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Opus 146: Opus
146 NOUS R US All the News
that Gives Us Fits (but that's not all the news there is, exactly) FLASH! Stop the presses. Or, choke the ether-whatever
we do here in cyberspace that is the equivalent of stopping those rollers
from rolling. All is not lost. Hope springs eternal within the human
breast. Sez so, right 'chere. Nicole Jantze, beauteous wife of Michael,
tells us that her husband could be persuaded to continue producing new
strips in The Norm ONLINE (not in the newspapers)
if enough paying customers sign up for a subscription. She's got six
weeks, she says, to persuade enough of us to pay at least $25 a year
for The Norm (a fee that includes access to
the entire Norm website and a 10% discount at the Norm Store). If we
reach the desired (albeit unspecified) goal by October 31, Michael will
start producing freshly minted strips on November 1st. Visit
www.thenorm.com for all the
details. Do it now. Click right there, just a couple verbals ago. And
now, back to our regularly programmed schedule ... Dilbert
is getting a new home. No, not another venue for the comic strip: instead,
a domicile for the strip's eponymous hero, "Dilbert's Ultimate
House" (or DUH, an expression familiar to readers of the Dilbert
online newsletter, which includes, in every issue, collections of particularly
incomprehensible utterances by "induhviduals"). Cartoonist
Scott Adams asked the strip's fans to suggest features for a house
that Dilbert could call a home, and 3,000-plus responded. Said Adams:
"We wanted him to have a house so impressive that some woman would
overlook his personality just to live in it." I'm not sure that
objective has been achieved. The most noticeable of the building's features
is a tower in front that looks like Dilbert's head. Inside is a room
devoted entirely to cat litter and a master bedroom with its own urinal,
to mention a couple of the more outlandish aspects of the dwelling.
But apparently a lot of the ideas given actuality in the building are
pretty forward-looking. According to David Astor in Editor
& Publisher, "Viewers will be able to take virtual tours
of the energy-efficient, eco-friendly house starting September 28 at
http://www.dilbert.com."
Fred
Basset, the comic strip dog created in 1963 by England's Alex Graham (who died several years ago but his creation carries on
in apparently endless rerun), may get his own tv show in Britain; the
pilot is due in October. ... The Los
Angeles Times passed a centennial this summer: it started publishing
comics with Buster Brown on August 21, 1904; according
to Dave Strickler, author of Syndicated
Comic Strips and Artists, 1924-1995. Richard Outcault's classic
was followed in the Times
by 940 other strips and panels. Bill Griffith has never been to Taiwan,
but his Zippy strip runs there
in the Taipei Times, whose
Dan Bloom interviewed the cartoonist in early September. Although Griffith
maintains, correctly, that explaining humor kills it, he nonetheless
offered an insight into Zippy comedy that I hadn't seen as succinctly
expressed before. Asked about the "surreal humor" of the strip,
he said: "If you think Zippy is surreal now, you should have read
him when he started out in the early 1970s in underground comix in San
Francisco. [Then] Zippy's tendency to speak in random non-sequiturs
was in full force. He rarely gave an answer or made a statement that
related in any but the most oblique way to what other characters around
him were saying. But I do not consider Zippy to be particularly surreal
in his current incarnation. ... Off-center, maybe-unexpected, indirect,
poetic-but not really surreal, if by surreal you mean nonsensical or
random. Actually, Zippy is almost always trying to respond sensibly
to any question posed to him; he just sees the world through a very
personal distorted lens. My intent with many of Zippy's statements is
to be satirical, and even political, but not surreal." In
a Chicago Sun Times review
of an exhibition of comics art by
Lynda Barry, Debbie Drechsler, Mary Fleener, and Mack
White, Margaret Hawkins put her finger on a problem that comics
face as museum art. To properly appreciate the comics on display, one
must devote a considerable time to reading. "The primitivism of
some of the drawing is charming," Hawkins writes, "but when
it relies heavily on text, and when that text is not especially interesting
or readable, we feel imposed upon. ... [The text] is wordy and boring.
