What would Pat do?

After a while, I just stopped clicking …

Published after months' long absence, in response to the Paris killings …
from GoComics® Universal Uclick.com

Editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant, my favorite, was no longer drawing, it seemed. His weekly output had dried up at his syndicate's Website.

His last 'toon had been mid-August, a variation on the discord between Congress and President Obama, whom Oliphant often portrays as aloof, a human non sequitir.

Then, nothing. Click — nothing. Click — nothing, click — nothing.

Oliphant is 79. I figured he could be sick or have retired by design or default. I sincerely hoped not. More likely, as a painter and sculptor now ensconced in Santa Fe, N.M. and far from his old Washington, D.C., hunting grounds, he was taking a lengthy break to pursue his personal art.

After 50 years of cartooning in the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize (only one?!), Oliphant doesn't have to prove anything. I'm not the only one who regards him as the best in the business, eloquently savage, a master in black and white — ink and opinion — and the next true challenger may never come.

Then, in the after-madness of the killings at Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere in Paris last week, I wondered if the events had provoked Oliphant.

Click.

Jean Jullien's fast-trigger response

Up came the cartoon above. Dark and morose, unfunny, grim. Oliphant is great at dark and morose, at not needing to joke.

Is it the most striking response to the violence, the most memorable? No. My pick is Jean Jullien's (right):

The London-based French designer almost immediately produced the quintessential cartoon response, powerful and still somehow playful in its immediacy.

Both cartoonists commented viscerally to the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the controversial satirical weekly which seemed intent on offending everyone. The killers took deadly offense to cartoons lampooning Mohammad, Islam's prophet.

Jullien drew, by intent or instinct, from the 1967 photo of a Vietnam War protester placing flowers in the barrels of National Guard soldiers' rifles near the Pentagon.

Oliphant simply drew from his gut, speaking out as a cartoonist, leveraging his inking mastery. By dry-brushing the edges of the killers' black uniforms, Oliphant invoked an evil, ethereal tone — is this just a nightmare? — and signaled his jagged anger.

Oliphant followed up a couple of days later with this riff of Eugène Delacroix' 1830 masterwork, "Liberty Leading the People:"

From Universal Uclick.com

Eh.

More pencils.

As much as I love Oliphant, I think the world was by then already done with pencils as a metaphor for the unsinkability of free expression.

This vacuum of time after the killings has filled with eloquent written arguments pointing out not only (1) was this not really about an attack on free expression, but (2) this freedom we espouse is ephemeral at best and illusion at worst.

One had only to witness the world leaders who linked arms in Paris in (distant and symbolic)  solidarity with protesters elsewhere in that city, to know the hypocrisy of freedom.

Critics literally went down the line of leaders, pointing out who — whether directly or through their sovereign states — had quashed freedom of expression by jailing, torturing or killing journalists and critics. Who really knows why the United States did not send a high-level emissary, if not the president himself, but he or she would have fit right in that line.

At the same time Saudi Arabia was condemning the shootings as a "cowardly terrorist act" through its official news agency, it was beginning its weekly beating of a blogger jailed for criticizing Saudi rulers and the kingdom's strict application of Islam.

Raif Badawi was not given his second set of 50 cane lashings last week — a doctor decided he was not healthy enough from the first beating to bear up to the second, at least not yet. Badawi is supposed to receive 50 lashings each of the next 19 weeks.

I'm giving Oliphant a pass on the second 'toon, and waiting anxiously for what he, or any prominent cartoonist with a wide reach, may come up with this week.

No more pencils: Hammers.

Cartoonists need to hammer away at hypocrisy, to match the eloquent words with pointed pictures. One cartoon won't do. This hypocrisy over freedom is practically codified in our government and corporate structures — and absolved by virtue of world leaders marching in Paris. Cartoonists need to point out hypocrisy and lampoon away with both ink barrels.

