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CARTOONING IN
Before we get to my interview with Pat Bagley, which
took place in ancient times—in April 1991—let me expend a few words to set the
scene. First about Mormons; then about Bagley in more recent times, in June
2006.
Mormonism,
or the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, is a Christian
denomination started in 1830 by a
Possessing
the new “truth” of Christianity, Smith felt a compulsion to spread the “good
news,” and he quickly won converts. Within a year, Mormon communities had been
established at Kirtland (now Kirtland Hills),
Is
Mormonism a cult? Many of the evangelical persuasion of Christianity say
Mormonism is a cult, that it is not truly Christianity. Some of these so-called
truth-tellers are the same people who refer to themselves as “Christians” as distinct
from, say, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and others, whose
Christianity is, perforce, denied, so I don’t know how seriously we should take
their criticism of the LDS Church. But Mormonism is different from other
Christian denominations in several ways. Mormons believe in the prenatal
existence of human souls, for instance. And they believe in a three-tier
Heaven, in the uppermost of which, the
Enough
history and theological background. Now, here’s Bagley as he appeared more
recently in an article by Jamie Gadette in the Salt Lake City Weekly (June 29, 2006):
Bagley in the Bookstores
Clueless
George Is Watching You
No one is watching Pat Bagley. The Salt Lake Tribune political cartoonist
walks into a small downtown coffee shop sans disguise, bodyguards or electronic
bugs. He sits down and discusses the bizarre phone call he received this
morning from an angry reader. It seems the man thanked Bagley for a sentimental
Father's Day sketch, one that's "nothing like the usual trash—all of the horrible,
hateful things you do in the paper that do nobody any good," Bagley
recalls with a laugh. He doesn't worry about negative feedback. It's not like
the government is sending him death threats.
"In
Europe, cartoonists have a lot of influence on the editorial page and people
really pay attention to it," he says, noting that the highly publicized
controversy over a Danish newspaper's illustrations of Islamic prophet Muhammad
reflects just how seriously readers take political sketches. "There are
cartoonists who have been killed in the Middle East because of what they
do."
Bagley
recently returned from Italy, where cartoonists of his caliber are widely and
openly celebrated. Discussing their work, however, is an entirely different
matter.
"When
they're talking to an American, they never bring up politics unless you
introduce it first," he says, adding that Europeans are starting to
relinquish longstanding prejudices. "I think they understand that
President Bush is an anomaly, though it's kind of frightening to them that the
biggest nation in the world has elected this guy, and he's obviously just as
dumb as a cedar post."
Bagley
makes no bones about his feelings toward Bush. His disgust with the current
administration inspired not one but two clever books depicting Bush as a
dimwitted monkey who wreaks havoc in the absence of his handler. Clueless George Goes to War references
Bagley's views on the Iraq War, or what he calls, "The biggest tactical
blunder America's made in the past century" while Clueless George Is Watching You! calls out the National Security
Agency spy program, which had the government listening in on private phone
conversations.
"These
are clearly illegal acts, but again, the American public has just kind of
rolled over and played dead," he says. "So the book's come out of
that frustration—that we're just kind of taking this stuff and not doing
anything about it."
Bagley
links apathy to mindless television. As long as people have their American
Idol, Survivor or CSI, they don't have to face the realities of war, poverty,
corruption and democracy's steady decay. Judging by the demand for Clueless George books, however, not
everyone is zoning out. King's English Bookshop owner Betsy Burton sold 1,838
copies of the first book—a store record. She credits its success not only to
Bush's sinking approval ratings but also to Bagley's infectious appeal. While
he'll never admit to rock-star status, Burton believes his reputation far
exceeds his own opinion of it.
"He's
one of the single most important parts of the Tribune for everyone who reads it—no one misses his cartoons,"
she says. "I expect that kind of adulation will grow as he's picked up
more and more places."
Burton
admits Bagley doesn't draw the sort of crowds that equally established novelists
might attract to a book signing. She's not sure even famed cartoonist Pat Oliphant will ever achieve author
Margaret Atwood's standing.
Still,
when Bagley reads his latest book at Ken Sanders bookstore on June 30, it's
likely the room will fill to capacity as it did last December. Who
knows—perhaps someone will even hold up a lighter when he reads the last few
lines about the war on Boxcutterivians. Perhaps they'll order a
"brazillion" copies to give to friends who wish they'd witnessed the
legend before the world was watching, just as Burton predicts it will.
"I
just think he's really found the pulse with this book. I really hope he writes
three or four more of them," she says. "We need all the help we can
to get through the next few years."