There's nothing wrong with rambling on in your diary but, in a format that is built on conciseness [my emphasis], this
seems oddly self-indulgent. Because this show asks us to read a great
deal of text, we expect it to have some literary qualities-plot, character,
nuanced language and good editing among them-and, lacking that, feel
frustrated and cheated." Moreover, if the comics are language laden,
the language itself ought to have some inherent beauty, like poetry,
for instance. Hawkins appreciates the unique character of comics: "Comics
at their best visualize a weird world of high drama with a kind of naive
conviction not available elsewhere." And that's the problem: the
show doesn't body forth the uniqueness of the medium. "My complaint
about this show is that it's a show at all, and one that takes three
or four hours to see thoroughly because it must be read," she goes
on. "No one going to an art exhibit expects to read this much,
and standing to read for this long is both uncomfortable and too public."
What
she says is related, surely, to the fate of various comics art museums
over the years. Mostly, they fail for lack of traffic. I've long felt
that the best way to make museums of comics succeed is to install living
cartoonists. In one corner of the museum, a cartoonist's workplace could
be set up-drawingboard, ink stand, and so forth. Every day, a cartoonist
would show up to work there; visitors to the museum would watch him
at work. It can be a rotating position so that one cartoonist doesn't
have to be there every day (although if some cartoonist needs studio
space, why not?). The "live" aspect of this maneuver would
enhance the display situation and cut the dullness, somewhat, from walking
galleries slowly enough to read everything in every comic strip on display.
Opus and the
State of American Newspapers Opus placed near the bottom of
the comics survey that the Quad
City Times (Davenport, Iowa) conducted last summer, but the paper's
editors stayed the execution-"at least for the time being"-and
invited Opus's creator, Berk
Breathed, who lived in nearby Iowa City during Bloom
County's formative years, to say a few words in his (and the perpetual
penguin's) defense. E-mailing from California, the cartoonist said he
"missed the rolling cornfields ... here in California, we just
get rolling Hummers." Then he went on to address some of the irks
that have plagued his new strip since its debut. "I'm as frustrated
as many fans are that it's only once a week. Four strips a month rather
than 30 isn't anything resembling a true comic strip, and it's something
less, no doubt. If I had a schedule that would allow it, I would clearly
be back doing dailies. But it leaves one-as I've often said-looking
like Keith Richards at 4 a.m. Scares the kids." He acknowledged
that many erstwhile fans are annoyed that Opus
isn't just Bloom County again.
"I suspect that they are also peeved that it's not 1982 anymore,
and they aren't living in a dorm and sex isn't flowing like beer. Nostalgic
memory is flawed, I've learned." And then he turned to the present
state of the newspaper game in regard to its only legitimate child,
the comic strip. "The comics are skewing evermore toward older
demographics-exactly those that answer comic surveys, oddly enough.
Pleasing this group may feel good, but I submit that ignoring the very
thing that upsets the oldsters-political, youthful tastes and attitude,
especially in humor-is a slide toward the newspaper abyss. Papers need
to figure out who will be reading them in the next 20 or 30 years. This
generation simply does not think of picking up newspapers." Breathed's
wit never falters; but the Sunday-only Opus,
which Breathed insisted be allowed a full, uncut half-page in order
to offer readers an visual extravaganza, has never reached that fond
apotheosis: it hasn't progressed much beyond the traditional cadences
of tiers of panels in routine row formation. Still, Breathed is right
about the timidity of newspaper editors in an age when newspaper readership
seems in a steady decline. The
issue, regardless of what newspaper editors say, is not, really, money.
Newspapers are making money. They always have. (One wag said that newspapers
were "money-making machines"; and that hasn't changed much.)
The cost of newsprint is increasing, true; but with profit margins in
excess of 20 percent, newspapers can afford to take the hit. The financial
issue is not whether the newspaper is breaking even or making money.
Since most newspapers in this country are owned by corporate chains,
their real owners are the people who hold stock in the corporations.
Stock holders demand greater and greater return on their investment.
To satisfy this voracious appetite, newspapers are forced to cut costs.
They can't increase profit by increasing sales in a cultural environment
that no longer relies upon the daily print media; so they resort to
the only alternative left to them. Cutting costs. One of the ways costs
are being cut is by reducing staff. Corporate-owned papers aren't interested
much in local news so they cut reporting staff and use wire service
national news to pad out the pages between grocery ads (where the real
newspaper revenue comes from). Editorial cartoonists are among the first
to feel this sort of cutback: since so much editorial cartooning is
syndicated and since cartoons on local issues only make readers mad
enough to pester editors, financial as well as public-relations logic
dictates letting the staff editoonist go. And it's happening all over,
one way or another. Jeff McNelly died in 2000, but he's never
been replaced at the Chicago Tribune.
