Nik Kowsar Tells Why Editoonists Are The Best Critics of Power
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Nik Kowsar is an Iranian-Canadian residing in Washington, D.C. and sentenced to prison in absentia for his cartoons about Iranian regimes. He recently used his Subtack to praise the art of editorial cartooning and admonishes the practitioners against self-censorship.
Read Nik’s “What I Learned From the Masters of the Ink-Stained Truth.”
People like to treat editorial cartoons as garnish—something clever you glance at after you’ve finished the “real” journalism. I’ve heard that tone all my life: Nice drawing. Now let’s get serious.
That’s exactly backwards.
A serious political cartoon isn’t decoration. It’s a pressure test. It asks, out loud and in public, the question most institutions try to tiptoe around: Who is lying, how are they doing it, and who is paying the price?And when people want to dismiss what a cartoonist is saying, they rarely argue the point. They go after the messenger. They belittle the craft. It’s just a cartoon. As if translating a difficult idea into one simple, readable image is a lesser form of thinking—when it’s often the opposite. It’s intellectual work with nowhere to hide.
[T]he best cartoonists aren’t side commentary. They’re critics with a sharper tool.
As for The Masters in the title Nik takes a couple paragraphs each to pay tribute to
Daumier’s gift wasn’t simply humor—it was anatomy. He drew judges, lawyers, officials, and bourgeois pretenders as flesh and posture: smug, swollen, predatory, ridiculous, all too real…
Nast understood what modern politics still pretends is new: the fight isn’t only over policies; it’s over symbols and narratives—over what people recognize instantly…
Herblock taught me a balance that’s rare: moral clarity without turning into a sermon…
Oliphant taught me scale—the ability to handle big, messy geopolitics without turning it into mush. In a world that tries to fragment everything into isolated “incidents,” his work refuses fragmentation…
Levine taught me that caricature isn’t about ugliness. It’s about essence. He exaggerated the way a doctor uses imaging: to reveal what polite portraiture hides…
KAL—and a lot of modern cartoonists—make the present problem obvious: the crisis isn’t lack of information. It’s manufactured exhaustion. Power doesn’t need to censor everything if it can flood the zone…
And if are curious about what is currently happening in Iran you could do much worse than reading Nik’s Substack. While the loudest news is about runaway inflation there are many other government failures bring the populace to anger. Nik the Hydrologist names the governments inability to supply water to the populace.
If you don’t understand Iran’s logistics and food vulnerability—grain ships sitting behind ports while unloading and distribution capacity collapses—you don’t understand what’s at stake. Political collapse without planning can turn into hunger fast.
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