They need to hammer away at those policies that create egregious plenty amid horrid want, and lead not only to the killings in Paris, but the slaughter of hundreds of Nigerians by the radical and violent Boko Haram (meaning: "Western education is forbidden"). The attention paid to Paris nearly obscured the holocaust in Nigeria.

Good cartoons can teach us, can lead us to the news that inspired the art. We need that.

We also need cartoonist to hammer away against the coming storm: The vacuum of time after Paris has exposed an undercurrent of tension over, if not hatred of, Muslims. I can't tell you how many times I've heard or read of people who equate the Charlie Hebdo or Boko Haram massacres with all Muslims, and I'm at a loss why reasoned people can't draw a distinction between a religion of 1.6 billion adherents, and a relatively small group who interpret their religion as violent tyranny.

Unless they aren't reasoned people, and their potential multitude scares me.

After intense pressure last week, for example, Duke University in North Carolina declined to allow campus Muslims to use its chapel tower to broadcast weekly calls to prayer. The university's ministerial staff had offered use of the tower as a friendly — I'll even say Christian — gesture. Duke is a private Methodist university.

But Franklin Graham, influential son of influential Christian evangelist Billy Graham, denounced the gesture, igniting a wave of complaints by Duke donors, and Duke quickly withdrew the gesture. Graham could have limited his argument to pointing out that Duke is a Christian-founded private school and within its rights to control use of the chapel. It would have been awkward to say so, but Graham went way beyond awkward and straight to hate.

He condemned Islam and its followers.

"We as Christians are being marginalized, and Islam … which is not a religion of peace," Graham told reporter Mark Becker of WSOC TV in Charlotte, North Carolina. "There's nothing peaceful about Islam at all. Just look at the Middle East and every country where Islam has the majority is in turmoil. They behead people, they rape women, they kill Christians, they burn churches."

Franklin said Muslims are taught violence in the Quran, have not denounced the killings in Paris — remarks that are remarkably easy to refute — and that American Muslims only denounced the killings because they're outnumbered.

"Violence is there and it's coming," said Graham. "And it's going to come to this country and it has nothing to do with what I say. I'm trying to warn America as to what's coming, warn Duke University. Islam is not a peaceful religion."

We are at war with Islam, he said.

Do you hear what I hear? The belltower clang of bigotry, trying to upraise one people by demonizing another? Is it not the same rhetoric that ingrained slavery into our American fabric, that laid waste to Native Americans in this country's founding and expanse, that tore Jews asunder in Nazi Germany, that imprisoned Japanese-American during World War II out of our baseless fear and sanctioned hatred?

People listen and follow this stuff, God help us.

It's past time to combat these words with pictures. Get out your hammers, cartoonists. You've got work to do. Are you free, Mr. Oliphant?

Scabrous

Voltaire never said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

He said, "What a fuss about an omelette!"

I found the second quote while looking for the first, and like it much better for expressing my disgust over the execution of cartoonists and editors and their police protectors at Charlie Hebdo Wednesday in Paris.

It sounds insensitive. It is, I hope you'll see, wildly appropriate.

Voltaire was defending, if a bit backhandedly, a contemporary's book, De l'esprit, in 1758. The French Parliament ordered Claude Adrien Helvétius' book burned, and him exiled from Paris, after the French ruling class and church hierarchy decided they were insulted. Man can improve himself, and become equal to his peers through education? Religion is largely ineffectual?? Indeed!

Voltaire didn't like Helvétius or his book, but supported its publication, the flowering of ideas, and found the fallout excessive, so much omelet fussing.

A Voltaire biographer 150 years later repackaged the philosopher's omelet remark into the quote we have stuck in Voltaire's throat ever since, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Until the sad and vicious and cowardly act Wednesday, I didn't know Charlie Hebdo from Charlie Brown, the comics character for whom the satirical weekly reportedly is named ("hebdo" being French slang for "weekly"). That's a sad admission from someone who frequently professes love for editorial cartooning and the power it possesses.

I have learned so much since.

Charlie Hebdo is an equal-opportunity offender, its official slogan translating to "dumb and nasty." U.S. cartoonists and satirists have nothing on the satire of Charlie Hebdo or the rest of the world, for that matter, where the risks of offense are high and real and immediate.

