Whether depicting President George W. Bush as an incompetent chimpanzee, Hillary Clinton as a devil or LSU’s Easy Streets program as a winding maze, the satirical nature of editorial cartoons have proven to be an essential part of newspaper opinion pages.
Award-winning editorial cartoonists spoke to a group of more than 100 students Thursday afternoon in the Journalism Building’s Holliday Forum. The lecture, sponsored by the Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs, featured four speakers who came to the University as part of “The Line That Roars: Editorial Cartoons in the Age of Anxiety,” and told students about the creative process and difficulties of creating editorial cartoons.
The exhibit consists of approximately 200 pieces by the artists who spoke and shows how editorial cartoons from the past 10 years reflect major issues in American society. The exhibit is on display at the LSU Museum of Art located downtown in the Shaw Center for Arts. The exhibit opens today and will be on display until February 2008.
“Editorial cartoons are the intersection of the visual arts and journalism,” said Richard West, director emeritus of Frye Art Museum in Seattle. “And to be a successful editorial cartoonist you have to have the eye of an artist and the nose of a journalist.”
David Horsey, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, said there are no rules to creating a successful cartoon.
“You bring to the cartoon of the day what it requires,” Horsey said. “The modern political cartoon is a mix of things. Sometimes you want a lot of words, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you want to be very funny, and sometimes you want to be deadly serious.”
West said cartoonists must be careful with the images they draw to ensure their message is clearly communicated.
“Your images and message have to match,” West said. “Otherwise, you may send a terrible mixed message and destroy whatever impact you’re trying to make.”
Steve Kelley, editorial cartoonist at The Times-Picayune, said it is the job of an editorial cartoonist to express an opinion of their own and not necessarily of the newspaper as a whole. He said editorial cartoons can be a symbol of our nation’s democracy.
“The very fact that we’re allowed to publish stuff as mean-spirited as it can be, or as candid as we want it to be and as much as we make elected officials or people in power look like imbeciles, is an absolute, literal celebration of democracy,” Kelley said. “You clearly could not do that in a lot of other places.”
Horsey said editorial cartoons help keep readers interested and involved in the democratic debate. He said the controversial nature of editorial cartoons opens discussion for opinion.
“We work on what I call the far side of the First Amendment,” Horsey said. “We are the only people at newspapers who are paid to knowingly offend readers.”
Todd Walters, mass communication sophomore, said he enjoys editorial cartoons and often reads them online. He said the lecture was humorous and validated what he was learning in his mass communication courses at the University.
Jaime Kolz, mass communication sophomore, said the lecture was funny.
“I didn’t think I was going to [be] interested at all,” Kolz said. “But I think their humor kept me interested. They were so funny it kept me listening.”
—-Contact Nicholas Persac at [email protected]