CSotD: Saturday Classic: Ron Cobb
Skip to comments
There's been a long and convoluted exchange over at the Daily Cartoonist — producing more heat than light, as these things tend to do — about what a political cartoon ought to be, with the impetus having been a blog posting by Daryl Cagle about how to create the kind of political cartoon that newspaper editors will actually pay for and put on their pages. Somehow, the word "good" got mixed into the conversation, which is a silly context for that particular word, "good" and "marketable" being two completely separate topics.
Case in point: Ron Cobb did really good cartoons for the LA Free Press back in the late 60s/early 70s, but was never terribly marketable. He enjoyed considerable success in later years, doing design work for films that you have most certainly seen, but his cartoons never got much beyond the underground, where most work fell into the "labor of love" category.
I was poking around for a good link and some additional information on Cobb and found this, which is well worth reading, features a couple of his other cartoons and, coincidentally, leads off with this particular cartoon, one that I've had in my favorites file for nearly as long as I've had a computer.
I scanned it from a book of Phil Ochs songs, which brings up the appropriate simile:
Ron Cobb was to R. Crumb as Phil Ochs was to Bob Dylan.
Comments 1
Comments are closed.