I read this morning about the evidence mounting against Trump’s efforts to get the Pentagon and the Justice Department to seize certain voting machines after the last Presidential election. Which he lost. He couldn’t take it. He even enlisted his attorney (“America’s Mayor” -how sad is that) Rudy Guiliani, to do his phone calling.
I was unable to come up with a fully formed cartoon, except that many of us would like to see Trump go to prison. Orange would suit him.
My editorial cartoonist colleague, Michael deAdder of the Washington Post, drew a perfect editorial cartoon about this topic, here. Parenthetically, Michael’s style and mine are polar opposite, he uses detail and many cross-hatched pen lines, and as you know, I don’t. He remarked to me in a kind and funny way once on twitter about how much time he spends drawing his cartoons and he wished he had my economy of line. De Adder’s cartoons are brilliant, and part of why they are is how he draws them. Each cartoonist has his/her style and it usually works because of the combination of how the idea is drawn, and what the idea is. Similar to a New Yorker cartoon—ideally, the style in execution and the idea dance beautifully together.
I couldn’t make sense of why I thought Trump should be pulling a box labeled “Voting Machine,” but it seemed to work visually for me. I am not sure if my way of thinking is non-literal, visual, emotive, or just not fully thought out or fully formed. Perhaps it’s cathartic for me to draw things like this, and, provided you agree with my take on the issue, watching me draw these ideas is similarly cathartic. If you don’t agree, then it probably infurates you…. or perhaps you just enjoy watching someone draw. These drawings I just created do not educate or inform, they are purely my thinking and feeling, for what that’s worth.
What are editorial cartoons for? Engagement? Solice? Information? Laughter? Division? Holding our leaders and government accountable? Fun?
Visualizing A News Item