Craven image
Can you be political and a cartoonist without being a political cartoonist?
Perhaps you’ve heard there’s an election next week. I’m tired of every election being “the most consequential in our lifetime,” but I guess that will be the case for as long as I have a lifetime, and probably for some time afterward. I suppose the lesson is that EVERY election should be treated as “the most consequential in our lifetime,” though an escalating string of superlatives tends to cancel itself out.
I have done more to support the Democrats in this election than past ones, which isn’t saying much. I’ve donated money, I’ve sent letters to registered voters, and I’ve done a bit of phone banking, which I quickly found counterproductive because my stress levels, even when talking to dedicated Harris supporters, led to stilted, unbearable conversations that did the campaign no favors. But hey - I tried it, which is more than I’ve ever done in the past.
One thing I have not tried to do this time around is leverage my modest creative skills for the cause.
This was definitely not the case the first time Trump ran. In 2016, I was at the apex of my efforts to improve my craft as a cartoonist/illustrator, a journey that brought me to the classroom of Steve Brodner, one of the country’s foremost political artists. I was taking advantage of my then-employer’s education reimbursement policies to attend courses at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, so I just happened to be studying under someone whose talents in caricature and satire were a perfect fit for the moment. The class convened, in tears, on the day Trump was declared the victor, and Steve made the case that our talents were needed more than ever. We spent the final few weeks of class fired up about the possibilities of resisting the incoming regime through art. My focus and consolation over the following two years was to create art that could move the needle of public opinion by exposing the rottenness of the Trumpist ethos.
The reality, alas, was rockier than the dream. I came to feel that any creative output that was NOT dedicated to activism was a shameful waste, piling on unsustainable levels of guilt whenever my mind and heart strayed elsewhere. Because even at the time, I knew this was going against my grain. In theater and art, my work has always tended to gravitate toward fantasy and comedy rather than satire and protest. Politically, I’m a lightweight, a left-liberal addicted to the comforts of privilege who lacks the ability (or will) to bring incisive focus to my broad-brush opinions. Combine this with the echo chamber of social media, where anything I posted felt self-evident to the majority of my small, likeminded community, and the result was two years of muddled, confused visual statements that all felt hackneyed and redundant next to people like my professor Steve, who had the passion and the vision to somehow speak both to the moment and beyond it. (His current ongoing project, The Greater Quiet, is a pageant of illustrated quotes that shed satirical light on the daily headlines, built from the very words of those who both make the news and suffer the consequences - sober and silly by turns, and always a corrective to the mediated sterility of mainstream media. Consider it required reading.)
Ground down by the exhaustion of tracking the Trump administration’s daily indignities, and called to increasingly greater responsibilities at work and home, I sheepishly let my output peter out over time. When I did muster the energy to work on art, I returned to the type of projects that don’t, for better or worse, chafe against my existing sensibilities. The guilt has never fully disappeared (as with so many things in my life), but I’ve managed to live with it.
I dramatized this trajectory in some comics that I made in 2017-18, which you can read below. The first attempt was an extended storyline that was part of a semi-ongoing series accurately called “Insufficient Comics.” Inspired by the rage I felt after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in the August 2017, the story starts out as a typical standoff between the artist and the blank sheet of paper but soon becomes a personal referendum on the effectiveness of “political art” as practiced without discipline by a confused nobody like me. I tried to end on a hopeful note, but I never quite found a way to fulfill the promise I made to myself in the final installment.
Over a year later, I created a follow-up to “Craven Image,” which I’ve never posted or shared with anyone until now. I drew it during the wave of tepid relief that came with the Democrats winning back the house in the 2018 midterms. For that election I’d created a get-out-the-vote poster (see the top of this post), which felt paltry to me even at the time.
My ostensible reason for tabling this sequel was that I had failed miserably at my attempt to embellish it with watercolor (I’d used the wrong paper, blah blah blah) - but more truthfully, I found it navel-gazing and self-lacerating in a way that didn’t feel productive at the time. I still feel that way, actually - but I also wonder if it might reflect the sense of powerlessness that many creative people feel right now. Everyone can - and should - contribute to politics, but not all of us are cut out to make “political art” as such. And maybe that’s okay?
At any rate, this week I scanned those unseen pages and slapped a coat of digital paint on them so they could actually be read. Here’s the original Part 1, followed by the never-before-seen Part 2…
Part 1
Part 2:
Part of what I’ve come to believe is that art (“Art?”) on its own is powerless. It needs to be allied with something larger in a concrete and strategic way - an organization, a publication, a community, a cause. Just setting images free to float around on social media, like I did, was always going to be a recipe for disappointment. I do think that, when allied with journalism or activism, as in the work of Steve Brodner and others, art has the ability to inform, enlighten, and persuade. And I maintain that less direct approaches can still provide solace and recognition for those who are struggling to make change by other means. So I present you these comics in the hope that if you too are feeling demoralized and terrified by the march of events, but powerless to address them directly through your creative practice, you can take comfort in the rueful chuckle of seeing a bit of yourself here.
As for next week - well, you don’t need me to tell you what to do. Voting is the one surefire way we CAN make an unquestionable difference - let’s just hope there are enough of us.
All our work matters. And most of it arrives in silence. But if we engage one reader and get them to think, we are doing it right!! There are many forms to work in. Most are better loved than political illustration!!!!
Bravo for all Jeff!
Steve