Tuesday TOON Roundup 3

[n2doc]

Obama


















Middle East

[ronnykmarshall]

1. Oh dear.

[Blue_Tires]

2. ttt

[Occam Bandage]

3. I get the idea Mr. Fish was not meant to be a cartoonist.

His comics, whether under Bush or under Obama, are most often a picture of his subject above or beside which he writes a paragraph of unrestrained invective. The rest of the Obama-bashing cartoons here are at least cartoons: they are clever and amusing graphic representations of ideas (even if those ideas are counterfactual, such as the one that makes the bizarre claim that Obama is proposing indefinite detention) with powerful, punchy text that drives home a single point unambiguously.

Mr. Fish prefers to babble on and on, using as many vitriolic adjectives and adverbs as possible, with his drawings usually little more than a representation of the figure he's angry at--today's installment is at least an improvement, in that he has attempted to come up with a drawing more creative than "a picture of the person I'm talking about." Still, he prefers to tell people things rather than show them things, and that is the opposite of what a good cartoonist does. A cartoonist would not need to say "idiotic and cruel determination," "dim-witted adoption of the Bush Doctrine," or "neither the balls nor the compassion to offer an alternative." A cartoonist would demonstrate those things through a humorous juxtaposition of image and text.