Editorial cartoons: My humble bumbling beginning

Headwaters: As far as forensic historians can tell, this is my first editorial cartoon.
A rather anemic start (Boo, drunk driving! is my bold message), especially since my mission was to
help raise the profession's standards. But I got better. Then worse again. Then insipid and derivative.
Then occasionally … OK. I'll show it all in good time, if you've the stomach for it.

One lonely Saturday in Hanford more than a quarter-century ago, I had my James Fenimore Cooper moment.

Cooper, you may remember from 10th grade literature class, was arguably America's first great novelist. "The Last of the Mohicans" and "The Leatherstocking Tales," resulted, so the story is told, from Cooper having read a bad novel and deciding he could do better.

I had a similar feeling that Saturday in Hanford, though writ small. It was my turn among reporters to work the Saturday shift at The Hanford Sentinel, and as with most Saturdays, Kings County residents were kind enough not to make news over the weekend. After visiting the jail to look over the police blotter, with sad families waiting around me in the lobby to visit their inmate relatives, and checking the hospitals for any updates, Saturday reporters had little to do but rewrite news releases and get ahead on assignments. Of course, I goofed off instead, mostly by reading all the newspapers The Sentinel subscribed to, particularly the comics and editorial cartoons.

I remember being fed up with one editorial cartoon in particular — one bad cartoon too many — in an out-of-town paper. I don't remember the content, but it was what I call a "knock-knock" editorial cartoon, that makes innocuous fun, nothing more, out of a current event, eliciting a giggle, if that. Its intent is to make readers smile without hurting their feelings, and most important to help the syndicate that sells the cartoon remain in the good graces of the newspaper that subscribes.

By their nature, syndicates water down the power of editorial cartoons, because they sell to as many news outlets as they can, liberal, conservative, libertarian, what have you. Some syndicates represent a stable of cartoonists from many points on the political spectrum, but the opinions of even those tend to carve a straight, safe line between all those political viewpoints, hence the "knock-knock" silly editorial cartoons, which you still see today in most newspapers.

Which is just plain wrong. Good editorial cartoons should kick ass and take names, with a punch that even the best editorial can't match for its instantaneous message.

Boss Tweed, the mastermind of New York's Tammany Hall political machine more than a century ago, fumed at cartoonist Thomas Nast's depictions of his shenanigans.

"I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles," he said. "My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures."

Good editorial cartoons should, as Finley Peter Dunne said, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They should spark change and change minds. Few do so today, and on that short list Pat Oliphant is the undisputed king. Ted Rall jabs mightily and means it. Tom Toles is consistently potent. Jeff Danziger does damage. After that, the cartoonist landscape is so-so. And cartoonists are becoming fewer, sadly.

I decided I could do better.

So for the next seven years or so, starting on that Saturday, I embarked on an odyssey of becoming an editorial cartoonist and knocking at least one other cartoonist down a peg. In the process I churned out more than my share of the kind of bad cartoons I hated so much, but gradually sharpened and poisoned my brush to the the point that every once in rare moment I came close to making an impact.

I did not achieve the bottom line, to become a staff  cartoonist somewhere, but I had a heady time trying. From time to time, I'll share my cartoons here, good and bad and botched, whether it be the anniversary of an event, the reminder of what I or the world was doing at a certain time, or just because I feel like it. Fair warning.