The Political Miss Cellany
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Propaganda, Cancel Culture, Public Service, Public Remonstration, Cartoons and Cartoonists.
Agitprop Animation
Members of Parliment are warning of youngsters being victims of propaganda with the animated Masha and the Bear, a Russian animated cartoon aimed at pre-school children.
George Francis Lee for The Guardian reminds us that there is a history of animated evangelism.
Cartoons as propaganda have a century-long history. The earliest examples can be traced back to the first world war, according to David Welch, emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Kent. “All belligerents employed them,” he says. One of the most prominent British animators in 1914 was Lancelot Speed, whose “lightning sketches” featured him drawing ridiculous caricatures of Kaiser Wilhelm II haunted by ghosts, wearing dresses and being turned into a sausage. “These proved hugely popular with cinema audiences,” Welch adds.
But the use of propaganda cartoons exploded in the second world war.
Lee takes on a sentimental journey from the United States’ The Ducktator starring Daffy Duck and Der Fuehrer’s Face starring Donald Duck to Fascist Italy’s 1941 Dottor Churkill and Britain’s 1954 Animal Farm.Then, more recently, with digital animation, Adobe Flash, and now AI there has been an explosion of animated propaganda.
Recently, the cost of cartoon warfare has plummeted. After the start of the US-Israel war on Iran, the Iranian digital media company Explosive Media used generative AI to create Lego Movie-style animations in support of Iran…
Bernd Zeller Fights the Political Concensus
Sabine Beppler-Spahl for The European Conservative writes of Bernd Zeller raging against the machine.
[Freedom] is surely also in a bad state if popular cartoonists face cancel culture and threats to their livelihood simply for being too sympathetic to the populist Right.
The cartoonist is Bernd Zeller…
Zeller is one of Germany’s best-known caricaturists and the author of several satirical books. Highly successful in his field, he has drawn and written for major publications ranging from Titanic and Spiegel Online to the popular “Harald Schmidt Late Night Show,” where he worked as a gag writer from the mid-1990s until 2014.
But the satire business has grown hard in our age of cancel culture.
For Zeller, the real break came after he drew cartoons for the AfD’s membership newspaper between 2020 and 2022. Even before that, though, his humor was regarded in many established circles as ‘quirky’ at best—and often as overly provocative, even offensive.
And they were right: it is, and was, exactly what good humor and good satire are meant to be…
A Tribute to the Public Service of a Public Servant
Editorial cartoonists rarely get to praise public officials, JD Crowe gets that opportunity (or here).
When I first took the cartoonist job at the Mobile Register in 2000, it felt like I had found a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. This Old South city with its beautiful canopy of live oaks dripping in Spanish moss was home to a barnyard of outlandishly colorful and/or corrupt characters. Most of whom had been elected to office.
I quickly learned that Lower Alabama was a target-rich environment. I couldn’t draw fast enough — and I didn’t have to look beyond Old Mobile for material. I was surrounded by fodder figures. Ripe and ready for the pickin’.
In 2006, when Tillman stepped down “to spend more time with his perjury and ethics violations” — Cochran ran for sheriff. And he won. Time and time and time again. He served four terms as sheriff. For good reason. My toon business took a severe hit.
‘Artbolish ICE’
From Maine to Southern California, from Minnesota to Texas the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has made enemies of the American public. Adam Solorzano at Calo News promotes a SoCal protest of a differrent kind curated by Calo News editorial cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz.
People throughout the country have expressed their frustration and anger at the terror that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has pushed upon immigrant communities since the inception of the current administration, as they continue tearing families apart at a rapid pace, leaving whole communities broken.
Local activists have expressed their thoughts on ICE in different ways, with some like CALÓ News cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, who’s been motivated to host his own exhibit called “ARTbolish ICE,” to create spaces where artists can express these thoughts through a paintbrush and canvas.
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