The candidates get new running mates

The other night Kamala Harris made history when she became the first Black woman to become a major party’s vice presidential nominee. Donald Trump gets jealous when someone else gets too much attention – he likes the spotlight to be on him – so this is how I imagined him responding to the news about Harris.

Many a truth is said in jest and I sincerely hope this is one of them.

Trump’s reaction to the COVID-19 crisis has made everything worse for pretty much everybody in America and I hope that will be an issue throughout the remainder of the campaign. I’ll do my part to make it one.

This isn’t the first time I’ve used the COVID-19 as Death character and here he or she or it is (haven’t decided on gender) in a cartoon about going back to school.

Which brings us to a short, but hopefully somewhat entertaining history of political cartooning.

Cartoon characters and visual shorthand

A long time ago I read about a study some college did that revealed how long people looked at political cartoons.

It was about three seconds.

So that being the case, political cartoonists had a tradition of creating characters that symbolize something or someone else and used those characters as visual shorthand.

Instead of drawing a bunch of people and saying “these are the Democrats” a cartoonist would draw a donkey and say “this donkey represents the Democrats” and a single character is way easier to draw and use in a scene.

According to the History.com website the first recorded use of a donkey to represent the Democratic Party was in 1870 and the guy who used it was Thomas Nast. Four years later Nast originated the use of an elephant to represent the Republican Party so if you’re tired of seeing those symbols, blame a cartoonist.

Nast also helped Uncle Sam – created by James Montgomery Flagg – become a symbol for the United States.

If we only have three seconds of your time we have to get our point across quickly and characters like John Q. Public – created by cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker – help us do that.

After Pat Oliphant and Jeff MacNelly brought a more realistic style of art to political cartooning, creating cartoon characters became less common, but I think they can still come in handy.

You made me what I am today

For most of my career I sat inside an office, drew cartoons and sent them out into the world without knowing their fate.

Then I started making public appearances.

Showing my cartoons to a crowd of people taught me a couple things for sure. Number one: a crowd can’t fake a laugh. The cartoons were either funny or they weren’t and people’s response told me they liked cartoons that made their point quickly and would laugh harder if the point was kinda mean so if you think I’m a jerk it’s a little bit your fault.

And what people found funny depended on their point of view.

A cartoon that killed in front of a bunch of liberals would fall flat in front of a bunch of conservatives and vice versa. It really depended on whose ox was getting gored and if the viewer had voted for that particular ox.

I quickly figured out that people’s response to my cartoons was based on how closely I came to agreeing with their point of view. A good political cartoon upsets half the people that look at it and the only worse thing a cartoonist can do is be bland and then everybody loses interest. Damned if you do, etc., etc., etc.

Also, I could spend hours laboring over the drawing and for the most part people didn’t care if I took the time to make up funny titles on all the books on the bookshelf in the background. I had about three seconds to make my point and then it was time to move on.

So the COVID-19 character helps me make my point quickly and this probably isn’t the last time you’ll see it, although I’d be real happy to retire this character soon as possible.

Have a good weekend, everybody.

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