Strengths and Limitations

An essay about political cartooning, baseball and Life in general…

When I first started writing about baseball and ballplayers, a ballplayer friend—Tim Bogar (Mets, Astros and Dodgers)—said it might be helpful if I thought in terms of “Strengths and Limitations” because pretty much every Big League player is good at something, but bad at something else.

And thinking in those terms would keep me from simplistic, black and white conclusions like “that guy’s great” or “this guy stinks” and while you’re at it you can apply the same thought process to your spouse, children, pets, mailman or bartender because it applies to pretty much everything and everybody and that includes political cartoonists, which is the subject of today’s epistle.

BTW: When I asked why not “Strengths and Weaknesses” Tim said because ballplayers don’t like the word “weakness” and who am I to argue with 154 years of baseball wisdom, so today we’ll talk about “Strengths and Limitations” not “Strengths and Weaknesses” and to kick things off we’ll take a second look at a cartoon I recently posted:

As I pointed out at the time I posted this cartoon, one of the ways to ridicule someone is to extend their logic to an illogical conclusion and in this case I extended Elon Musk’s firing of federal employees to include the pilot of Air Force One.

Which is kind of an exaggeration and kind of not because while the President relies on a pilot to get him where he’s going, other people rely on the fired federal employees just as much, but as I believe I also pointed out in a previous post, when self-centered, unsympathetic, egotistical jerks are in charge, your problems aren’t nearly as important as their problems and if you don’t agree, that’s not my problem.

(And now we’ll pause while we wait for that joke to sink in.)

BTW: A SpaceX rocket just exploded and it’s the second one in a row to blow up and they had to close airports while they waited for all the debris to fall out of the sky, so you’d think just maybe the Department of Government Efficiency would have some questions for Elon, but don’t hold your breath waiting.

Anyway…

The cartoon made the point that if you keep firing people without knowing what they do you’re eventually going to fire someone that’s needed and now let’s talk about the cartoon’s execution.

(Which reminds me that when his Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost yet another game during a losing season, NFL coach John McKay was asked what he thought about his team’s execution and McKay said he was in favor of it.)

Caricature and Cartooning 101

I started thinking about “Strengths and Limitations” when a reader complimented me on a caricature, which was nice, but I didn’t think the caricature was all that great probably because caricature isn’t one of my strengths as a cartoonist.

Now here’s a caricature by cartoonist David Levine who was great at it:

A couple things worth mentioning that at least one of my editors didn’t understand:

Nixon’s face is the biggest thing in the cartoon and takes up most of the space (still doesn’t make it easy, I couldn’t produce anything remotely as good no matter how much space you gave me) and at some point in my political cartooning career I realized I was better off creating simple visual symbols that stood for the people I was depicting: baseball cap, sunglasses and a chainsaw and let’s agree that’s Elon Musk, orange combover and red tie and let’s agree that’s Donald Trump.

Which is handy, because in political cartoons you might have to depict those people doing all sorts of things and in some cases the depictions need to be really really small and in the Air Force One cartoon the caricature of Trump was less than 5/8ths of an inch high on the original and would be much smaller by the time it appeared in a newspaper.

Which is OK because my goal isn’t to make you say “Oh, what a great caricature of Trump” — my goal is to get you to accept that it is Trump and then think about the political point the cartoon made.

And Now A Real Life Demonstration of Strengths and Limitations

Back when newspapers had money to burn and would supply the matches, I got sent to the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco along with two of my best friends, Bill DeOre (Dallas Morning News) and Jeff MacNelly (Chicago Tribune and that’s Jeff at the top of this post) and the three of us were supposed to draw cartoons for our papers back home, but quickly figured out a floor pass to a political convention is like looking at the moon through a telescope if the telescope is really shitty.

Standing on the convention floor, there was just no way to know what people were saying or what was important or what we should be drawing about.

That being the case…

We decided we’d have a much better idea of what was happening if we watched the convention on TV, which we could have done back home, but then we wouldn’t have been able to hang out together at Lefty O’Doul’s, drink beer and watch the convention together, which is exactly what we did.

After a couple of fun, but non-productive days we decided we better stay in the next morning and draw something for our newspapers and Bill and I were staying in some converted attic in the Tenderloin, along with pimps, their fulltime employees and a wide variety of drug-dealing acquaintances because hotel rooms in San Francisco were at a premium during the convention, while Jeff, with better connections and bigger expense account, was staying at some La-Di-Da Hotel like the St. Francis.

After a morning of drawing we met up in Jeff’s suite which contained more artwork than the Sistine Chapel and was wallpapered with numerous full-color drawings and when I saw all that work, I immediately said:

“Bullshit, there’s no way you turned out all that work this morning.”

Because Bill and I had managed just one black and white cartoon each, but when I looked closely at Jeff’s cartoons, Bill and I were in them doing things we’d all done since we arrived in San Francisco.

Dammit.

