Go, Look: Erik Wemple On Two St. Louis Arch Ferguson Cartoons

There's an interesting article from late last week here where Erik Wemple goes over the similarity between the recent New Yorker Ferguson cover by Bob Staake and the similar approach RJ Matson used in a cartoon last summer. I think this stuff is always worth noting because it helps identify cartoonists and institutions that make a habit of not screening ideas more rigorously -- it's almost impossible to prove any thing nefarious from a single example, no matter how egregious and obvious it might seem to a reader or even an aggrieved party. However, someone who takes a shortcut once is bound to do it again -- my bad habits never come in solo servings -- so one hopes people ask these questions as a way of building a case if building a case eventually becomes necessary.

Even though the individual appraisal isn't all that important, in this particular case it doesn't seem to me like Staake's a straight lift of Matson's for the reasons Matson notes and a couple of others. The arch imagery is so generic, and a big chunk of the effectiveness of Staake's cartoon is in the shading choice over a labeling one. If you had shown me the Staake cover and asked me to bet $100 that something similar had already appeared, I would have taken that bet. The supplementary example brought up to flesh out the article is worth noting, too, and might be of greater interest because of its specificity. Still, I always favor the notion that humor repeats itself.
 
posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives