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Ted Rall and Steve Brodner

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from: Ted Rall

The Cartoon Mayor

Posted Thursday, Oct. 14, 1999, at 12:29 PM ET

Dear Steve:

I couldn't agree with you more about Mayor Giuliani and his hollow showboating regarding the Brooklyn Museum controversy. While much of what passes for 20th-century modern art is absolutely horseshit--painting an entire canvas red is mere laziness, and claiming that it has meaning doesn't make it so--Giuliani seems determined to base his whole political career on crushing the messy process that is popular culture and scapegoating people too weak to defend themselves.

As New Yorkers will recall, he launched his career by going after homeless guys who spritz your windshield at intersections and demand a buck to finish the job. OK, so they were annoying, but there are crack houses that have enjoyed continuous operation during the years that the mayor has been after the squeegee men. Then he put all the accouterments of street life out of business--newsstands, hotdog stands, street vendors--all of which gave New York a sidewalk-level buzz that separated it from your average suburban mall. Last year he attacked taxi drivers with fines for speeding--frankly, any cabby who can speed in these choked streets gets an extra tip from yours truly--and an array of nuisance regulations designed to make their lives impossible. I drove a cab for years and thought it was too hard for $150 a shift; these days you're lucky if you make $60 for 12 hours of backbreaking through the streets of Manhattan. What kind of bully picks on guys who earn five bucks an hour?

More frightening, he's turned Times Square and its menagerie of wonderful filth and decadence into Disney World North. The porn shops are all but gone, nightclubs find it nearly impossible to function after getting busted all the time, and now he's stopping the rent check to the biggest cultural institution in Brooklyn. What always made New York great was its anarchic brew of mayhem and energy; Giuliani is determined to replace both with sterility and bourgeois consumerism.

OK, back to comic strips. After yesterday's missive, a number of people e-mailed me to remind me of Scott Adams' Dilbert--and of course, it's a great strip. It speaks to the cubical culture in which many Americans, including me until a few years ago, spend two-thirds of their waking hours, and does so with consistently funny gag lines. Still, there's quite a bit of repetition there, too, which I think is inevitable. How can anyone draw 365 cartoons a year for 10 years or more and have each idea be original? I think that's why recent giants like Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and Larson (The Far Side) quit after roughly a decade each--you get pretty tapped out at 3,000-plus ideas, and they had the class to recognize that. Moreover, the daily papers are constantly shrinking the space available for comic strips, which means that it's impossible to stretch out artistically.

Ah, I'd forgotten all about editorial cartoonist Ranan Lurie, for whom I once toiled as a graphics assistant (wage: $5 an hour, no benefits, in 1987) for two months, until you retrieved my repressed memories. Fortunately, I don't read papers where he appears, but his work is trite, appallingly apolitical, and graphically bereft of any character whatsoever. Even worse, the guy never paid me for thinking up ideas, crosshatching, etc.--yo, Ranan, with interest that comes to half the value of your Trump Tower apartment now. I need the cash for drawing lessons, man.

But the greatest conflict in cartooning is about which is more important: Ideas or drawing. It helps when a creator enjoys both a muse and a good hand (as you do, Steve), but the vast majority of cartoonists are lucky to have one or the other. Editors, it seems, lean more to the graphics side, but I think people like Larson and James Thurber prove that you can draw great cartoons with lousy art. I have yet to find a great cartoonist with bad or nonexistent ideas. In my case, I know that the art has always been my weak point, which is why I developed a highly stylized drawing style (it also helps to set it apart from the donkey-and-elephant crowd of editorial cartoonists) and why I still take drawing lessons and study everything from old woodcuts to Cuban comics. I can't understand gifted artists who intentionally draw less well than they're able to; it's a form of self-mutilation. As for the ideas, either you have them or you don't, and there isn't much you can do about it either way.

Speaking of Peter Max, I hear he's made sort of a comeback on the '70s nostalgia bandwagon--he even had some show a few years back in Des Moines, of all places.