*****
Return with us now to that day of yesteryear in April
1991 when the United States was riding high, having just trounced the massed
armies of Saddam Hussein in the desert near Kuwait and George Herbert Walker
Bush was the Man of the Hour. But let us, as Pat Bagley did in one of his books
of Utah cartoons, let Mark Twain give the invocation:
“I
cannot easily conceive of anything more cozy than the night in Salt Lake City
which we spent in a gentile den, smoking pipes and listening to tales of how
... heedless people often come to Utah and make remarks bout Brigham or
polygamy or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning at daylight,
such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley, contentedly waiting
for the hearse. ...” —From Roughing It
CARTOONING IN
SALT LAKE CITY
A
Conversation with Pat Bagley
“Humor is the hook,” Pat Bagley said. “That’s what
gets people to come back— to turn to the
cartoon before they read Ann Landers.”
We
were talking about the function of the editorial cartoonist. Is he reporter or
crusader or jester? In Bagley’s view, he’s a little of each.
“My
job is to do, I think, three things,” he said. “One is to inform, and that can
be done with an editorial cartoon that doesn’t really take a position on either
side of the issue. The issue may be obscure and needs clarification, so you
draw a picture to clarify what’s going on. Another thing a cartoon can do is to
persuade. As I tell elementary school people when I talk to them, I’m out there
trying to get you to see things my way. But you have a mind of your own, and
you make up your own mind. And the last thing is to entertain, to be funny,
humorous. And that’s the hook.”
We
were sitting in Bagley’s office, a cubicle of 5-foot-high walls snuggled up to
a bank of editors’ offices on the second floor of the Salt Lake Tribune building in downtown Salt Lake City. Bagley’s
drawingboard was positioned diagonally in the corner away from the windows that
overlooked South Main Street. It was April 1991, and for several weeks,
President George H.W. Bush has been basking in the glow of his victory over
Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. Soft-spoken,
articulate and relaxed, Bagley sat on the stool in front of his drawingboard.
He was dressed casually— plaidish sport shirt, jeans, running shoes— and his
blond hair and short beard accentuated the kind of ruddy complexion that skiers
and other sorts of outdoorsmen have, the kind that radiates health and fitness
and makes sedentary people like me wince with envy. At
35, Bagley has spent most of his working life at the Tribune. But his cartooning is not confined to the paper’s
editorial pages. He also draws a comic strip called Lost Soles for a monthly magazine, The Running Times, an outgrowth of his interest in running and
racing. And for book publication, he draws some of the riskiest cartoons a
cartoonist can draw—cartoons that laugh at religion. He has produced two book
collections of cartoons about life in Mormon Utah. Amazingly, the books are
best-sellers in that region.
The
progress of Bagley’s career as a cartoonist is equally confounding. When he
joined the Tribune in 1979, it was
the culmination of a short but thoroughly engaging fling at cartooning that
began as a result of “a happy accident” when he was a junior at Brigham Young
University. Majoring in political science and history, Bagley was heading for a
law degree eventually and hadn’t the least intention of being a cartoonist. He
had drawn all through elementary school and high school, he explained, “but I
didn’t know you could make a living at it. I grew up in a household where
artists were kind of nice things but were always spoken of as Starving Artists.
It might be all right for some people to do, but you want to make a living. And
making a living meant getting into management school or business or law
school.”
The
accident that started him on the road to cartooning began one day at BYU in a
particularly dull class. Trying to keep himself awake, Bagley doodled in his
notebook. And having an editorial cartoonist’s bent (whether he knew it or not
at the time), his doodling was influenced by an issue then current on campus:
BYU wouldn’t allow men and women to live in the same apartment buildings.
Bagley drew a cartoon with Bella Abzug in it.
Thinking
the idea wasn’t too bad, he took it over to the offices of the Daily Universe, the campus newspaper. He
expected the editor to turn the idea over to Steve Benson, who was the editorial cartoonist on the paper at the
time. But the editor told Bagley to do a finished drawing, and then the paper
ran it. Shortly thereafter, the cartoon got national circulation.
“I
was working in the university’s graphics department at the time,” Bagley said.
“And one day the secretary came in and said, I was happy to see your cartoon in Time. And I said, What? This is news
to me— ”
“—they didn’t pay me!” I interjected with a
laugh.
“—yeah,”
he laughed too. “They didn’t pay me. So anyhow, I got a copy of the magazine
and opened it up and, sure enough, there it was. Some stringer for Time at BYU had sent in some information
on the apartment issue, including my cartoon. It was one of those Busby Berkley
type musical things, being in the right place at the right time to get the
breaks. And it’s been downhill every since,” he finished with a grin, his teeth
suddenly gleaming under his moustache.
After
that, Bagley was asked to continue doing cartoons for the paper for the next
several months while Benson was away from BYU. And when Benson returned in the
fall, the paper kept both cartoonists on.
“It
was fun working with Steve,” Bagley said. “Our styles are very, very different;
our approaches are very different. But the competition kept us both on our
toes.” At the end of the year, the two produced a book of their cartoons called I Am Appalled.