(The honchos there say they're still looking, but they pretty certainly
aren't. That paper developed one of the most insidious strategies for
dealing with comics readers complaints when dropping a favorite strip:
in responding to phone calls, the paper execs claim they're still evaluating
the dropped strip. Oh, the complainer thinks, then the decision to drop
isn't final; and he/she hangs up, mollified somewhat by the belief that
perhaps the strip will be returned to the comics page. Alas, this is
a mistaken belief; the strip never comes back. But by the time the comics
reader has figured that out, it's months later, and the heat of anger
has died down. Surely the present mantra about McNelly is a species
of the same dodge.) In just the last 18 months or so, Kirk
Anderson was let out of his part-time position at the
St. Paul Pioneer Press; Mike
Lane, one of two editoonists at the
Baltimore Sun, accepted a buy-out when the paper decided to cut
back; John Sherffius left the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch because (probably) he no longer agreed with
the policies of the paper; and just in August, Gary
Markstein left the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel for unspecified reasons (probably like Sherffius's
reasons). The
problem plaguing editorial cartooning isn't simply a paper's fiscal
ambitions. It's also the timorousness of the editors. Desperate to maintain
circulation, they cringe, apparently, at the thought of angering a reader
enough to cause the reader to drop his/her subscription. Editorial cartoons
do their most effective work on local issues, but that means riling
up some of the readers. We can't do that-oh, no, heavens not. So editoonists
learn not to hit local topics hard, to focus their best shots on national
targets. And if that's all the editorial cartoons are about, why not
use syndicated editoons? The
lame newspapers that emerge from this cauldron of timidity have not
escaped notice. Last summer, Kathleen Parker, a columnist syndicated
by Tribune Media Services (the Chicago
Trib's syndicate arm), rolled out an attack on the champions of
inoffensiveness. "People who read my column presumably want
to hear my point of view not a bedtime story," she told Dave Astor
at Editor & Publisher after
producing a column that lambasted newspapers for being boring. In the
column, she referred to the steady decline in newspaper circulation
and advertising revenue and wondered if newspaper people, "the
most self-analytical tribe around," wasn't "looking for love
in all the wrong places." All those special youth-oriented sections,
for example, "that lose money and insult the intelligence of would-be
readers who happen to be young. All the while, numbers drop and jobs
disappear, while the blogosphere explodes and cable news ratings soar."
The problem was evident to her. "Let me be blunt," she continued.
"Newspapers bite. The work isn't much fun anymore, thanks to the
soul-snatching corporate culture that has euthanized newsroom personalities.
Most papers reflect that numbers-crunching, cubicle-hunkering mentality.
We're boring, predictable, staid and out of touch with the folks with
quarters. Nobody rushes to the rack anymore to see what the paper's
great voices have to say because there aren't many great voices left.
Meanwhile, half the nation's editorial cartoonists-Doug Marlette's 'designated
feelers'-have disappeared from editorial pages, leaving holes where
hearts used to beat." Recent
so-called thinking on the matter has resulted, Parker continued, in
theories about the liberal slant of the media (or the conservative slant),
its racial and gender biases. So newspapers try to level the playing
field. "Obviously," she says, "there's nothing wrong
with trying to make newsrooms reflect the American community, though
quotas by definition suggest a compromise of standards. But the racial
parity mandate is symptomatic of what ails newspapers. It's the perfect
bureaucratic band-aid, a cosmetic fix that looks good but is a superficial
corrective. Parity does not equal quality. But hiring by the numbers
makes us feel good and gives us bragging rights to public virtue. We
may be dying, but at least we're diverse! We'll all go down together.
As even Ordinary Americans know, adjusting the racial makeup of a newsroom
doesn't begin to address why newspapers are losing readers. As with
the Cosmo girl who can't find her man, it's not the makeup that's wrong;
it's the soul that's gone missing." I'm not sure I agree with every
jot and tittle of her harangue here-she seems more than a little dismissive
of diversity, for instance (although I agree that it's scarcely a universal
solvent)-but at least she's skewering newspapering for real, not imagined,
sins. Lack of guts, both heart and stomach. I'm reminded of those historic
days of newspapering glory when, at the Denver
Post building in downtown Denver in the early years of the 20th
century, Frederick G. Bonfils, one of the two owners, installed a fire
siren on the roof. He could activate it by pressing a button on his
desk, which he did, every once in a while when particularly excited
about something. When he was asked why he did it, his response was perfect:
"It shows enterprise," he intoned. It also showed that he
wasn't afraid to make noise, which might, come to think of it, be the
same thing. Funnybook Fan
Fare A quartet of first issues is stacked up on the corner
of my desk. Hawaiian Dick No.
