The thing I love about cartoons like this in the British press, is the incredible detail involved -- a whole story contained in a single image. That, and the relative absence of labels.
Half the fun's just trying to figure who's who and what's what -- As with the purple speedo there on Farage; well I think it's Farage -- The commentators online seem to think it's Putin for some reason.
Editorial cartoons in other countries aren't like this. For an example, I sought out cagle.com, always a source of some of the worst cartooning in America. And on the third page, I found a perfect example of what I was looking for:
Not to pick on this guy, and he can draw when he wants to, judging by the other work on his site, but this just says everything about the state of editorial-cartoons in America: Everything has to be labelled, can't say anything controversial, when in doubt, go for the cliches.
Something bad happened in South Carolina. Hate struck the treestate like an act of G-d. Yeah, that, or a racist nut-job white guy went out and intentionally shot up a historically black church, killing a bunch of innocent black people who were there to worship:
But we don't want to be talking about race, just as we don't want to talk about the proliferation of guns in America. Too controversial ! At best, maybe we could mention mental illness. But easier still to just take a readily identifiable symbol for a state (and the state is the real victim of course, huh Nikki Haley ?), put a label on it anyway, then draw a lightning-bolt labelled 'hate'.
Speaking of that symbol, I think there may be something missing...
Oh yeah ! Huh, wonder why he left out the crescent-moon ? Can't be that there wasn't room. Can't be too difficult to draw. Nah, it's just a mystery.
Now I know the media-markets are different, I know the Guardian doesn't make a profit, and I know what a shitty time it is for cartoonists in general these days. But, even when the cash was flowing more freely, even when the print-media was still flourishing, shit like this proliferated.
Newspaper-editors and readers alike see editorial cartoons as disposable, because, by and large, they are. And yet as demonstrated by the likes of Martin Rowson, they don't have to be. They can be works of bloody art.