While
working for the Daily Universe at
BYU, Bagley decided to pursue editorial cartooning as a career, and after he
graduated, he started asking around, eventually applying at the Salt Lake Tribune.
“I
was not originally accepted,” he remembered. “But a few weeks after I’d
applied, they called me up again and asked me to bring my stuff in. And then
they hired me. The Tribune was
probably the last big paper in the country that didn’t have its own political
cartoonist on staff.”
Bagley
has a noon deadline (although sometimes he can be as late as 1 p.m. if
necessary), and he starts shooting for it early in the morning.
“I
come in about seven o’clock and go through the paper,” he said. “If I’m lucky, something
will hit me— an issue. Then usually what I do is I start just kind of
scribbling— drawing out some things. Again if I’m lucky, something will click,
and I’ll work up a rough draft and take it in to one of the editors. And if
they like it— if they think it’s funny— then I’ll go ahead and do it. And if
they don’t, it’s back to the drawingboard and come up with a different issue.”
“People
always want to know where the ideas come from,” I said, “and everybody has a
different answer for that question— after a fashion. But few people— young
aspiring cartoonists in particular— seem to realize that ideas can come from
the act of drawing—doodling and scribbling, as you indicated— as much as from
simply thinking in splendid isolation. That is, ideas can come from the pencil.
Many people, including novice cartoonists, believe you get ideas independent of
the pencil’s working— as a product of a kind of pure act of ratiocination. But
maybe you don’t have any idea at all when you start the pencil, and first thing
you know, you have an idea.”
“Absolutely
true,” Bagley agreed. “Sometimes I’ll be drawing, and it’ll be a gesture that I
do in my doodles that will suggest something— and I’ll end up going off in a
different direction, different tangent. And it’s hard for a lot of people to
understand the process of cartooning because it’s not anything that you can
write the steps— one, two, three, four, and end up with a cartoon. It’s magic,”
he grinned. “You throw in the eye of a newt, a frog, batwing, and you stir it all
together, and if you’re lucky, something comes out.”
“If
you’re drawing a particular character, the idea may come out of the personality
of the character,” I said.
“Oh,
yes. Sometimes it’s a catalyst to get things moving. We all get brain cramps
once in a while. Sometimes it’s hard to break out of a certain train of
thought. What I’ll do sometimes is pick up a magazine, and start drawing things
in the magazine, and those will suggest other things, and pretty soon, I find
that I’m out of the rut that I was in.”
“What
is your relationship to your editors?” I asked. “Are you like any editorial
writer who submits his editorial for approval? Are your editors an audience for
you, or are they editing— saying, you shouldn’t print this, or it’s okay to do
that.”
“I
feel that they’re my peers,” Bagley said, “so they’re an audience. Their
reactions matter to me because I respect what they have to say: they’re
well-read people, and if they don’t understand the cartoon, then I’ve got to
get back and start all over again. The publisher is the one who has the power
to kill the thing, or at least to edit the cartoon. And that happens maybe
twice a month. He’s given me a lot of lee-way. And that’s not always the case
with an editorial cartoonist.”
“Right,”
I said. “And it’s something editorial cartoonists always discuss--how much
freedom they have to do what they want. I gather that Paul Conrad at the Los
Angeles Times believes he can do anything he wants. And I think he does,
too. I don’t know if he ever gets stopped.”
“At
times, he does get stopped,” Bagley said, smiling as he thought of a Conrad
cartoon inspired by the issues in the Middle East in the wake of the
just-concluded Gulf War. “He had a cartoon recently with Shamir pissing on the
burning bush, and we actually got the cartoon. Then we got a notice from the
Los Angeles Times Syndicate, saying— Kill that cartoon.”
“Oh,
yeah? That’s surprising,” I said. “But there are cartoonists who maintain they
have that freedom, and I suppose that’s a cast of mind as much as anything
else. It’s whether you feel you’re being restrained. And I gather you don’t
feel that.”
“I
feel some of it,” Bagley said. “The thing with the Church [of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints, the Mormon Church]--people want us to maintain good relations
with the Church. That’s a stumbling block sometimes. Just from talking to other
editorial cartoonists, I know I’ve got a lot of freedom compared to others. My
feeling is that only a small handful have absolute freedom to do whatever they
want. You have to have some kind of stature to get away with it.”
“Like Herblock, I guess,” I said. “I
imagine he can pretty much do what he wants.”
“And Pat Oliphant.”
“Oh,
right— Oliphant,” I agreed. “I think he’s a pivotal figure in the history of
American political cartooning. He came along and changed the whole face of it—
almost at once—in the space of a few years. Up until Oliphant’s arrival at the Denver Post after Conrad left in 1964,
everyone was doing Herblock imitations. And Oliphant came along, and for a long
time thereafter, everybody was doing Oliphant. But now, I think it’s really an
open situation. I mean, you’re not doing Oliphant and you’re not doing Herblock
and you’re not doing Conrad. And there are many other cartoonists in your
situation whose drawing styles are distinctive and not in any school or
tradition at all: they’re making their own traditions, setting their own
styles. And I believe that it was Oliphant— who came to the Post and drew in a dramatically
different style (even the shape of his cartoon was different, horizontal
instead of the conventional vertical rectangle)— it was Oliphant who created
the climate for all this individuality by being so different. He showed that
you could be different and still succeed. He was a liberating force. And he is
unusual in this respect: a lot of times, someone as widely and as assiduously
imitated as he was at first is not a liberating influence at all. Instead, such
people set the fashion and everyone slavishly follows the fashion. But not with
Oliphant—not after the initial period of imitation passed.”
“No
doubt, he was an innovator,” Bagley said. “It’s kind of like Patton’s tanks
coming over there, over the barbed wire, and liberating all the concentration
camp inmates. If you look at editorial cartoons before Oliphant, they were
stilted, stiff—and not very funny. And all of a sudden, Oliphant comes in, and
everything is wildly different. And as you say, we’re still feeling the effects
of that.” He paused, thinking about the state of the art. “Every time I go to
an editorial cartoonists convention,” he continued, “I get the feeling that
we’ve lost our way. We don’t know where we’re headed. But my feeling is that in
the next ten years, something else will come up.”
“What
do you mean by lost? Do you mean
editorial cartoonists have lost a sense of mission?”
“Well,
cartooning during the mid-sixties radically changed,” Bagley explained. “And it
was due to a lot of things. The turmoil of the sixties made an explosive
mixture, and cartoonists tried to illustrate the absurdities of the times in
the absurd medium of cartoons. But I get the sense that most of us feel we’re
kind of adrift right now. We’re not as compelled as a lot of cartoonists were
back then—compelled to, well, we had better targets back then. I don’t get the
sense that cartoonists feel that sense of mission like they did then.”
“Admittedly,
George H.W. Bush isn’t as good a target as Nixon,” I agreed, “—he’s not going
to raise the kind of visceral responses that Nixon did.”
“The
same thing with Ronald Reagan,” Bagley said. “Reagan turned out to be an
affable, cheerful grandfather type. And he was kind of slippery for cartoonists
to get hold of. Even the American psyche hasn’t come to grips with the Reagan
legacy. And now with the Bush administration— you don’t know quite how to get a
handle on it.”
“So
if an editorial cartoonist feels less drive or less purposeful today,” I said,
“it’s probably because there aren’t the kinds of targets there were several
years ago? I guess editorial cartooning is a reflection of the times in more
ways than one.”
Working
in the LDS-dominated community imposes certain constraints upon the editorial
cartoonist, but Bagley sees quite another side to his situation.
“Doing
political cartooning in Utah is not ... hard,” he said (pausing to select the
most appropriate descriptive term), “because there are things that come up in
Utah consistently that made good cartoons. This latest issue about the abortion
controversy is the kind of thing Utah puts on itself all the time. The state
legislature is very moralistic, and they see themselves as being in the
forefront of the fight against creeping moral decay in America. So I can count
on them at least twice a year to give me something to do.”
“Something
that will keep you supplied with material for weeks, you mean?” I said.
“Yes,”
he said grinning impishly. “It’s kind of like shooting fish in a barrel.”
But
the blessing is not unalloyed. “The Church has a huge influence here,” Bagley
went on. “And it’s a two-edged sword. It’s good in some respects in that I can
do cartoons that wouldn’t make any sense anywhere else because the humor is
sort of ‘in the family.’ If you’re from Utah, you understand what I’m getting
at. On the other hand, the thing that’s bad is that the Church wields such
influence in the state that the paper is hesitant to publish a lot of those
kinds of cartoons. My guess is that one of every three that have to do with the
LDS Church get printed; the others never see the light of day.”
A
lot of those “others” have been published by Signature Books of Salt Lake City
in two paperback collections of Bagley’s cartoons: Treasures of Half-Truth in 1986 and Oh My Heck in 1988. The books are unusual in several respects.
First, their content breaches decorum. (Joyfully— with such carefree abandon that there’s a kind of innocence about it.) The cartoons in them are almost all based upon aspects of the Mormon faith, and joking about religion—particularly an oft-persecuted sect—was, until quite recently, a firmly held taboo almost everywhere. Secondly, understanding the cartoons requires special knowledge. The jokes are so specific to tenets and practices of the Mormon religion that many of them cannot be understood without knowing something about the LDS Church. Finally, in spite of these seeming obstacles to success—or, perhaps, because of them— the books sell very well. Probably better than most collections of editorial cartoons. Bagley said he’s heard that Oliphant’s annual collections sell about 7,000 copies; each of Bagley’s two books has sold better than 15,000.