1, by B. Clay Moore as pictured by Steven Griffin, is actually the second
"mini-series" of that title. In this one, private investigator
Byrd is hired by one of the local gangland kingpins to provoke antagonism
in a rival gang so the truce between the two will be violated, thereby
opening the possibility that Byrd's client can muscle the others out
of the competition for monopoly of the casino trade in town. Eventually,
spirits of Hawaiian dead will rise to complicate matters, but only one
of them shows up in the first issue. The storytelling and staging here
are nicely accomplished, but the coloring is highly distracting. Griffin
applies color in a painterly manner but lays it on so splashily and
in such dark and garish hues that the visuals are sometimes difficult
to sort out. And that's too bad: the splashing color is the most distinction
achieved by the artwork, which is thoroughly competent but without much
detail in background and accouterment and no variation whatsoever in
linear thickness, producing, without the wild coloring, a pretty flat
and uninteresting visual. In
Forsaken No. 1 by Carmen Treffiletti with Kristian
Donaldson's pictures inked by Nick
Zagami, we encounter one of those angular drawing styles, part manga
and part Mignola, in which it is difficult to tell the humans from the
architecture: buildings and doorways loom, defined by their unlit shadow-sides,
and so do the people. It's all very crisp and clean-and stiff and wooden.
And cryptic. The style is more design than illustration, but it's a
very attractive despite an inherent inhibition that prevents rendering
anything approaching lively movement. We meet agent Apollo Delk in several
mysterious settings-once, getting his brains blown out at Russian roulette-but
we can't tell what he's up to, exactly, except that it's all taking
place in some sort of future. Instead of story, we have somber atmosphere-a
lot of mysterious menace, dramatic staging, suspense-building timing,
but, withal, somewhat pretentious. At the end of the issue, several
provocative personages, including Delk, have apparently been collected
for the purpose of being given an assignment, which we'll find out about
in the next issue. Mike Hawthorne pencilled and inked Gabriel Benson's Ballad of Sleeping Beauty,
a copy of No. 1 of which I picked up on Free Comic Book Day. It's a
Western setting for a re-telling of the classic fairy tale. The principals
here, Cole and Red, spend the entire issue on the gallows with ropes
around their necks, standing there, all night long, in the rain, and
telling each other their life stories. Cole's is about coming home to
find that Indians have raided the place and set fire to his house. He
tries to save his wife, but is wounded; and his wife is killed and her
body left lying on him. Red's story is the story of Sleeping Beauty.
Where Red figures in it, we don't know yet: he tells the tale up to
the point that she falls asleep under the curse of an old Indian woman
whom the townspeople refused to help when she needed it. Hawthorne's
artwork is a good deal more flexible than Donaldson's-his line varies
and people appear to be capable of bending-but Mike Atiyeh's coloring rescues many a scene from otherwise being just
a mechanical drawing (like the diagram of the inner workings of, say,
a vacuum cleaner). The Milkman Murders No. 1 is the most interesting
of this quartet-in both drawing and story. There's more of both, and
much less of atmospherics, than in the preceding trio. Stephen Parkhouse deploys an unvarying line to render the pictures,
but he does some feathering and adds wrinkles to clothing and achieves
a loose and lively look, which gives the drawings a graphic energy and,
therefore, visual interest. Joe
Casey's story is a "modern suburban nightmare": we meet
the Vale family, an abusive brute of a father, a plump and uncomplaining
mother who escapes the misery of her daily life by watching tv and day-dreaming,
and two savage kids-the son, who kills dogs and eviscerates them, and
the daughter, who is sexually involved with her physical education teacher.
The first issue is devoted to introducing us to these wholly unattractive
personages. Then on the last page, into the Vale house comes-the Milkman,
who is physically as great a slob as the husband. So what is his mission?
Can't wait to find out. Book Marquee In NBM's Eurotica series, here's Milo Manara again, this time with a paen in paint to The Model (80 9x12-inch pages, in color;
hardback, $24.95, www.nbmpublishing.com
). Celebrated as a limner of the curvaceous gender, Manara here wants
"to show not just that [artists' models] were more than just bodies
but also to what extent they were an authentic inspiration for artists."