Cartoonists and journalists are threatened, injured and killed throughout the world; we pay attention to this incident, I'm afraid, for its brazenness and body count.

It's ironic that in the United States, with our relative freedom of expression (I said relative: you can name me many, many instances of censorship and restraint in my country), we have nothing that approaches Charlie Hebdo for raw and unrelenting provocation.

Why? I wonder. Being free(r), are we more tolerant, or just more complacent? Do we have no more big ideas to skewer, and instead tilt at the niggling nuances of wrongs in a democratic society? Do we censor ourselves as a people? Do we bow to power, to money?

Cartoonists and reporters and journalists in the United States face opposition to their work, of course, though vary rarely has it resulted in death — Denver radio host Alan Berg was murdered by members of a white nationalist group in 1984. Who else?

Two cartoonists — Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee and Nick Anderson of The Houston Chronicle — today described the death threats they have received over the years for their work. Typically, though, opponents' weapon of choice against published opinion is an angry call or letter, typically containing a demand that the offending commentator be fired. Sometimes those offended protest or boycott. That's how it should be: I don't like your idea, and I get to say so.

Would a journal the stature of Charlie Hebdo in the United States publish cartoons depicting Muhammad, Islam's prophet, just for the sake of doing so?

Or would we in the U.S. just shrug at a Charlie Hebdo, write our letters, make our calls, demand firing, and move on?

Taking Charlie Hebdo's cartoons together, I infer that its overarching aim is that no idea is sacrosanct, every viewpoint is open to criticism and lampoon. Its cartoonists persevere on this point, pushing it purposefully in the face of death — to the point of death.

Would we? Would I? Am I Charlie?

I agree with The Sacramento Bee editorial today:

Sometimes, more mainstream journalists and artists find themselves aligned with practitioners who walk beyond the bounds of good taste and civility. Opinion journalists are out on the end of a very long branch. The far twigs of that branch are inhabited by publications such as Charlie Hebdo, and far less secure.

Or, as Pat Oliphant commented in 1988, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine's satire of televangelist Jerry Falwell:

Oliphant's version of Voltaire, anthologized in "Nothing Basically Wrong."
Oliphant's additional commentary: "A landmark decision by the Supreme Court.
If Falwell had prevailed, this book would have ended on the previous page."

Though literally surrounded by pens and pencils and ink — though passionate about cartooning — I do not see myself willing or able to carry a point as boldly as Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists. But I honor and appreciate that they do, because they extend the boundaries of freedom and keep light on the truth, where you and I can roam, arms flung wide.

And I honor those who will pick up the pen for editor/cartoonist Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), and cartoonists Georges Wolinski, Jean Cabut (Cabu), and Bernard Verlhac (Tignous), some of France's most famous cartoonists killed in Wednesday's attack.

"The real question," said diplomatic editor Julian Borger of The Guardian, "is whether anyone is going to pick up the baton, and being as brave and being as in your face as Charlie Hebdo. That is no small challenge. It is a lethal challenge."

Someone — many someones — must pick it up and keep going, keep expressing, for all of us. And we must enable them, we must help them hold the pen. We must be Charlie.

"We have avenged Muhammad!" the gunmen reportedly shouted. "We have killed Charlie Hebdo!"

But of course they didn't. Instead and instantly, they scattered its spores around the world. Acting on their bizarre and perverted interpretation of religion — Think as I, or die! — they accomplished the opposite of their goal. Charlie Hebdo cartoons zoom now around the world; controversial parodies of Muhammad proliferate.

May the spores of free expression flourish in our good soil.

Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill.
There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

— Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Nowhere to go

I don't know, it sort of felt like this again last year …

May we make this year better.