For
all the aura of innocence that infects the books, the cartoons have bite. Their
joyousness is not gentle. And some of them are downright wicked in their
assault on Mormon sensibilities. So how does Bagley get away with it? How does
he survive, going around blithely treading on the sensitive religious toes of
his readers?
To
begin with, he was raised Mormon. Although he grew up in Southern California
(which, he says, “explains a lot”), he was born in Salt Lake City. And he did
the customary missionary duty (serving in the Bolivia La Paz Mission 1975-77).
Thus, his cartoons are, as he puts it, “in-house humor—it’s all in the family.”
“The
Mormon Church played a huge role in my life,” he continued by way of
explanation, “as it did with a lot of people around here. And Mormons have a
tendency to circle the wagons when they feel that they’re being threatened,
when they feel they’re being criticized. Being within that circle of wagons, I
could see what went on there, and what I did with the cartoons was to kind of
chronicle that nonsense. And it was to let off some of the pressure I felt,
growing up in the Church. Growing up Mormon, you face a lot of contradictions,
and you can either grapple with them, wrestle with them, or work it out
somehow, or just ignore it and go along your merry way. And cartoons for me
were a way to wrestle with those demons. And I felt that they also helped a lot
of other people. People still come up to me, and say, You know, I really
appreciate that cartoon on this particular subject—that’s true. So the cartoons
were a release.”
But
Bagley is more humorist than psychologist. (All humorists are psychologists; but
few psychologists are humorists.) In the introduction to the first of his
books, he reveals something more of his motivation in doing the cartoons:
“Sister
Howell was my Top Pilot teacher in Primary. ... Long before sociologists
discovered that Mormons were different and began churning out dissertations as
though we were a tribe of Hottentots, Sister Howell had already leaked the
secret to my fellow Top Pilots and me. ‘Mormons are different,’ she would say.
And I soon learned why. I learned that the world generally wallowed in sin and
hot tubs. I learned that we resisted such worldly pleasures. In time, I even
developed compassion for my wayward brothers and sisters. They were the lost
sheep— prodigals who were too busy whooping it up to realize just how miserable
they really were. I, on the other hand, learned that I was blessed with the law
of tithing, the law of chastity, and the law of the sabbath, the word of
wisdom, and, eventually, with the burning wish that just once a year Mormons
could have a holiday so that we could be just as miserable as our gentile
friends. ... Sister Howell made sure that we knew we were choice, special. ...
She was nothing if not thorough. But there was one thing Sister Howell forgot
to tell us— probably the one thing which endears us to our creator more than
anything else— the fact that we make such terrific subjects for cartoons.”
Encountering
such an introduction, a Mormon reader would know at once that he was in for
some ribbing but that it was all, as Bagley said, “in the family.”
Still,
as I told Bagley, seeing the cartoons in the books was, for me, something of a
revelation.
“I
grew up in this part of the country,” I said, “—in Denver, Colorado—and I knew
the Mormons were over the other side of the mountains in Utah. And I always
felt Mormons were a particularly serious, dedicated bunch--scarcely the sort of
people who would laugh at themselves. And yet they must be doing just that when
they buy and read these books, or else you’d be vilified in the streets. People
would come after you with sharp sticks and other kinds of weapons— ”
“Well,
that happens,” Bagley laughed. “Not the weapons part but being vilified. I’ve
had nasty letters and phone calls and vaguely threatening letters because some
people don’t appreciate how I’m portraying the Church. They think it’s
sacrilegious. It’s wrong— ”
“And
some people will write in and say, You’re got it right on the button, I
suppose.”
Bagley
nodded. “I know that the cartoon has hit the nail on the head when I show it to
a Mormon neighbor of mine. He’s fairly orthodox, fairly straight. His first
reaction—if he laughs, you can see something registering in the back of his
brain: I really shouldn’t be laughing at this— ”
“And
that’s your measure of success!”
“Yeah—he’ll
laugh and then say, Well I don’t know—this may be going a little bit too far.
And that’s just what I want to do.”
“You
want to go far enough to make people pause and think,” I said. “The situation
with your neighbor—that’s a great illustration of what editorial cartooning is
all about, I think. Good story. Anyhow, as I was saying, reading these books of
cartoons was an extraordinary experience for me. They present a completely
different vision of what the Mormon community is like. If it can be tolerant of
this stuff, then it’s a good deal more tolerant a group than I thought it’d
be—if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I’m
not the only one who does Mormon cartoon books, by the way,” Bagley said. “Calvin Grondahl, who used to work at Deseret News, came out with the first
Mormon cartoon book. The official Church has had a really difficult time living
with this sort of thing. They can’t really outlaw these books, but they’d like
to.” He smiled and went on: “The way the Mormon leadership sees things—it’s
like they want to play a football game, and their rules allow them to go out on
the field and run up and down making touchdowns, but the opposition doesn’t
show up. If the opposition shows up, then they feel that it’s persecution. So
they’re uncomfortable with the cartoons, but, at the same time, they’re savvy
enough to realize that they cannot stop them.”
