late '60s, encouraging cartoonists like the Milwaukee Journal's Bill Sanders, the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal's Hugh Haynie and Newsday's Tom Darcy to fuse a pull-no-punches approach with a bold, contemporary look. Sanders, Haynie and Darcy taught me the importance of saying something. Wayne Stayskal, a comic gem of an artist at the Chicago Daily News taught me the irresistibility of humor.

But for me, Don Wright, then at the Miami News, put it all together. He mixed the dramatic visual flair and crayon shadings of Mauldin with the sophisticated Mad magazine look of Oliphant, heightened to a juiciness and an edge that were all his own. I could not get enough of his cartoons. There was something sensual and wicked about them. Oliphant had attitude but Wright combined it with moral substance and a point of view.

Unfortunately, Oliphant's dazzling artistry and admirable instinct for the jugular seemed harnessed to a sour sensibility. His cartoons often looked like they were drawn by someone who had just sucked on a lemon. Oliphant was essentially giv America. And with a grandmother bayoneted by a national guardsman in a mill strike uring the "30s. I couldn't have asked tor a better-pedigree to become a professional troublemaker.

It was nearly impossible at the time not to have a political viewpoint. Politics, then, was not an abstraction. Politics tore us apart, divided families, and split our guts over the suppertable at night. Political cartoons felt to me like the most natural, visceral response to the madness of those times available to me, as natural as going to jail or burning a draft card or sitting in at a lunch counter. I'll never forget being handed a leaflet at an anti-war demonstration emblazoned with a Don Wright cartoon showing a ghostly battalion of Vietnam casualties pointing accusatory fingers at a guilty Nixon with the caption "The Silent Majority." Here was an artist's cry of protest, his dazzling insight passed along hand to hand, like the mimeographed underground scribbles of the French Resistance or the Soviet samizdat.

I was hooked. That's what I wanted to do. Cartooning's giants At age 19. I drove to Washington, D.C., from Tallahassee. along with other student protesters, in a broken down Volkswagen van painted camouflage green to demonstrate in the moratorium against the Vietnam War.

Somehow, between marching by candlelight to Arlington Cemetery and catching my first whiff of tear gas at Dupont Circle, I called Herblock, introduced myself as the cartoonist for the Florida State University Florida Flambeau, and asked to visit him at the Washington Post. Meeting Herblock was like meeting the North Star. He was and still is a fixed point by which we all. cartoonists and civilians alike, set our bearings. I entered his legendary cluttered, office and saw his sketches for the next day's cartoon about Nixon's reaction to our peace march.

Herb signed a copy of that day's drawing, looked at my cartoons and told me, as I recall, that I had a decent line and to keep plugging. All the way back to Tallahassee I had a Herblock contact high. We may not have stopped the war that day, but I had met the greatest cartoonist of the century, and I was convinced that sooner or later he would stop the war. And sure enough he did. Today, closing in on 90, he's still firing shots across the bow of the Ship of State with the same vigor he went after Richard Nixon and Sen.

Joe McCarthy nearly 50 years ago. But Herblock was hardly the only influence on the best cartoonists of the last 50 years. During World War II, Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons for Stars and Stripes won him a Pulitzer Prize at age 24 and a nagging sense of guilt for profiting from a war that decimated so many of his generation of young men. After the war, thrown by his new celebrity, he floundered for a while drawing cartoons for a syndicate, writing books and running unsuccessfully for Congress until 1959, when he took over Daniel Fitzpatrick's cartooning slot at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"Hit it if it's big" was Mauldin's motto, and he updated and humanized cartooning with an elegant, semirealistic drawing style and a wit that turned more on placing public ures in humorous real-life situations than on manipulating outdated symbols and stock cliches. His bitingly fresh commentary perfectly represented the torch being passed to a new generation of cartoonists in the early '60s, when Camelot was in flower. If Herblock and Mauldin were the twin towers of cartooning in the mainstream press at the turn of the decade, Jules Feiffer emerged on the left at theWillage Voice as a chronicler of social malaise and ennui. With a depth and resonance unprecedented in cartooning, Feiffer taught us that a cartoonist didn't have to apologize for having a brain, that cartoons could not only be funny but have meaning. In his Voice drawings, Feiffer (who was also a gifted playwright) set a new standard of eloquence and sensitivity, revealing the potential of a ing the world the finger, while satirists like Wright and Conrad were sending it an acerbic valentine.

