I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of visual political culture is a self-absorbed joke. Visual political memes have become a massive and persistent grassroots social phenomenon with far more influence and engagement than too-clever-by-half political cartoons... not to mention certain animated shows with extremely sharp political and social satire. I don't think the author really regrets loss of political discourse. I think he regrets no longer being considered part of the political chattering-class establishment, even as that establishment loses its influence in a world of democratized information flow and opinion-sharing.
This is similar to comics and webcomics. It turns out that if you have your own website, you don't have to satisfy the censors in order to post anything.
Sometimes editors have good reasons not to let cartoonists put anything they like in the funny pages or the political cartoons, but the end result is usually very sterile. There's a lot of things you can say in that medium (e.g. the work of Bill Watterson or Gary Larson), but also a lot of things you can't.
That's a problem especially for political cartoons, because they usually poke fun at specific people, but you can't poke fun at just anyone because readers might get mad. The idea that there's an Overton window for people it's socially acceptable to ridicule should make us at least a little bit uncomfortable. Sometimes it'll be the emperor with no clothes and that's fine, but we might want to include the guy that sold him an invisible robe (but they own the newspaper too), and to exclude the kid who told everyone the emperor wasn't decently attired.
For a number of reasons, I don't think you're a real person. I think you have an agenda. I think you're here to provide artificial tone and voice to a conversation on The Internet, in an insubstantive matter.
If drawings and charicatures accompanied by text captions and word baloons in print media haven't appealed to your tastes in some time, it is less the fault of the medium, and more likely founded in massive social and cultural shifts fomented by the potent emerging technologies currently changing the world.
>>A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh or think deeply in years.
This probably says more about you than about political cartoons as a medium.
Is it possible that you have become so used to over-the-top memes and shallow animated shows with instant-gratification "satire" that you have lost the ability (and/or patience) to pause and ponder the subtler, many-layered messages underneath traditional cartoons?
The traditional cartoons aren't subtler and multi-layered though for the most part. The commentary usually defaults to some tautogical theme along the lines of "wouldn't it better if world had more of peace or some other good quality and less of war or some other bad quality".
It's then interspersed with some self-referential pieces about their own profession where characters have pencils replacing weapons or whichever object you'd expect instead. They all too often have to label the elements in the picture to make it comprehensible, which ruins its impact.
Some of the funniest cartoons tend instead to have a cynical or absurdist take on things, which is not too far off from a high-quality meme.