“And
meanwhile, the congregation is reading the cartoons and liking them--or not,
depending upon the humor and their own risibilities,” I chimed in.
Bagley
nodded. “You know,” he continued, “in the Soviet Union, even in the really bad
times, the one form of expression that was still open to them was in cartoons.
They could poke fun and satirize the system. And I think that’s true with the
Mormon cartoons.”
“You
realize that you’ve just likened the Mormon Church to the Soviet Union,” I
joked. “But your observation is provocative in another way. It’s hard to lay
your hands on a cartoon, isn’t it?—to get a grip on it. That classic story
about Thomas Nast’s cartoons attacking
Boss Tweed— Tweed saying, My constituents can’t read the editorials but they
can see them damned pictures--an apt description of the objectives of editorial
cartooning, I think. But it’s hard for a victim to say what it is about those
damned pictures that he feels ought not to be there. Daniel Fitzpatrick once told about the response of one of the
targets of his editorial ire—the guy said he could answer the editorial
writers, he could explain his position or whatever, but he couldn’t figure out
what to say to the fellow who draws the cartoon.”
“It’s
curious,” Bagley said. “Take Mormon symbols. For instance, the Angel Moroni
[who appeared to Joseph Smith and called him to found
this new religion] whose statue is on top of the Temple. I grew up in the Church,
being fairly devout in my early years—I’m semi-retired now—but I had no hint
that that figure, that icon, was off-limits. And when I started drawing him in
my cartoons, a lot of people had a great negative reaction to it because they
thought it was sacrilegious to portray Moroni in a cartoon. Just putting him
into the cartoon, not even making fun of him, was wrong. And that was a
surprise to me. They feel strongly about a caricature of Joseph Smith, too,
although that’s a little more tolerable for them than a caricature of one of
the current leadership. Doing cartoons about the Church is one of the most
unique aspects of working in Utah, and it’s sometimes very tricky.”
“I
wonder if you weren’t Mormon if you could get away with it,” I said.
“I
think if I were not Mormon and hadn’t grown up in that culture, a lot of it
would just be a mystery to me,” Bagley said. “A lot of it I wouldn’t even find
very interesting.”
Bagley
does a good deal of homework to keep himself informed of current issues and aware
of what his readers are tuning-in on. He reads both the local papers, the Tribune and the Deseret News, and he reads Newsweek.
“What
I find especially helpful,” he said, “is to get a magazine like The New Republic or even The Atlantic or The New Yorker that takes an issue and goes into it in depth. That
helps in being able to formulate a cartoon. And, like everybody else, I get a
lot of ideas from television. I don’t consider myself much of a crusader, but I
do feel strongly about certain issues. I don’t feel that I should be out there
starting a movement against putting diapers in land fills. But if I see
something that enrages me, then I’ll go ahead and do it.”
“Conrad
sees himself as a crusader, pointing out inequities,” I said. “And he’s dead
serious in attacking things he feels passionately about.”
“And
it comes across in his cartoons,” Bagley said. “I mean, they’re vicious.”
“Right,”
I said. “They aren’t very often funny either, that’s for sure. He’s an
inheritor of Fitzpatrick’s mantle, I think. You didn’t laugh at Fitzpatrick. He
took that crayon of his and made it into a blunt instrument, and then he
distilled his rage and put it on paper to tell everyone about it. But let’s get
back to you. I suppose some things you just have a gut reaction to. It’s not a
question of having to weigh the pros and cons: you just think this is wrong or
this is right. Is that fair to say?”
“Oh,
yes. You get pretty visceral reaction to, for example, Saddam Hussein,” he
said. “Looking in the paper in the morning, you can usually find something
pretty outrageous, and you focus on that and take off.”
“So
it’s not really necessary to become the world’s foremost expert on a subject in
order to comment on it,” I said. “You just react to it.”
Bagley
nodded agreement. “And the other thing,” he said, “is that you are really
pretty much a blue collar guy like everyone who reads the newspaper, and I see
the same images that everyone sees when they watch television. The image— the
visual impression—is so important in a cartoon that it’s very helpful to keep
in touch with some of the images that are current on television. For example,
the Challenger disaster—the picture of it going up and then exploding. It’s
pretty much burned into everyone’s memory, and a number of cartoonists after
the disaster used that image. They recreated it in various ways. They did the
same thing with Michael Dukakis riding around in the tank and helmet.”
