Upate On The Delonas Chimp Cartoon

* the NAACP has called on the dismissal of Sean Delonas and his editor from the pages of the New York Post for the publication of a cartoon many believed either directly compared or riffed on the likelihood of comparison between President Obama and a chimpanzee killed in a hail of gunfire. Al Sharpton has called for a city council review.

* I'm not sure I understand the tone of Daryl Cagle's post about a cartoon over which he was castigated on racial grounds a while back. I'm detecting an undercurrent of resentment -- although granted, I could be wrong. While the people that throw stuff like that into people's faces as grist for whatever manufactured political controversy of the day or as absolute proof of the state of someone's heart are annoying as all crap and even potentially dangerous, I would also imagine that finding out about obscure racist comparisons is a good thing so that you can avoid them in the future or at least head into the next cartoon with greater ownership over what you're saying. I don't think anyone on planet Earth has conflated this cartoon or the blue-lips cartoons with what they feel Sean Delonas may have been doing with the chimp cartoon. I was accused by readers of being racist, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic in the course of doing a daily comic strip, and while the certainty that I was doing something awful like that on purpose was kind of distressing, it was on balance good to hear from some of those people so I could refine what I was saying away from an unconscious slip into insult.

* wait, this article actually does make a comparison between the obscurities and Delonas, if only by proximity. I think that's unfortunate. They should remain separate, because I think they're processed in separate ways. I would also reject the notion floated there that no one can criticize the president without being accused of depicting him in a racist fashion -- I suppose a certain hardcore constituency is going to suggest that any criticism is based on racism the same way that hardcore people on the other side of the political spectrum suggested that criticism was un-American, but that seems a completely different issue than the trickiness of visual iconography. Anyone that thought Mike Lester's Jonestown cartoon was racist I'd greatly suspect of being an idiot, although I didn't like that cartoon.
 
posted 7:10 am PST | Permalink
 

---

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