Bill and I were both solid professionals and won our (and quite possibly someone else’s) share of awards and made good livings, but this was like stepping into a boxing ring against Muhammad Ali in his prime, trying to land a punch and quickly realizing: “I just can’t touch this guy.”

Jeff was phenomenally talented in ways we weren’t and here’s a drawing he did of Jimmy Carter after Carter won some primaries that shows Jeff could have done what David Levine was doing had Jeff chosen to:

Having been offered a convincing demonstration of all the things we weren’t capable of producing, as we left the Hotel La-Di-Dah, Bill yelled “Fuck me!” and Frisbeed his one cartoon into San Francisco traffic which made me laugh, but then say: “We better go get that piece of shit, it’s all you’ve got.”

Later that summer at the Republican Convention…

We ran into a famous magazine cartoonist and he told us how hard it was to produce on a deadline and how he was sweating bullets to come up with just one idea in the entire week and showed us a drawing Jeff could have turned out left-handed in a moving cab on the way to or from Lefty O’Doul’s.

Bill and I look at each other and burst out laughing.

Which oddly enough brings us to…

In the TV show M*A*S*H they eventually decided to replace the character of Frank Burns with the character Charles Emerson Winchester III because they thought Frank Burns’ character was too easy a target for Hawkeye and BJ and Charles Emerson Winchester III would eventually give as good as he got, but in the episode in which the character was introduced, Charles can’t keep up in the operating room and feels overwhelmed and afterwards, Hawkeye and BJ explain:

“We’re not better than you; we’re just faster than you.”

They called it “meatball surgery” and through repetition had gotten good at it and that’s the way I felt about the magazine cartoonist; Bill and I were like Hawkeye and BJ (I’m writing this story so I get to be Hawkeye and Bill should be grateful I didn’t make him Corporal Klinger) and even though we couldn’t keep up with Jeff, the magazine cartoonist had a hard time keeping up with us because we’d gotten good at producing work quickly through repetition and as some cartoonist once profanely and politically-incorrectly said:

“Being a cartoonist is like fucking a nymphomaniac: the first thousand times are great.”

The overwhelmed magazine cartoonist could have gotten better at producing on a deadline, but he’d need to do it over and over and get used to the idea that you could turn out the greatest cartoon ever and still need to come right back and do it again the next day because it’s just one cartoon and that year your newspaper will need 299 more of them.

I have no idea of the exact number of cartoons I produced for the Kansas City Star, but it’s well over 11,000 and I probably drew three sketches for every cartoon that got published, so now we’re over 33,000 cartoon ideas and trust me, they weren’t all great.

But I learned to meet my deadlines.

Today’s Lesson

In Baseball (you knew I’d eventually get back to it) there are 5-Tool Players – run/throw/catch/hit/hit for power – and there aren’t very many of them and one of the keys to success in baseball is figuring out what you can’t do and doing that as seldom as possible.

Which is not how human beings tend to think.

We all want to be great at anything and everything and keep trying to do things we suck at which is why either Voltaire or Leo Durocher said: “Perfect is the enemy of good.” But quit trying to be perfect and settle for being good and if you’re good long enough, people will say you’re great.

San Diego Padre Tony Gwynn figured out he wasn’t a home run hitter (about nine a year) and focused on line drives and hit .338 lifetime. Understanding and accepting his Strengths and Limitations made Tony a Hall of Famer.

Early in my career I attended a lecture by Tony Auth (Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist) and Tony showed a simple sketch his newspaper declined to print. Evangelist Billy Graham had endorsed the castration of sex offenders (weird position for a Christian, or maybe not, depending on how much you know about Christians) so Tony depicted Billy standing by a guillotine with a small hole positioned crotch high.

The audience burst into laughter and right then and there I thought:

“It’s not the drawing…it’s the idea.”

One more time because I don’t want anyone misunderstanding what I’m about to say: as a cartoonist Jeff MacNelly was way way way more talented than me which was OK because Jeff was way way way more talented than just about everybody else and just because he’s playing at the same time as LeBron James, that doesn’t mean Steph Curry isn’t good at basketball.

But realizing I couldn’t draw like Jeff made me focus on the ideas and Jeff once said he wished he had my ideas because “they’re nice, tight, little pieces of logic” (although it would be way more accurate to say Jeff wished he had some of my ideas, even I don’t want all of them) and in my opinion (feel free to disagree because I won’t know or think about it) this cartoon is better than the Air Force One cartoon because it’s a better idea:

So today’s message, assuming there is one, if you’re a 5-tool player good for you, there aren’t a lot of you around, but if you’re not a 5-tool player maybe you should quit trying to be one and focus on what you do well and get really good at that and here’s what one of my favorite writers, Timothy Hallinan, had one of his characters say, which sums up the previous 2,047 words:

“Most people work their whole lives to get to the point where they do one thing okay, not great, just okay. People who get great, they only do one thing. Most great singers can’t swim for shit.”

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/