“Editorial
cartoonists have complained in recent years that there is much of our cultural
heritage that they can’t use as metaphors in their cartoons anymore,” I said.
“The average reader simply won’t understand the allusion. Literary quotations,
for example. And even historical incidents. Do you find that to be the case?”
“Oh,
absolutely,” Bagley said quickly. “Biblical allusions. It’s too bad we’ve lost
those. Some of the richest imagery we have comes from the Bible. And
occasionally I’ll do something like that, and my editor will say—and my editor
is college-educated and he understands—he’ll say, This is gonna be lost on a
lot of the readership.”
“So
the things you use for metaphors now must come from popular culture?” I asked.
“Yes—which
is too bad because this stuff is going to dry up and blow away,” he said. “Five
years from now, nobody’s going to care much about Madonna. And there are people
who are always—look at Mark Twain. His stuff is as crisp and as funny as the
day it was written. But if you look at some of his contemporaries, humorists
who did some writing then, they were pretty poor. And a lot of that has to do
with their use of current, topical material the significance of which has faded
away. That’s something I worry about in my cartoons. If I’m just drawing on the
popular culture, it might be a big hit now, but down the road, it’s just going
to seem dated.”
We
talked a little about the art of caricature, an essential skill in any
editorial cartoonist’s quiver of barbed weapons. I asked him if he had any
favorites for caricaturing.
“Saddam,”
he said with a grin. “It helps that he’s so evil. But I enjoy doing people who
are just on the edge of full public consciousness—like Nelson Mandella. Norman
Schwartzkopf was fun because he was so new. It’s fun to be the first out there
with a caricature. The thing about caricaturing in these cartoons is that the
waters get polluted very quickly. It was true with George H.W. Bush, for
example. People struggled to do a good Bush. And you look at how somebody else
does Bush and even subconsciously you begin to pick up on certain things, and
then all the caricatures begin to resemble one another after a while.”
“When
I was a kid, Eisenhower was president,” I said, “so I tried to do Eisenhower. I
was just learning how to caricature, and so naturally, I picked on the
president. I thought he’d be easy--simple, round face, bald head. But he was so
simple that it was hard to capture anything distinctive about him. And yet, Ike
did have a distinctive face. I struggled and struggled. And then one day I was
reading a magazine and came across a page of photos of Ike’s face—picture after
picture, row after row, each one showing a different expression. And suddenly I
realized what the secret was: Ike looked a little different with every
expression, so to get a good caricature of Ike, you had to caricature every expression.
I think Reagan is difficult, too. I used to sit and watch his press conferences
and try to do a Reagan. There are some obvious things you have to use, but the
trick is to put them together the right way. I guess that’s something you learn
through practice.”
Bagley
agreed. “When I first started, my stuff was pretty poor. It was really poor,”
he said with a laugh. “I’ve refined the drawing over the years. I think my
ideas have always been pretty good, but the art is something I’ve refined.
Caricature is a lot that way. I’ve gotten better at it, I think, because I
don’t get quite as uptight. If I don’t get it in the first three or four tries,
I just step back and do something entirely different. I might get somebody and
focus on the forehead and try to draw him that way, and then after a half-hour,
it’s just not working. Even though I think it’s the forehead that stands out,
I’ll try some other feature.”
Bagley
thinks the best way to learn how to caricature is to do it. “Draw people you
know,” he advised. “Draw people on the street. I would not necessarily
recommend this, but I drew caricatures in a mall. That was about ten years ago,
before I started working here. It’s not bad because it gives you constant
practice. And if your rates are cheap enough, you get lots of people to sit for
you, and you begin to recognize which features to capture and so on.”
“Did
you do profiles?” I asked.
“No,
full face.”
“Oooff.
That’s tough. Profiles are relatively easy to do on the spot like that, under
the gun so to speak. But full face—that’s chancy.”
Cartooning
is tough to teach, Bagley believes. “You end up teaching your way of
cartooning,” he said. “Ever hear that definition of a cartoonist? A cartoonist
is an artist who can’t draw well enough to be an artist and a writer who can’t
write well enough to be a writer.”
I
laughed. “I’ve never heard that,” I said, “and there may be some truth in it.
But I think the essence of cartooning is the blend of word and picture. If your
picture can stand by itself and make sense alone without words, then it’s not
quite a cartoon. If your words can stand alone without pictures, it’s not a
cartoon. You need both of them, together—mutually dependent. And then you’ve
got a cartoon. Blending words and pictures requires an ability to economize in
the way you express yourself. So I guess I think of cartooning as a superior
communication accomplishment rather than as a substitute for proficiency in
drawing or writing.”
