Drawn and Quartered
Political cartoonists prove that sometimes the pen really is mightier
BY Lynn Cunningham
Circa 1330 B.C.: What's been called the first political caricature is inscribed in stone: a skinny-necked, big-eared, large- mouthed Pharaoh Akhnaton. Found in the mid-1930s, the Egyptian artifact was deeply buried, which a writer at the time speculated was due to the "royal wrath" that would ensue if it were discovered. This seems improbable given that official images of Akhnaton were no more flattering, portraying the ruler as pot bellied, thick-thighed and generally odd looking.
1754: Benjamin Franklin stops messing around with kites long enough to create what's been credited as the first North American political cartoon. In it, a rattlesnake is shown chopped into pieces representing the colonies. Below is the ominous message "Join, or die." Franklin's aim is for a united front in the Seven Years' War, but the motto is revived several decades later in the prelude to the Revolutionary War.
1873: Torontonian John Wilson Bengough founds the satirical weekly, Grip (named after Barnaby Rudge's pet raven), illustrated with his own cartoons. A scourge of Tories, in particular John A. MacDonald, Bengough also champions causes from women's suffrage to anti-imperialism. Considered today to be one of Canada's cartooning greats, Bengough, appropriately enough, dies at his drawing board in 1923.
1978: Victoria Times cartoonist Bob Bierman depicts then B.C. human resources minister Bill Vander Zalm as an overgrown boy delightedly picking the wings off flies after Vander Zalm suggests young people should be cut off welfare. Vander Zalm sues and initially wins at the B.C. supreme court level. Cartoonists and newspaper editors are deeply relieved when the decision is overturned by the courts of appeal.
2007: Editorial cartoons haven't caught the imagination of many academics, judging from the dearth of research on the subject. Of the 1.6 million dissertations and theses contained in a major database, fewer than 100 address the subject. Comic books receive almost twice as much attention. Those that do exist tend to be more impenetrable than provocative: "This exploratory study utilizes a Q methodological experiment to differentiate between partisan and nonpartisan schematic political sophisticates by exposing them to political cartoons about partisan politics."
2008: In mid-July Barry Blitt's New Yorker cover featuring Michelle and Barack Obama that encapsulates all the right-wing smears of the couple is widely denouncedÑgenerally by liberals. The common objection is that while they're sophisto enough to get the joke, what about rubes in the regions? As The Boston Globe notes, "It's a law of cartooning that the more radioactive the subject, the more literal the reader reaction. Out of their comfort zone, people suddenly lose their irony receptors."
