Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Bookends

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Mike Peterson Published: May 3, 2011 1 minute 3 comments

 
I have looked at scores of cartoons relating to the death of bin Laden, but you shouldn't imagine that I was narrowing down the field to select one that was "best."

I was simply trying to find one that wasn't obvious or even lame. One, to start with, that didn't reference 72 virgins, or demand to see the death certificate, or confuse the Statue of Libery with the statue of Justice. I mean, I know we all love mash-ups, but, please — The Statue of Liberty carries a torch. Justice carries a sword (and she also carries a scales, but balance was missing from most of what I saw).

What I found, going through a multitude of sites, was mostly a selection of cartoons belaboring the obvious or proclaiming the politics of the cartoonist. A few were offensively lame but most were simply … meh.

I liked Chan Lowe's first cartoon on the topic because it doesn't really proclaim much of anything. Rather, it asks a question. And I think, right now, that's the appropriate response to bin Laden's death. It is a moment out of "The Candidate," in which Robert Redford pursues a Senate seat and then (spoiler alert), having won it, is at a loss because the goal was to win. "What do we do now?" he asks.

Then, having had a day to ponder, Lowe produced a second cartoon on the subject, featuring 72 virgins. *sigh* Shoulda stuck with his first reaction. "What do we do now?" is an interesting question, perhaps the interesting question.

It's not easy to come up with something interesting at a moment like this. Obituary cartoons tend to be a bookmark, a mandatory must-draw that doesn't proceed from the cartoonist's actual opinion or analysis of anything, but, rather, an acknowledgement that this famous person has died and must be memorialized somehow. When Jim Henson died, we had cartoons of weeping Muppets. And again, I say, "meh."

Major one-off events — like the two shuttle disasters, for example — tend to produce lousy cartoons, because, again, it is incumbent on the cartoonist to make a comment while there often really isn't much to be said. and maybe this was a bookend moment as well as a bookmark moment, because 9/11 produced a host of lame cartoons, most of which (I stopped counting at 30) were of a weeping Statue of Liberty.

However, the mission of this blog is not to point out lousy cartoons but to salute the best, so here, from that first bookend, are a pair admirable cartoons rendered at a difficult, challenging moment:

Clay Bennett went beyond weeping Statues of Liberty to conflate an attack on a building to an attack on a nation. Use of color wasn't common a decade ago and it helps here quite a bit.

"The Scream" is overused in pop culture, but a cartoonist should never be afraid of using a familiar image in the right context. Peter Schrank had just the right image here for two reasons: It's easy enough to convert a bridge into Wall Street, and the painting does lend itself to immediate one-to-one graphic parallels. Moreover, the world reaction was just that, which we tend to forget a decade later. Familiar image or not, this was exactly the right one.