Thursday, May 08, 2008

Onion Editorial Cartoonist Try-Outs

Glenn McCoy seems to be gunning for the job with today's totally awesome cartoon.

McCoy is an interesting editorial cartoonist: his style is wonderful, very fluid and loose, and he has a true gift for caricature. He also has the meanness that a lot of the best editorialists have had; he digs in his heels and really lays into the same people, over and over. (In particular, he seems to loathe Al Gore, and spends an awful lot of ammo attacking someone who lost an election eight years ago and then made a movie.)

On the other side is the fact that McCoy's cartoons are politically blinkered to a level that I've never seen from anyone else. Even the purest "liberal" cartoonists like Herblock or Tom Toles will beat up on the other side when that's what's going on in the news, but McCoy maintains a frighteningly obsessive focus on the evils of liberals.

And I mean that literally -- many, many McCoy cartoons try to make the point that Liberal Policy X will immediately lead to Godless Commies tapping our Precious Bodily Fluids.

I don't know where McCoy's cartoons originally appear, since I see them on the Internet. But he's managed, as far as I can tell, the astounding feat of working as an editorial cartoonist for the past 10 years without drawing a single cartoon criticizing the current president.

Anyway, there have been a lot of cartoons about the fuel-food crisis, but McCoy manages to make petroleum look humanitarian with this one -- and that's a real gift.

Before I go, let me link to another one: this cartoon has great pacing and made me laugh out loud...even though I don't think it's true.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The line "another type of fossil fuel" totslly baffled me, but apart from that McCoy seems pretty enlightened, in that he recognizes one of the main criticisms levelled against the corn-to-ethanol nonsense - that it may lead to high food prices and ultimately famine.

Andrew Wheeler said...

Anonymous: Everyone else did their sad-starving-African-child-with-begging-bowl-
looking-mournfully-up-at-a-gas-pump cartoon close to a month ago -- there were at least a dozen of them, and they all were basically the same.

It's the "fossil fuel" comment that differentiates McCoy's version, and the bizarre idea that he and his readers suddenly (out of nowhere) care what happens to dark-skinned people is laughable. (Check out his Obama cartoons, which, again, are extremely nasty once you reralize they're about a first-term Senator who, as far as we know, has never purposefully injured a member of McCoy's family.)

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