Bagley
works at the economy of expression that is the essence of a good cartoon’s
impact: “What I try to do is cut down on the number of words just because
reading is sometimes a distraction. I want to do a cartoon that will hit people
right between the eyes—right away.”
For
the time being, Bagley is content to confine his attention almost exclusively
to his editorial cartoons. He has no immediate ambition to moonlight on a comic
strip like Jeff McNelly and Mike Peters and others.
“I’ve
talked with some editorial cartoonists who do comic strips,” he explained, “and
for some, it was a real fiasco. It ate up all their time. And they’re glad,
now, that they’re out of it. Of course, that’s not true of all of them. Some of
them just can’t decide if they like editorial cartooning best or a strip. But
they all say a strip is consuming. The editorial cartoon allows for other
things. So unless you’re willing to sacrifice a major part of your life to a
comic strip, you don’t get into it. But someday, I might do it. Not now,
though.”
To
the aspiring young would-be editorial cartoonist, Bagley says: “I suggest that
they do drawings of local people and try to get them printed in local magazines
and newspapers. They’ve got a good chance at getting published this way because
they’ve pretty much got an open field: focusing on local issues, they’re not
competing with the rest of us.”
Bagley
enjoys doing cartoons on local issues. “About one out of three of my cartoons
is local,” he says. “We get national cartoons from the syndicates, but a local
cartoon is something nobody else does here. Doing a national cartoon is like
being a piranha attacking George Bush, but on a local level, doing a cartoon is
like being a great white shark.” He grinned.
“So
you feel you have greater impact on the local level than on the national
level?” I asked.
“Oh,
yes—I have no impact on the national level.”
“What
about the temptation to go for the Pulitzer,” I said, “—which means using
national themes. Do you feel that temptation at all?”
“Well,
I’m human,” he said with a laugh. “It’s tough because I’m not syndicated, and
without that kind of exposure, my cartoons probably wouldn’t get the
consideration that others would. I have never entered for the Pulitzer; I
should start doing that. I think eventually I’ll get syndicated and all that.
But I was happy to see Jim Borgman win this year.”
“One
of the things debated these days among editorial cartoonists,” I said, “is
whether or not the injection of a lot of humor into their cartoons is a good
thing. Historically, editorial cartoons have not necessarily been funny. When
Oliphant invaded, the example he set used humor as a weapon. And he was unusual
in this respect although Herblock had a sharp wit and was using it then, too.
And Ding, of course— Jay Darling at
the Des Moines Register-Tribune— and
maybe Harold Talburt. But through
most of the early history of editorial cartooning, editorial cartoons pretty
much just presented an image--a message in metaphor. They didn’t set out so
much to provoke a belly laugh; instead, they served to focus your anger. In the
wake of Oliphant’s popularity, a lot of editorial cartoonists honed their
senses of humor, and editorial cartoons generally got funnier. And not everyone
approves. Tom Englehart at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for instance,
says that cartoons today are all smile and no teeth. And even
Oliphant—ironically—objects to what his ostensible followers have done to the
medium by using humor. Under the banner of satire, he says, editorial
cartoonists have gone slapstick, and editorial cartoons have become like the
comics generally. I think Oliphant believes that in order to stay pure as an
editorial cartoonist, you must be angry about something—maybe everything— and
uncompromisingly savage in your attack. He doesn’t like the idea of provoking a
chuckle for its own sake. Now, you give humor a significant role in your work.
Do you think there’s too much laughter being provoked by editorial cartoons?”
“I
hear that criticism,” Bagley said. “But I really don’t have much of a problem
with that. I don’t think humor is undermining the profession. The people most
outraged by this are those who would otherwise be standing on soap boxes in
Hyde Park—very angry and loud, maybe. I think injecting humor into the cartoons
isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t know personally any cartoonists who are
in it just for the jokes. Cartoonists I know care about what they do.”
“I
guess I agree,” I said. “I like your metaphor—humor is the hook that’s gonna
get readers back.”
“Look
at Mark Twain,” Bagley said. “Side-splitting stuff. But he was sidesplitting
because what he said was true as well as funny. And that still works today.”
Bagley Gallery. Here is a batch of Bagley’s latest, culled from the most recent year’s crop of editoons. His casual loopy lines make cartooning look easy, and his lumpy people, cuddly in a goofy, maniac way, almost persuade us that the world according to the Bush League is not as dire a place as we might otherwise suppose. But the respite is brief: Bagley words and pictures reveal the lunacies of modern life and politics. No, no, not simply to reveal—but to hammer into insensibility, to nail to the wall, to drive a stake through hypocritical hearts. Yes, there’s a smile, but that toothy grin is fanged. JEREMY: INSERT BAG-1 (a repeat from Op. 215) and BAG-8 through BAG-11 HERE; THEN DELETE THESE CAPITAL LETTERS.
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