This past April, after the Virginia Tech shootings, some friends and I were discussing the way the media handled the situation. One of those discussions turned to the editorial cartoonists’ response, which I have written about here before. Just from Daryl Cagle’s cartoon syndicate website, one could find several cartoons changing the “VT” logo into a pistol; several more depicting Uncle Sam mourning; two very similar cartoons with a parent hugging a child who thought his parent would be happy he got in to college; and a few with the Virginia Tech mascot mourning in Uncle Sam’s place.

Friends outside of cartooning were shocked when I assembled a handful of cartoons and exposed the similarities side by side. One told me that it was obvious to him that these cartoonists were copying each other, but I argued that couldn’t have been the case when so many of these came out on the same day.

So I opened my copy of the Omaha World-Herald this morning to see Jeff Koterba’s cartoon on Barry Bonds. It involved Bonds swinging and missing at a pitched asterisk instead of a baseball. I immediately recalled Daryl Cagle’s cartoon of two weeks ago, which depicted Bonds connecting with an asterisk instead of a baseball.

Now in my never-ending quest to be as critical as possible and burn every cartooning bridge before it’s assembled, I was tempted to go on one of my customary rants about cartoonist groupthink killing off the industry, blah blah blah, but I thought I’d try something different and turn to the humans behind the cartoons to get their side of the story.
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