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Oh look, it's already started. From one of many New Year's Day swims taking place around the world — including our own at Lake Natoma — I got to design the cap for one of them, in Walter Dods' community out in New Mexico:

Swimming, we swimmers have resolved, is salve. Maybe not a cure, but a medicine, stout to reset and steel you for the trials ahead. Which is why, even though Colin Hay sang in "Beautiful World:"

All around is anger automatic guns
It's death in large numbers, no respect for women or our little ones
I tried talking to Jesus but He just put me on hold
Said He'd been swamped by calls this week
And He could not shake His cold

And still this emptiness persists
Perhaps this is as good as it gets

Hay proclaimed the liberty of swimming in the sea. And it is as good as it gets.

May we make this year better.

In a similar vein

Ethics, ever vigilant watchdog, expected a long and rewarding career …

Someday, or so the plan went, I'd hang around long enough as an editorial cartoonist to have my own tropes — recurring characters and icons of my own devising to serve as whimsical shorthand for whatever evergreen ox I was goring.

Readers would see the trope traipse into the cartoon and know immediately the issue and my opinion.

I'm surprised more editorial cartoonists don't employ these devices. Now that I think on it, only one comes to mind.

Punk and Edmund Muskie

Of course, Pat Oliphant, my cartooning man crush: He is a master.

This isn't about jack-booted menaces representing anything
vaguely evil or fascist, or the Star of David to represent Israel, or a girded Mars to stand in for war. Republican elephants, Democratic donkeys —those are staple icons many cartoonists use, Oliphant included.

Jack Ohman's Gov. Brown spokesdog

Nor is it about Punk, the miniscule penguinish character who appears somewhere in almost every Oliphant cartoon, cracking wise on the downbeat. Sacramento Bee cartoonist Jack Ohman has used the zeitgeist of his new job to conscript Gov. Jerry Brown's corgi, named Sutter, into the same role.

This is about what Oliphant does better than anybody, and that I had one shining chance to emulate.

Oliphant, for example, uses Uncle Sam (as others do) in all his Flagg-ian fury when the issue suits, as he did here following the 9/11 attacks:

But when the United States stumbles and bumbles and stinks up the world, as it's apt, Oliphant's Uncle Sam becomes W.C. Fields:

Pissing off multiple constituencies in one swift motion …

I wonder how long Oliphant can keep using this analogy, as Mr. Fields slips from our collective memory.

Similarly, Oliphant drags out a brutish, swarthy, money-counting thug to represent the national debt (I'm not sure whether he's a figure in literature or popular culture; something Dickensian, my narrow mind thinks; if you know, tell me).

When the Equal Rights Amendment was big and women's liberation was all the talk, Oliphant represented the issue as a breast-plated and helmeted Brunhilde, usually pummeling her milquetoast husband.

Oliphant isn't out to make friends.

So inspired, I created an ethics watchdog to safeguard the state Legislature, and made him way too small for his collar to show how well the Legislature designed it — present, but toothless.

Ethics made its debut following Shrimpscam, the FBI sting that ensnared several state officials and sent some lawmakers to jail. I 'tooned about it last post.

The Legislature wanted to clean house, or look like it was, after key lawmakers got caught taking bribes in exchange for favorable legislation.

The keeping up of upright appearances culminated, naturally, in voter initiatives. Because when your lawmaker doesn't know right from wrong, blame voters and punish them with a mumbly-jumbly proposition that may or may not do anything and gets tied up in court to boot.

Proposition 112 in 1990, which put strict limits on lawmakers' outside and under-the-table graft — and seems to have worked until the last couple of years — tied good behavior to a boost in lawmakers' pay. Presumably if our representatives were paid more, they wouldn't have to cadge strangers for their trips to Hawaii or college tuition for their kids. Honor comes at a cost.

California lawmakers this week just got a pay raise, shortly after the latest bribery scandal blew up. It's probably coincidence.

Little Ethics could still be on the job today, gumming miscreants into submission — if he could ever climb out of his spiked collar.

Sucking on a toothache

Most editorial cartoonists in the United States forget how good they've got it.

As cartoonists elsewhere face firing, beating and even death for their vivid opinions, cartoonists here, in full-throated freedom, too often cough up hairballs.

