Pulitzer Prize winning illustrator/cartoonist Ann Telnaes. (Photo: Youtube/Emory University)
Jan 8, 2025 07:42 IST First published on: Jan 8, 2025 at 07:02 IST
To the FAQ at reader interactions on where the women cartoonists are, one answer has, for a while, been Ann Telnaes. Editorial cartoonist with The Washington Post since 2008, Ann has recently quit the paper, once home to the legendary Herblock. Herblock’s legend was made because the Post celebrated its cartoonist as a splendid soloist. He was left alone to do his work and it helped. For 55 years till he died in harness in 2001, he steered the paper through the McCarthy era, Vietnam War and the Watergate years. Out of the 76 Pulitzers the paper won, three were his. He had already won his first before he joined. His second and third were for editorial cartooning at the Post; the fourth he shared with colleagues for public service on Watergate.
Post-Herblock, cartooning everywhere changed into a quicker response to faster news and the best of editorial-page editors seek focused messaging and clarity on visuals. Such revisions are all very well, says Ann but not killing a cartoon for who it targets. Her last cartoon submission featured tech and media billionaires clutching dollar sacks and kneeling before a truncated Trump figure instantly recognisable for its extra-long cartoonish neck tie. Besides Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the favour seekers include the publisher of Los Angeles Times and owners of the Walt Disney company and, hold your breath, The Washington Post, the paper for which the cartoon was made.
Shouldn’t the cartoonist at least spare the paper’s owner? Ann sees no reason to and that is in the best traditions of editorial cartooning. World War II Britain’s David Low had famously lampooned his publisher, Lord Beaverbrook. Like all professionals, cartoonists are entitled to cite favourable precedents and best practices. But these aren’t the best of times for the fault-finding art.
Ann isn’t the only one to lose work recently. Last year, The Age, the Australian daily that prides in its cartoonists, sacked its biggest star, Michael Leunig. Declared an Australian living treasure, this political, personal and poetic satirist was eased out for no specific reason. The mild-mannered Leunig was taken aback but took it in his stride. He knew he had a committed readership waiting. Before he could restart, a brief illness took his life.
Steve Bell, another veteran who had to quit The Guardian in 2023, hasn’t chosen to resume. Here’s hoping Ann stays on in the web. The internet is the option for independent cartoonists and a platform for cartoon lovers to access their favourites from the world over. The web is also a merciless leveller. The artwork from creators exiled by brazen autocracies rubs shoulders with the rejected art from the declared democracies of Europe and US.
Why are constitutional democracies getting rid of their finest cartoonists? You can stop a cartoon but you don’t let a cartoonist go for a single unacceptable cartoon. In the case of Ann, there is an elephant in the newsroom and that is Donald Trump. Ann had actively cartooned through his first term and famously declared at the end of the first presidential year that she couldn’t do a single non-Trump cartoon the whole year. That makes her a habitual offender and a bigger risk in Trump 2.0.
When even big bold newspapers get risk-averse, what happens to the cartoon? Not easy to predict but there are signs one can read and they don’t all point to certain doom. Not that the cartoon can take on the might of media houses or the state. Cartoon collectives can, at best, expose and embarrass but not do much more. If the art practice survives, it will be thanks to its inherent portability.
Historian Mushirul Hasan has traced how London’s premier cartoon magazine Punch was cloned across the Indian Subcontinent. An alien art minted in Europe crossed over with surprising ease to Indian languages as diverse as Urdu and Parsi. Awadh Punch was published from Lucknow from 1877 and turned out to be more than a mere clone. It developed more punch than its British parent, didn’t spare the colonial government and strongly asserted Hindu-Muslim unity. Soon, there were over 70 similar periodicals, notably the Parsee Punch and Hindi Punch. It was incredible but a fragile satirical form made it possible to work across cultures and convey its message.
Equally incredibly, there is a huge revival of the art practice in, of all places, China. China’s science fiction master Cixin Liu’s work is being rendered into graphic novels by 26 writers and artists from 14 countries. One of these creators, Zhang Xiaoyu, is already an overseas hit. The New Yorker calls him China’s answer to Arthur C Clarke. This is certainly not hard political cartooning but a comic adaptation of literary fiction. But trust the comic artist to stray. The best of them are restless.
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Art Spiegelman, author of the groundbreaking Holocaust tale Maus, recently announced that he was co-authoring with Joe Sacco, the veteran of graphic reportage on Palestine and Bosnia. After weeks of phone conversations on Gaza, the stalwarts have zeroed in on comix content, just enough to fill three pages — the long form a newspaper’s weekend supplement can readily accommodate.
In November 2016, The New York Times commissioned reporter Jake Halpern and artist Michael Sloan, both freelancers, to produce a graphic report on a Syrian refugee family seeking US asylum. Even as the family began resettling, America elected a new President, Trump. The anxious process of coping with a menacing regime was gently chronicled into a sequential comic in 2017. Welcome to the New World won next year’s Pulitzer for editorial cartoon.
When newspapers drop cartoons, the art doesn’t exactly vanish into a blackhole. It stays up there in the clouds. On a good internet day, a school kid from Manipur will find her Ann Telnaes.
ep.unny@expressindia.com
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