Pam Platt of the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal wrote a column this weekend about editorial cartoonists’ approaches to drawing minority candidates.
If you’re an editorial cartoonist, are there any special guidelines or sensitivities when it comes to drawing Clinton and Obama? How do you use exaggeration and caricature with these candidates, who are shattering gender and race ceilings, without falling in to sexist or racist traps?
Platt noted that the Courier-Journal pulled a Pat Oliphant cartoon the editors deemed “racially insensitive to Obama.” Platt felt the same cartoon depicted Clinton as “mannish-looking and big-bottomed.”
So Platt contacted ten nationally-syndicated cartoonists, with specific attention toward gathering a diverse bunch – or as diverse a bunch of editorial cartoonists as possible, and asked them a series of questions. Here are a few of the responses:
Lisa Benson, a California-based syndicated cartoonist: “For me, it’s not the race or gender as much as the candidate’s history and policies (baggage) that influence how I will draw that person. And, yes, Hillary comes with a good amount of baggage, mostly around the thighs.”
Nick Anderson: “A little girl once asked me why I made George Bush look like a monkey. I said, ‘I didn’t make him look like a monkey, God made him look like a monkey.’ I can say that, with tongue in cheek, and I can draw him that way, because we don’t have a pernicious, racist history of depicting rich, powerful white guys as monkeys. If we did, well, I’d have to reconsider.”
Read the rest here in column form, and here in full Q&A form with more info about each cartoonist.
Elsewhere in Kentucky, State Rep. Jim Gooch is trying to get revenge on some cartoonists and editorial writers.
According to Editor & Publisher, Gooch is pushing legislation that would categorize editorial writers and cartoonists as lobbyists, which would prohibit them from entering the House and Senate while lawmakers are in session. It’s all apparently retaliation for some cartoons mocking him last year.