At cagle.com, in reaction to the nearly-identical Rosa Parks cartoons, they’ve got a blog post from cartoonist Mike Lester on the issue. It raises a point that, in my disgust, I hadn’t even considered:

I’m curious and -not that they need defending, but I would like to believe that a great many in our profession are dictated their cartoons and the heft of the message by some cleverless editor who assumes to feed readers what they think readers need to be fed. Since when do we give people what they expect? It’s my belief that no job pays enough to illustrate opinions that are not ones own but the true pity is that we’ll never know what kind of work would be produced without creative constraints.

I like this. He gives these cartoonists an out, but if they choose not to take it, he hits them with a well-deserved insult that stings more when applied to a cartoonist who should know better. While it is tempting to believe that there’s no way so many cartoonists could think alike in such a dull way, it’s not exactly easy to believe that the same number of editors share the same brain (cue some quip about 10 editors having one whole brain between them).

And let’s give these guys the benefit of the doubt and operate under the assumption that these editors forced this identical idea upon their staff cartoonists. If so many editors have the same concept of dull cartoons for a somber moment, who is to blame other than the years of cartoonists who’ve worked so hard (or not) to build this precedent?

Give an editorial cartoonist a forum, and he’ll talk about how it’s a shrinking field, how cartoonists are losing their relevance, how papers are opting for syndication rather than the unique voice of their staff cartoonist, blah blah blah. Look at what the brilliant minds of our nation’s finest have to say upon the death of Rosa Parks.

(the following cartoons are from today’s cartoons at cagle.com)

Mike Keefe at The Denver Post:

Robert Ariail of The State in South Carolina:

Ed Stein of the Rocky Mountain News:

Jeff Koterba of the Omaha World Herald:
Rosa Parks getting on a bus in Heaven

Mark Streeter of the Savannah Morning News:

Jeff Stahler of the Columbus Dispatch:

How relevant, valuable or unique are you when all you can do is come up with the exact same idea as a half dozen of your peers? And these are just the cartoonists on Cagle’s syndicate.

Here’s a real statement. At 10:35pm, on October 24th, 2005, at the very moment I heard that Rosa Parks had passed away, I made the following comment:

I predict no less than 27 cartoons tomorrow with God driving a bus in heaven and saying “Why don’t you come sit up here with me.”