Yet each day I follow their phlegmy siren song, made easier by Internet aggregation, hoping this day — maybe this day! — I'll find something worthwhile. Usually, though: Crash …

I know the current excuse; I just don't accept it: Editorial cartoonists are the newspaper environment's indicator species, signaling by their attrition the continuing demise of print. Keeping a job is hard enough, let alone profferring a controversial opinion in the process.

All the more reason, I say, for them to go down swinging. But just like always, too many cartoonists fancy themselves the Jay Lenos or Jimmy Fallons of family newspapers, Johnny-Carson-on-the-spot with a current-events joke.

Syndication enables this milquetoast behavior, allowing editors to treat cartoons as a visual break. They're just little candy kisses for your supposedly having read all the heavy gray erudite stolid —serious! — opinion surrounding the 'toons. Good reader! Here's a joke.

At best, newspapers use syndicated cartoons as window dressing for syndicated opinion columns. Fit tab A liberal cartoon into slot B liberal column on the same topic, and so on.

At worst, many cartoonists become the poster painters for their political affiliation, simply illustrating party talking points, without an opinion of their own.

Cartoonists should work without fear or favor, without deference to any political flag. Their credo should be "When our leaders do us wrong, waste our money, act out of hypocrisy, no matter who they are, I will shame them and bring them down."

Cartoonists should do all in their power to effect change — to correct the shamed, or compel readers to vote or criticize their leaders. With their immense power of visual immediacy, they should do this, every time.

They should also educate us, bringing to light issues we may not be aware of, and daring us to form opinions.

Their work should stand alone on the opinion pages, without tether to the newspapers. Editors should leave them alone, let them be accountable for their own opinions.

Some cartoonists do this. Most don't. Here's a sampling: 

• The Good

I've waxed enough about Pat Oliphant, my favorite, so I'll move on.

Matt Bors

Like Ted Rall, Bors comes out of the independent weekly newspaper ranks, with the look and ethos of independent comics, and has garnered wider recognition through syndication. Like Rall, Bors trends liberal but doesn't hesitate to attack people and issues from what might be considered his own camp.

He's tenacious, for example, about the U.S. use of remotely operated aircraft, or drones, and particularly President Obama's predilection for them, and what they mean for our right to privacy and protection from our government.

Sometimes The Sacramento Bee, my hometown newspaper with a liberal muckraker leaning, will run Bors' 'toons. But not often.

Jeff Danziger

He's old school, a Vietnam veteran who has never lost his anger or power to offend with a jab and a smile.

Here he exposes the hypocrisy of Senators attempting to block the confirmation of Sen. Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary.

Sens. Graham and McCain dismissed pointed investigation into the fabricated causes of the Iraq War, but have held up Hagel's hearing until they get answers about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Danziger wanted to point that out, just in case you're voting next election.

• The Bad 

Steve Breen

Breen is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and I don't know why.

His work the first time 'round, 1998, was sharper than the work he did 11 years later for his second prize. But that's not saying much.

This example shows the devolution of his work. It's a comment on a former San Diego mayor alleged to have won and lost $1 billion gambling her husband's foundation money.

So … what are we to do about it? What action? The sum is outrageous, the gambling sad, but other than that … I think he flashed on voting booth levers and jackpot levers (they're similar!) and bim-bam-boom, cartoon done, now off to work on his syndicated comic strip "Grand Avenue," where the one-note punchlines come lamely from a mile away. Where is the justice?

Michael Ramirez

Nobody approaches Ramirez for technical mastery; his drawing skills are a wonder, his use of color painterly.

But the same opinion, always from the far right, always some variation on whatever-Obama-does-is-wrong.

Case in point, this recent cartoon. Caduceus, Year of the Snake — clever juxtaposition — to bang the same drum: Obamacare BAD! No particular reason, no nuance, no call to action, just Obamacare BAD!

This cartoon, as most of Ramirez' work, brought to you by Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell.

