Comment on the Toon
Satire is all about taking some element of the real world and twisting, stretching and morphing it into something impossible. At its best, satire highlights the ridiculous element inherent in the satirized target through comic exaggeration.
But sometimes it’s tricky. Five years ago this month, I was sitting on a barstool on Salt Spring Island Island watching eastern US election results come in on a big screen TV. Against all the pundits’ prophecies, previously Democratic voting districts were falling to the Republicans. The impossible was happening. As I watched the swing state of Pennsylvania get riddled with red like bullet wounds, I thought, “Goddam, he’s going to win.”
‘You must love it that Trump’s president,’ people would occasionally say to me during his reign, believing he made things easier for political cartoonists. Initially I thought so too, but Orange Thing’s appearance, actions and statements made it increasingly difficult it lampoon him effectively. This was summed up nicely in a 2018 cartoon in the New Yorker. As a cartoonist works away at a drafting table, his wife leans into the doorway and says, “Stop, that Trump cartoon you came up with this morning just happened.”
The US president shrunk the distance between satire and reality to the quantum scale, and then stumbled light-years past it.
(Where I part company with some people is that I don’t believe the political, cultural, and social sphere is any less absurd now that Trump’s out of office. More so, in fact. And since I promised myself not to mention anything in this post about the C-word, I’ll leave it at that.)
I’m not saying anything new, of course. “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” the early sixties’ musical satirist Tom Lehrer once observed. (In conspiring in the covert bombings of Cambodia and Laos, President Nixon and Kissinger were directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents.)
Perhaps there’s some minor consolation in understanding that satire has lost out to reality plenty of times in the past, long before Trump, Kissinger, et al. I’m sure when the mad Emperor Caligula decreed his horse a senator, most of the Senate fell silent - if they knew what was good for them, that is.
Anyway, this toon is a bit of a homage to Chuck Jones’ Warner Brothers cartoons of yore, complete with a Roadrunner/Coyote style background and the hare’s ACME-brand atomic runners. Done from start to finish on an iPad Pro with the fantastic program ProCreate.
Addendum: I know I promised to not use the C-word in this post about reality overtaking satire…but I didn’t say boo about not taking screenshots of news stories. Enjoy!
As usual hilarious!
I believe 'reality' has further insanities up its sleeve. But I am sure you will find a way to satirize it...and I look forward to them all. This toon gave me the first lighthearted moment in a day filled with endless frustrations just trying to get a simple blood test. Nearly impossible, mostly due to missing or mislabeled paperwork that is still being transmitted via something called a fax machine. Huh?