Go, Watch: KAL In Tampa; Matt Bors, Tom Toles

How much you like the cartooning and insight in this KAL video is going to vary by political orientation, the kind of humor one likes, any number of aesthetic standards you might apply to its execution and even age, but I thought this was a reasonably effective use of an editorial cartoonist of the point-and-laugh variety on the ground at a political event and a pretty fair use of video, two things I almost never enjoy. You see something like this and you can almost envision some sort of wider future that's not traditional staffed-position cartooning as we've come to know it. Almost.

I haven't seen anything I've liked cartooning-related vis-a-vis the political convention. Scrolling down Cagle's blog is disheartening except for this post where the cartoonist reveals he beat feet to India to speak on a State Department-focused itinerary rather than cartoon about that particular brand of, well, branding. Good for him. I didn't watch five seconds of the political convention, but judging from activity on Twitter, on blogs and via Facebook it seems everyone in comics watched it -- or at least the same percentage of comics people that tend to watch things like the Olympics or the Grammys. I'm sort of endlessly curious about the notion of comics people holding forth on politics in this way, which goes back several years now -- at one of the first comics blogging panels I attended, there was 10 minutes on blogging about politics from your comics blog; I didn't have much to say on the topic -- and seems to me almost wholly a creation of the way the Internet has people relating to one another. I'm fascinated because I don't get it. I keep making the same stupid joke about Don McGregor expounding on the Panama Canal's return in FOOM because the whole notion that part of the way you conduct yourself in public is through declarations of political insight seems super-weird, particularly as expressed in comics right now.

I did like this piece from Matt Bors (that's a chunk of it above), I think because the outright paradigm shift we're continuing to experience in terms of who makes up the American electorate seems to me an actual political issue. I tend to catch up with Tom Toles in big chunks, and I thought this a graceful, funny way to express a particular point of view about class politics right now. Toles seemed more furiously dismayed by the convention than willing to be engaged by it, and you can't really argue with that.
 
posted 6:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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