Giuliani HOW PARE )0W MAkE MORE MNEy-ftMME HOW PARE You BE MORE TREtfTEPTMUME HOW PAKE MOW RARE y0 6ET A MOVIE PEAL' H0W PARE )f0U MAkE MORE MONEY THAN ME NEVVStV their talent or conscience, arc delighted to give it to them. Has mandatory sensitivity helped geld us? Irreverence is not appreciated in an atmosphere of public piety. Interestingly, over the years 1 have had far more cartoons killed by liberal secular humanists than by Bible-thumpers. When it comes to lice speech I have found liberals more cowardly and more easily intimidated by pressure groups perhaps because they are more guilt-driven, and easily guilt-tripped by-sanctimonious special interests. If it's no longer open season for satire, if some groups are deemed exempt as fair game, if we're not all lampoonable regardless of race, creed, color, gender, whatever, then there is no free speech.

Could it be that no one needs satirists in a tabloid age when real life becomes a parody and sleaze dominates the headlines? Thirty years ago -issues at the core of ho we were as a nation and a people were at center stage civil rights. Vietnam. Watergate. Now sideshows dominate, and the result is wide-scale cynicism and trivi-alization. We are too hip to be appalled, too knowing to be ashamed.

That which is missing in our national ethos is missing in our editorial cartoons passion and a sense of outrage. Some of the most incisive editorial cartooning around today, to my eye, can be found on the pages of the New Yorker. Whatever the reason perhaps due to Tina Brown ordering her cartoonists to think topical, or the ascent of Art (Maus) Spiegelman as art editor the shift is noticeable and bracing. In the New Yorker 1 find what's missing in so many of today's editorial cartoons: something instinctive, unpredictable and up from the depths. Young cartoonists seem to be struggling to find themselves, but instead of breaking new ground, creative energies are spent in rival bashing and crass self-promotion, achieving new levels of smarminess.

Some cartoonists go so far as to contact newsmagazines to learn what their lead stories will be that week, the better to tailor their cartoons accordingly and increase chances for reprints. So much for fire in the belly. If we're not an endangered species we're certainly working hard at thinning the herd. We snipe at each other at cartoonists' conventions, whine incessantly about the successes of others and air the perennial plaint that syndication is a sellout, that the only good cartoon is a local cartoon. We spin elaborate but paper-thin self-justifications and rationalizations of our own personal failures.

We make grand displays of removing ourselves from national competition, protecting our wounded pride from further humiliation, then loudly defend our neurosis on panels and in articles, like talk-show trailer trash, making a virtue of our emotional immaturity. Cartoonists seem especially susceptible to the kamikaze allures of self-defeat. We're constantly looking for ways to take time off, cash in our chips, remove ourselves from the game. Self-abnegation is all the rage. With comic strippers Bill Watterson, Berke Breathed and Gary Larsen deleting themselves to great fanfare, quitting is seen as a reasonable choice, even a source of pride.

As we stand on the bridge to the 2 1 st century, it's clear that as our culture devalues and co-opts the individual, the artist is neutered and the independent spirit" is vanquished. So the great cartoonists may be a dying breed, either by forces beyond their control or by their own hands. Yet the way we treat our artists, our exposed nerve endings, reveals something essential about ourselves and our nation. A great democracy needs great cartoonists because theirs is a special kind of vision. "No eyes in your head we marvel with King Lear at blind Gloucester, "yet you see how this world goes." "I see it feelingly, replies Gloucester.

7. 2. Still, the '80s saw a few editorial talents emerge: Jim Borgman, with his whimsical artwork and wistful, almost shy commentary; Bill Schorr, a Peters disciple with a Disney style and a darker edge; and Tom Toles, who editors liked for his dry wit. non-sequitur crosshatching p.nd instruction-manual barbs garnished with enough verbiage to neuter their liberal slant rendering them safer and somehow more civilized, like an editorial. Some of the most arresting satire of the era sprang from the comic pages with Berke Breathed's Bloom County.

When Breathed won the Pulitzer Prize, it caused a firestorm of bitter protest from passed-over editorial cartoonists, just as it had when Breathed's comic stripper role-model, Garry Trudeau, won a decade earlier. With feminist inroads giving the green light to female aggressions editorial cartooning like stand-up comedy opened up to women in the '80s. Young women cartoonists M.G. Lord at Newsday and Signe Wilkinson at the Philadelphia Daily News began to make their mark, although Etta Hulme of the Fort Worth (Texas) Star Telegram had been plugging away unheralded for years. Lord, who has since abandoned cartooning and segued into a writing career, broke the glass ceiling of syndication along with Signe Wilkinson, who became the first woman cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize for her work.

Yet the most distinctive female voices of social commentary in this period were heard not from newspaper editorial pages but from magazines. Lynda Barry and Roz Chast were the first women cartoonists to shed any visible male support or influence over their comic stylings. Editorial cartooning in the '90s, the Clinton era, has been special so far in that nothing special has emerged. If Clinton is squishy and amorphous, so are the cartoons that mirror him. In reaction, some ink-stained ideologues are being heard from again, like Steve Benson of the Arizona Republic and Michael Ramirez of the Memphis, Commercial-Appeal both MacNelly clones and both blunt instruments of Republican National Committee propaganda.

