Herblock Foundation: The Golden Age For Editorial Cartoonists And The Nation’s Newspapers Is Over

I urge you read a couple of articles today about the distressing state of editorial cartooning: Bob Duggan's thoughtful article at Big Think, and the PDF of the report from the Herblock Foundation that triggered Duggan's piece. There has been no more stark presentation of the travails facing that form of cartoon expression that this: approximately 40 practitioners (down from 2000 at its height, and even 100-120 within my professional lifetime covering comics), most of whom are very old, young and promising cartoonists leaving the field altogether, little in the way of a potential profit center for anyone to hold onto those positions five, ten twenty years from now.

Duggan's piece is helpful because he personalizes reading editorial cartoons in the course of reading all comics: it's partly how he learned about the adult world (it's in this way that Doonesbury very much functioned like an editorial cartoon for a lot of kids now adults). He also nails the way the great cartoons were once able to shift debate on important issues, like Herblock calling out Joseph McCarthy's nonsense and exposing it to ridicule. I think most of the great cartoons function like that, whether or not they have a wide readership like that one from Herblock or Bill Mauldin's weeping Lincoln Memorial. I know there are maybe a few dozen times I've seen a cartoon on issues of reduced national import and thought, "whoa, game over" because of a particularly poignant cartoon. I'll miss that when they're gone. I miss it already.
 
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