Another two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

• The Ugly

Chuck Asay

I'm never quite sure of Asay's point. It's right-of-Tea-Party conservative, but that's not revealing. He's old school, too, though not like Danziger. More like a guy on his front porch, shaking his fist and screaming about the gummit dammit! I guess he's retired, but still syndicates. Here's a recent 'toon.

I think he's saying that the problem can't be solved by addressing the causes of crime, but by reading the Bible and doing as God says. Why this is pertinent specifically to black-on-black crime, if at all, I'm not sure.

The Proverbs verses referred to are, according to the King James Bible:

"These six things doth the Lord hate: Yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren."

I say this, it's an opinion, all right. I think. And he did make me look it up, so there's that.

Yeah, I too noticed all my "good" examples are liberal, while all my "bad" and "ugly" examples are conservative. I don't care what way cartoonists lean, except that their side can't always be good and the other bad. Hypocrisy and evil cross all lines, and the cartoonists should say so. Thump the Bible, the Koran, what have you, but be willing to badmouth the beam in your own eye, and have the guts to say something meaningful.

The day the comics died

Tag 'em and bag 'em: The comics died Wednesday, November 7, 2012, about 5:45 a.m., partway through my first cup of coffee.

Don't feel bad if you missed it. Most did. Though death came with a big bang, it was muffled under millions of newsprint pages, still folded and unread.

Chances are you really don't care. I'll be magnanimous and show you The Moment anyway:

This is the apex, the final funny thought, the last brilliant idea that need be called a newspaper comic … a perfect jewel of a 'toon by Dan Piraro, an ever rarer genius of the now-dimmed genre.

(An alternate title for this post might be, "In praise of Dan Piraro" …)

You draw a cartoon like that, your next move is to lock up your studio and shout into the evening air, "Goodnight everybody, and drive safe!" You click your heels, flip your porkpie hat into the void and make vacation plans, long vacation plans.

You have done all you can possibly do in comics; nothing is left to say.

Yes, it's that cataclysmically good. Why? Count the ways:

• It's a meta-comic. It's a comic about comics.

• It takes a trope as old as comics (the little, gradually enlarging circles, visual shorthand for thoughts) and marries it to another visual trope, of bubbles expanding in water as they rise.

I chuckle at the surface idea, then at the clever trick of breathing new life into cartoon code we don't even really see because our brains tell us immediately, "That's a thought balloon!" Then I chuckle at the impassive faces of the fish, seemingly crushed under the ennui of their conundrum (unwarranted anthropomorphism, I know). Then I wonder at the endless loop created by the fish's confusion over who or what it's talking to (Me? The other fish? Itself?), and wonder again whether the other fish might answer … and whether it would wonder too whether it was thinking or talking. And I chuckle again.

(btw — because "by the way" is way too hard to type — I learned "trope" only this year, used mostly to mean a conventional idea. I can't tell if the rest of the world learned the word this year, too, or if I'm more keenly attuned to others' use of the word because I now know its meaning; I hear it every day now. )

• Sure, it's two fish and no real background, but it's two fish well drafted as Dan Piraro knows and shows so well, with color ink laid down as if water colors.

Bad drawing isn't a deal breaker for me. Ideas rule. I think editorial cartoonist Tom Toles can draw; he just chooses not to. One less uncertain line on any of his caricatures and he'd have to draw little signs telling readers who he's trying to draw. Toles stings with his ideas instead; drawing well might get in the way. But give me good drawing. I could waste big chunks of day staring at good drawing.

(Awkward addendum I: Daily strips tend to be in color now, a last ditch effort to attract the unread. Piraro does it right, but others color the speech balloons, which muddies legibility.)

(Awkward addendum II: The Bee does not run Piraro's Sunday strip, which is a celebration of big puns and ornate hand-drawn type. We get Frazz on Sundays for some reason, which is nice, but we don't get it daily, so it's like a visit from a third cousin, twice removed.) 

Piraro wrote thusly in his blog about this panel, which he called "cartoon self consciousness:"

"Here we have a fish who isn’t sure how to read its own cartoon symbology. Is she thinking, as the bubbles normally suggest in a cartoon, or is she talking and the bubbles are a function of being underwater? I know the answer but I won’t divulge it until I’m on my deathbed. Assuming I die in bed."

Of course, Piraro did not go gentle into the good night. He's still knockin' out good 'toons, and in the last two weeks they have been extremely sharp and elevating, even for Piraro. Despite his low station in a bottom corner of the comics page, Piraro shines among the mediocre.

So many comics are safe and boring and afraid. I read them out of habit anymore, like a residence hall monitor checking the inmates in hopes anything funny or surprising happens.

Several still deliver — Luann and her family gradually mature and have real-world problems; Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman use Zits to play with the visual possibilities of comics; Sally Forth's family revels in its social ineptitude. For most others, yawn. Though my view is limited to the two daily pages The Sacramento Bee has alotted to comic strips (which is generous), they contain much of the pioneer stock of 20th Century comics. That's not necessarily good.

We still have Peanuts, even though creator Charles Schulz died 12 years ago. A pillar of the genre, a beacon for future strips, truly great, never to be forgotten. Except we never get the chance. Peanuts takes up valuable space on every comics page in the nation, I'm sure, like the dustiest berth in a crowded mausoleum.

With all respect to Mr. Schulz, Peanuts didn't have much to say in its last 10 or 15 years at least, but there it sits, still babbling. I have no idea what it's saying or where it is in the chronological order of more than 18,000 strips, because I don't look at it. I suspect most people don't read it, but it's there because people feel its absence is somehow worse.

Though I was sure Schulz said the strip would not continue after he died, it turns out what he really said is that no one else would draw it after he passed. Wishful listening on my part.

For Better or For Worse still goes on, (I'm going with the latter) even though creator Lynn Johnston effectively retired four years ago. We get treated to a trip in the time machine to see all the Pattersons in their younger states, starting over with all the foibles and jokes that charmed the first time but clunk on the second reading.

Beetle Bailey is drawn by (or credited to) I don't know how many of Mort Walker's progeny, but more people aren't making it better. Beetle Bailey is lazy, Sarge eats a lot and violently hates Beetle's laziness, Gen. Halftrack is a drunken letch; OK, we get it. Funny a long time ago. It may be difficult for any new readers to tell they're supposed to be Army soldiers and brass assigned forever to Camp Swampy. Now they're just folks in funny suits who do their best with bad, mysogynistic outdated scripts.

Mort Walker created what became the National Cartoon Museum. You'd think he above all would see the need to tie a bow on his trailblazing career, retire Beetle, and make room for someone else to get a chance to make it into the museum.  

Mark Trail repeats ad nauseam Mark's misadventures, which Mark always survives, usually with a punch to the bad guy's bewhiskered lantern jaw, giving him one panel to go home and break promises to his family about spending time with them, because he is quickly on another repeated misadventure. Over and over again.

The Bee, at least, spares readers any more soap opera comics such as Mary Worth or Rex Morgan M.D. In the rush of social media and reality TV, nothing is less relevant.
 
Hank Ketcham passed away in 2001, but little Dennis the Menace lives on and on. And on. Someone is accurately mimicking Ketcham's distinctive serpentine and economic line for the daily strip, someone else for the Sunday panels. Word is that someone was doing so even when Ketcham was alive, and was paid to write gags around the endless trope of a precocious boy and his eternally grumpy neighbor and his cookie-cooking wife.

Piraro draws others' ideas occasionally too, and trumpets his collaborations. The cartoon playing on trope for tear-off phone numbers comes from Andy Cowan, a television comedy screenwriter. The cycle path/psychopath 'toon idea came from one of his business managers, and the cyclops pirate panel came from a clever buddy. I don't hold it against him — a daily strip of good ideas is obviously extremely difficult. At least he's getting ideas that elevate the ethos of his work.

Bil Keane died a year ago, yet one of his son's maintains the damnable suspension of time that is Family Circus; I wonder how many times each saccharine utterance from each of those eternal children has been recycled. I wonder and I shudder.