Very truly yours,
Ted

the breakfast table
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from: Ted Rall

The Cartoon Mayor

Posted Thursday, Oct. 14, 1999, at 12:29 PM ET
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Ted Rall is a New York-based political and social-commentary cartoonist and opinion columnist for Universal Press Syndicate and the author of Revenge of the Latchkey Kids (click hereto buy it). Steve Brodner has been a satiric illustrator for 27 years and has contributed caricatures of political and pop figures to a wide variety of publications.
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Some reactions from readers:

Steve asks if the whole hoo-ha over at the Brooklyn museum is about captions... And the answer is, of course it is.

I have yet to see anyone substantially refute Tom Wolfe's theory, back in The Painted Word, that today's art has devolved into being illustrations for the catalog. Take away the catalog, and there's no there there. One or the other of the fellows cited Serrano's Piss Christ--it's the perfect example. I doubt many people have seen it in person--it's a huge 6-foot-by-4-foot (or so) chibachrome--and more than anything else comes across as a modern chiaroscuro photo-mural. It's reverent. Right up until you read the title, and figure out just how Serrano got those gorgeous tawny reds and burnt umbers. But it's only the title--or the catalog--that fills you in.

The whole Virgin Mary thing is much the same--I doubt there's any way to tell just how the image was made, elephant dung or not, except through the catalog. To be sure, I haven't actually seen it (this summer I've been seeing the Van Gogh, Sargent, Ingres, and Diego Rivera exhibitions as I travel), but that's my bet... Though I'll cheerfully defer to a real live witness.

(To reply, click here.)


Dear Ted,

I agree wholeheartedly with you in regards to the death of the comic strip, and glad to see someone else who views the Peanuts as melancholy. As a former illustrator (I know--do not call me bitter just yet) I think that the entire world of illustration is a rotting cadaver. Working now as a web designer I can't help but feel sympathy for my friends who valiantly try to establish careers in this former occupation. Many believe photography has killed the illustrator, and to some extent I agree, but I think the true blame falls upon the state of art education within our country.

Art schools have become a haven for the untalented and unimaginative, upper-middle-class would-be rebels more concerned with looking the part than being. Instructors, often failed artists themselves, so afraid of offending these cash cows offer no realistic criticism or advice. Since "all art is good art," students who would have been laughed out of my 2nd grade arts and crafts class are encouraged to pursue their "style." After graduating art school, it took me 2 years to enjoy drawing again....and I am not alone. Keep up the good work my brother!

(To reply, click here.)


People always feel that to say things like, "theater is dead," or, now, "the comic strip is dead" raises them to the level of philosopher. So, when someone has some silly stuff to say to seemingly back up such an impossible phrase, they get excited and say it all over the place and as loud as they can.

The comic strip isn't dead. New and great cartoonist will come in great forms no one can predict and, therefore, it's amazingly arrogant to predict the death of an art form. The Internet provides all sorts of new room for artists (this includes cartoonists) to work and spread around their wares.

(To reply, click here.)


Hey Ted Rall,

Yeah, your comic strips are great, but you made a big mistake in your blanket dismissal of all the comics in the comics page (save Peanuts). Your glaring omission: Mutts by Patrick McDonnell. This guy can DRAW! His comics are funny, sweet, and compassionate without being treacly--no mean feat. What's more, he takes a strong and unapologetic stand on animal rights, which takes guts in a nation of necrophages.

McDonnell's a genius. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go pray with Johnny Hart.

 (To reply, click here.)


What do you guys think of Tom Toles? His cartoons single-handedly got me through the Reagan/Bush years.

 (To reply, click here.)


I think it's a bit too early to say the comic strip is dead. I think Robotman, Non Sequetor, and Mutts are some of the great comics in the papers, but for the rest I don't bother. It seems true that, in newspapers at least, comics are resorting to simple puns.

However, on the Internet the art of the comic strip is still alive. Some of the best, in my opinion anyway, are Ozy and Millie and Freefall, which are genuinely funny and entertaining. While the newspaper comics may be reverting to single unfunny puns, the Internet may be a place where the art of the comic strip is still living.

(To reply, click here.)



--Michael Brus (10/14)

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