After all, he notes, "the history of models is inextricably linked
to the history of art, and their role is of immense importance in our
civilization. We owe so many masterpieces to them! And yet, while we're
ready to reward artists with honors and recognition, nobody seems to
remember the models." A nice, even noble, idea, but the project
is just an excuse, of course, for Manara to produce another parade of
barenekidwimmin, and he does. But in these pages, the nudes are portrayed
with the artists who made them famous (albeit still anonymous)-Filippo
Lipi and his nun model, Lucrezia Buti; Raphael and Fornarina, Titian
and Violante, and a dozen or so more. Each full-page portrait is accompanied
by a narrow column of type in which Manara playfully describes the relationship
between the artist depicted and his model. Manara deploys a variety
of media-oil, watercolor, chalk on textured paper-and while I like his
linework better, this is an exquisite array. At the end of the book,
he describes (and paints) generic models-The New Goddesses, The Commercial
Model, An Extraordinary Model (photographed unbeknownst to her and,
later, painted by the artist), The Deceptive Model, and The Model Underneath
the Clothing. In this last, Manara applauds Luchino Visconti who demanded,
during the filming of "The Leopard," that even the extras
wear period underwear although they knew they'd never be in the scene.
Manara admits the story may be fiction, but says Visconti "deserves
our applause. I'm convinced that every woman chooses her underwear for
herself, all the while knowing that nobody will see it, and I think
she does so for esthetic reasons. It's the model in her coming out."
The penultimate image in the book, a leggy blonde in a mini-skirt bent
forward over a piano and looking back at us, Manara describes under
the heading The Gaze: "One of the most fascinating aspects about
the painter-mod The Sportin' Life I'm not what you'd call a
big sports fan. In fact, I'm not even a tiny sports fan. If I seem vaguely
aware of the Olympics every four years or so, it's because my wife watches
these historic events, and I see 'em out of the corner of my eye when
I walk through the livingroom. I've never tuned in to Monday Night Football
either. Or Sunday Football or Saturday Baseball. I watched the Chicago
Bulls when Michael Jordan was at the height of his fame, but as a general
rule, I don't watch sporting events. I've never understood the appeal
of contests the culminating event of which is people showering together.
But I did watch Willard
Mullin. I doted on his sports cartoons. And he was the dean of the
lot, the all-time champion renderer of athleticism. (And if you missed
the Mullin biographical appreciation we put up in Hindsight last week,
here's your chance to review his achievement; click here.)
Failing that, you'll have to take my word for it: Mullin was the all-time
champ of sports cartoonists. He set the pace-and the fashion-for sports
cartoonists, coast-to-coast. After Mullin hit his stride, all other
sports cartoonists drew with Mullin as their inspiration. Three of the
best at it were Lou Darvas, Karl
Hubenthal and Murray Olderman.
And so when I heard about a new book by Olderman, I dashed to the keyboard
and ordered it- Mingling with
Lions (290 7x10-inch pages; paperback, $19.95), but it isn't what
I thought it would be. I was looking forward to reading about Olderman's
life drawing sports cartoons. I was hoping for something like Mullin's
A Hand in Sport, which was mostly his cartoons with a little commentary
accompanying each of them. (Poor reproduction of many of the drawings,
alas.) But Lions isn't like
that. It contains scores of Olderman's crisp and muscular renderings-some
cartoons, lots of juicy bold-lined caricatures and some full-bore portraits
of nearly photographic intensity (on coquille or ross board, a special
grained paper that yields a varying gray tone when rubbed with a grease
crayon)-but the book is mostly text, stories about the athletes. Olderman
spent 35 years working for NEA as a sports cartoonist and writer, and
during that time, he met the legends-Mickey Mantle, Howard Cosell, Muhammad
Ali, Joe DiMaggio, Casey Stengel, Rocky Marciano, Johnny Unitas, Jack
Dempsey, Branch Rickey, Fran Tarkenton, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, Pete
Rose and on and on. Olderman knew them all. And in this book, he tells
stories about them. The title of the book comes from one of the stories.