Gary Larson left cartooning while he was on top, retiring The Far Side before running out of ideas. (The comic a little merchandising factory now — Books! T-shirts! Whatever! — but at least room was made on the comics page.) Bill Watterson fought for more space for Calvin and Hobbes, fought for the vastness of the early days when Winsor McCay had half or all of a newsprint page on which to unhinge his beautiful snack-fueled dreams, then told readers he'd said all he could say in a comic strip and disappeared.

Comics are the gateway drug to reading. A kid rifles through the morning newspaper looking for the funny pages, and tries to figure out what the characters are saying, while the grownups look through all the boring gray pictures without many pictures, funny or otherwise. After awhile, having gained power over words, kids drift toward the boring gray pages (first sports and then movie reviews) to discover they aren't boring but enlightening.

Kids need a reason to become addicted to reading, a compulsion to rifle through the paper for dibs on the comics. They need comics they want to see, that'll dazzle the way they dazzled me as I learned to read. The Old Guard needs to fold and legions of unpublished cartoonists need the space to take their places.

The Old Guard of readers won't let them leave, though. The Bee is just one of many, many newspapers that roll out surveys so readers can determine which comics to keep and which to ditch. By popular vote, Charlie Brown lives on, trudging zombie-like across the page with Dennis and Beetle an Hi and Lois and that baby of theirs, endlessly fascinated by sunbeams. We hate change more than we fear the potential of new ideas. Newspapers aren't democracies, though; they should change the comics on their own. It'd take us about a week to get over it.

But it may be too late. Too many people I know don't even subscribe to newspapers anymore, people my age, reading online instead. That's no way to read a newspaper. You need the ritual, the comfortable chair, the breakfast table, the purchase of time to linger and look and hope for a laugh.

I feel sorry for people who say they never read the comics.

Newspapers will die and these already dead comic strip icons will die again with them, depriving the next generation the chances they were given.

Cherish what ya got.

Dianne and Pete, sittin' in a tree …

Another ode to Oliphant:

Though not alone, Pat Oliphant is one of the best editorial cartoonists at capturing the essence of the public figures he pillories. He whittles down each victim in short time to visceral visual shorthand. Each becomes a vessel into which Oliphant pours in his idea of who the person is, not just what s/he looks like.

President Reagan began, under Oliphant's pen, a collection of sharp lines that lampoon his lionization as a silver screen idol. (Of course, Oliphant's caricature of Reagan began when Reagan was California's governor with eyes on the White House). In the end, Reagan became a juicy squidge signifying an oily pompadour, and two dots for eyes atop a crooked squiggle for a nose and a long chin.

The gubernatorial candidates show off their new personae.

Spartan, but devastating. President Clinton received the same two dots for eyes, a bulbous nose and a big chin, which sometimes morphed into W. C. Fields. President George H. W. Bush got a pinched face and often carried a purse; his son mostly showed up as a little boy in big boots and cowboy hat, asking Vice President Dick Cheney what to do.

Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury and presumably unable to draw caricatures, instead depicted Bush No. 1 as empty air, and George No. 2 as empty air or a floating asterisk under a cowboy hat or Mars' battered helmet.

I was trying to be like the big boys here, establishing a relationship with my characters and turning them into symbols that would amplify my point. The cartoon atop literally shows how I went about that transformation with Pete Wilson and Dianne Feinstein, then vying for governor.

Outta my head, Oliphant! You can see Patrick Oliphant's influence in caricature, angle and
general bugaboo portrayal.

Of course, it implied I'd be drawing these two many times and would need this shorthand. This marked early days in my efforts to become an editorial cartoonist, and I expected to learn how to convey more nuanced opinion. It's a difficult trick, especially with state politics, to lampoon people and issues when readers might not even be aware of either.

These offer rather generic viewpoints: politicians are buffoons who defer to lobbyists and blame each other rather than solving problems. Nothing to see here, folks. But I like to think I was getting better.