As in negative political campaign ads, a certain venality has crept into cartooning, and a ciubfooted-ness. There's no subtlety, no discrimination, no discernment, no selection of worthy targets. All are treated as if of equal weight, and everyone is greeted with a sneer. Cartoonists with a lighter touch like Steve Kelley, Chip Bok, Mike Luckovich, Rob Rogers and Walt Handelsman are frequently reprinted, but it's too early to tell who, if any. will be for the ages.

It's easy to be a shooting star it's harder to have a career. Editorial cartoonists are an endangered species. Increasingly, we're seen as a costly indulgence. The Greensboro (N.C.) Daily News, a paper with an unusually rich cartooning tradition Bill Sanders, Hugh Haynie and Bob Zschiesche got started there no longer has its own cartoonist. The St.

Petersburg (Fla.) Times fired its cartoonist two years ago and has not rehired. The Los Angeles Times has not replaced Paul Conrad since his retirement three years ago. Irreverence unappreciated Granted, uncertain economic times at newspapers do not embolden editors and publishers. And in a newspaper culture increasingly obsessed with the bottom line, where a computer-generated pie chart passes for an exciting graphic, it's no accident that I have had more cartoons killed over the last couple of years than in the previous 25. Today, editors think like publishers, cartoonists think like editors, and they all think like marketing directors.

They find the messy emotions that good cartoons raise threatening, untidy, unseemly and worse, unquantifiables They want mush. And cartoonists whose ambition outweighs existential soliloquies, used a comic strip format for his editorial commentary. He put words into the mouths of White House officials while his characters became baby-boomer archetypes and proxies for the Woodstock generation. The comics had always played host to right-wing Cold War sentiments from Steve Canyon and Little Orphan Annie; liberal opinion had been a staple of Walt Kelly's Pogo and Al Capp's Li'l Abner for years, but there was something about Trudeau's pungent liberal bias that cut against the generational grain and got him banished from the comics and onto some newspaper editorial pages, and won for him the first Pulitzer Prize awarded a comic strip. The spirit of anarchy and insurrection loose in the land during the '70s, which found comic expression in National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, also infected the editorial pages of American newspapers.

Jeff MacNelly displayed a droll, rollicking humor, an independent streak and an uncannily graceful and detailed drawing style. He won three Pulitzers, landed on the cover of Newsweek and was syndicated to countless newspapers. His success also inspired multiple MacNelly clones, mostly faded carbons with none of his organic creativity. Mike Peters, another singular comic talent, also stood out by bringing his scary comic genius to political issues. Though criticized by witless rivals for bringing such outright fun to the serious business of editorial commentary, his wicked cartoons skewered targets in ways his by-the-book critics could never touch.

Unfortunately, the success of MacNelly and Peters legitimized a purely go-for-the-yuks cartooning style now in vogue among lesser lights, which in less deft hands becomes as brainless arid boring as so much of stand-up comedy. Yuppie greed As the '70s moved through the Carter Malaise and gave way to the Reagan Revolution editorial cartooning seemed to mellow, reflecting the self-satisfaction of the times. The Reagan-Bush years sanctioned the rise of yuppie greed, which found its spiritual equiva lent in televangelists with their gold toilet fixtures and holy wars. The acquisitiveness of the '80s was reflected in journalism as well. Instead of looking inward for inspiration, cartoonists looked more to external measures awards, syndicate numbers and reprints, their own gold toilet fixtures for validation and reassurance.

Newsrooms brimmed with resume hounds instead of new-shounds. Ambition replaced talent at drawing, boards. Calculation replaced passion. Image was all. Cartoonists learned to do an impression of cartooning; they memorized the formulas and the graphic vocabulary but said nothing.

LEW CONSCIENCE BE YOUR Spirit of anarchy By the time my generation Jeff MacNelly, Mike Peters, Garry Trudeau, Paul Szep, Tony Auth broke onto the scene, the rules had changed, ushering in a renaissance in graphic satire. We were the first generation raised on television. Mad magazine made us question authority and the world of grown-ups. And that was something we could imagine doing for a living. We also were blessed with politicians who looked like their policies LBJ, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Henry Kissinger all living gargoyles who personified what was wrong in civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate.

Such leadership ratified our killer instinct. Journalism itself had become a cauldron of insurrection. I.F. Stone, Woodward ancT Bernstein, and Bob Greene at Newsday were retooling the investigative tradition. At magazines like Harold Hayes' Esquire and Willie Morris's Harper's and Gonzo Guerilla Hunter S.

Thompson's Rolling Stone, the New Journalism made tidal waves; their backwash showed up in cartoons. Meanwhile, Garry Trudeau was making the comic pages safe for democracy with Doonesbury. Trudeau, inspired by Feiffer's.