The story involves Harry Grayson, an old-time sports writer who gained
a reputation writing about boxers. One day in the mid-1920s, it seems,
he went down to the old boxing arena, Madison Square Garden (in those
days, it was on Eighth Avenue between 48th and 49th
streets), when a circus was moving in. Seeing nothing going on in boxing,
Grayson wandered into the basement where he found a young man in a cage
full of lions, defending himself with only a whip and a chair. Grayson
was astounded by this feat, and when he discovered that the young man
(whose name, he learned, was Clyde Beattie, destined for greater fame
than Siegfried and Roy) earned just fifty bucks a week in this death-defying
performance, Grayson grabbed the kid and took him to the office of an
agent and promoter who, Grayson told the kid, could get him more money.
The agent, as astonished as Grayson by Beattie's pittance, promised
to get him five times that amount. Beattie was flabbergasted and agreed
to the deal. The contract was drawn up, but just as he was about to
sign, the young lion tamer paused. And then he put down the pen. "First,
you gotta understand one thing, mister," Beattie said, looking
up at the promoter. "I ain't worth shit without them lions."
Olderman's book is full of anecdotes like this, most of them with punchline
conclusions, all of them revealing the clay feet and warm hearts of
the legends. And Olderman's pictures are stunning. Even if, like me,
you aren't a big sports fan, you'll love the book. (And if you are a
big sports fan, why, you'll be ecstatic.) At the end of the book, Olderman devotes its shortest chapter
(just 16 pages) to his own career, with an emphasis on the writing rather
than the drawing part of it. Writing he apparently did almost effortlessly
(and his rattling conversational prose here speaks highly of his skill),
but drawing he mastered laboriously, through diligent application and
practice year after year. When he was growing up in the 1930s, he remembers,
Manhattan sported twelve daily newspapers, and ten of them (not The New York Times or the Herald-Tribune) had a staff sports cartoonist
"whose work was prominently displayed on the first page of the
sports section." At the World-Telegram
where Mullin demonstrated his genius day after day, six days a week,
the sports section's front page was designed around his cartoon. And
Mullin exploited the situation, varying his configurations repeatedly;
he felt the purpose of a sports cartoon was to "dress up the page,"
and he made it don its most extravagant finery. Sports cartooning flourished
through the 1950s, but it was, even then, a dying craft. Olderman landed
his job at NEA in 1952 because the "nabobs" there wanted a
daily comic strip with a sports theme-but not a single-panel sports
cartoon, which, Olderman says, they already felt was passe. The World-Telegram
collapsed in 1967, one of the casualties of a disastrous succession
of printers' strikes in the city. Mullin lost his perch. He continued
to draw occasionally, as I remember (maybe even regularly; my memory
isn't that good), but he was retirement age, 65, and he died just eleven
years later. Sports cartooning lost its colossus. But by then, sports
cartoonists were pretty hard to find. Hubenthal had been converted to political cartooning sometime
in the 1940s by his boss, William Randolph Hearst. Darvas had retired
by then, and Olderman retired in about 1987, taking refuge in sunny
California from whence he's written eleven books. Today, as Olderman
observes, there are only two sports cartoonists left in regular practice:
Bill Gallo, Olderman's exact contemporary, still writing a weekly
column and drawing at the New
York Daily News; and Drew
Litton at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where he's
been treating his subject as a political cartoonist treats his-with
an eye more askance than awed (the usual sports cartoonist posture).
"What happened?" asks Olderman. Part of what happened, he
says, is that the afternoon metropolitan newspaper disappeared; newspapers
went to morning editions. And with that, "the logical display case
for sports cartoons," reporting on the day's sporting contests,
disappeared. And news holes shrank as newsprint got more expensive.
Editors were less inclined to devote any space to such frivolous enterprises
as "cartoons." The sports cartoonists themselves retired or
died and no one came along to take their places. A new generation of
editor turned to the action sports photograph to "dress up"
the sports page. And another change involved the very nature of sports
coverage. In the days of yore, sports writers lauded sports and the
athletes who displayed their considerable skills. But the modern sports
writer is a wannabe investigative reporter, a habitual skeptic whose
chief motive is to find chinks in the armor of yesteryear, to find fault,
to unearth abuses, to reveal drug usage, to question. In this environment
of antagonism between athlete and writer, there is scarcely room for
laudatory cartooning. Strange, then, that the fate of the political
cartoonist is so precarious these days: the editoonist is as skeptical
as the political reporter, and throws more doubt upon the politicians,
so why is he (and she) an endangered species? You'd think the reverse
would be the case-that political cartoonists as a breed would be on
the increase.
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