{"id":4211,"date":"2008-03-04T00:08:29","date_gmt":"2008-03-04T07:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2008\/03\/04\/bad-cartoonist\/"},"modified":"2008-03-04T00:08:29","modified_gmt":"2008-03-04T07:28:17","slug":"bad-cartoonist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=4211","title":{"rendered":"Bad Cartoonist!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new blog Bad Cartoonist<\/a> is written by someone who is obviously a political cartoonist, but he’s keeping his name to himself. (Or she. But odds are, given the demographics of political cartoonists, it’s he.)<\/p>\n

And he’s pissed off by the laziness, hackery, and lack of imagination that characterizes most political cartooning nowadays. For instance<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Todays lesson is a follow-up on yesterdays lesson on how you too can be a cartoonist with out really trying. Today we\u2019re going to learn from one well-paid, syndicate, award-winning cartoonist; Jeff Stahler.<\/p>\n

Yesterday we learned how you can rip off Hollywood or Cnn when realise you don\u2019t have a creative bone in your body. For those of you who are so insipid that you can\u2019t even make a cartoon out of a movie poster we have the following technique. We\u2019re going to call it the \u2018Stahler\u2019 because he does it more than anybody else but, keep in mind, every cartoonist on the planet does this, repeatedly. And they all hate it with a passion.<\/p>\n

The idea is simple. If you can\u2019t come up with an idea about a news story, just draw a cartoon of people reacting to the news. Most often this cartoon will be of two people, husband and wife, sipping coffee at the breakfast table reacting the newspaper in their hands. The cartoonist must draw the newspaper. No one knows for sure why, but it is a rule that is followed religiously. Subtle variations include: two people at a cafe; two people in front of the TV (in this instance the cartoonist must draw the remote control. Don\u2019t ask why, just do it. It\u2019s a rule.); two people reading a sign and so forth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two illustrate “the Stahler,” he posted this image, which was created by overlaying two different <\/em>cartoons by Stahler which were published less than a month apart.<\/p>\n

An overlay of two cartoons by political cartoonist Jeff Stahler, both showing a husband and wife reading the newspaper at breakfast. What the overlay reveals is that the two cartoons are almost identical; the wife, in particular, appears to have been traced the second time.<\/p>\n

I don’t share all the values of Bad Cartoonist; I think you can be a good political cartoonist without being good at caricatures, and for some styles of cartooning repeating images works. But I think that whatever style you work in, any good cartoonist strives to be creative and demonstrate good craft within the parameters of that style. Within the style he’s working in, Stahler — like way too many successful political cartoonists — displays virtually no creativity and cheats on the craft. Which is why political cartooning — and in particular, the kind of political cartooning most often found in mainstream newspapers — has lost almost all creative vitality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new blog Bad Cartoonist is written by someone who is obviously a political cartoonist, but he’s keeping his name to himself. (Or she. But odds are, given the demographics of political cartoonists, it’s he.) And he’s pissed off by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartooning-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}