Political Cartoons Quotes

Quotes tagged as "political-cartoons" Showing 1-21 of 21
Salman Rushdie
“What would a respectful political cartoon look like?”
Salman Rushdie

Lalo Alcaraz
“In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups

(from an interview in the book Attitude, 2002)”
Lalo Alcaraz

Andy Singer
“My obsession with cars is based on my obsession with the environment. Food, housing and transportation are the three big human and environmental issues. That's where most of our resources go and where most of our pollution is generated...Transportation is the big elephant in the bedroom that no one wants to seriously discuss.

(from an interview in Attitude, 2002)”
Andy Singer

Andy Singer
“Cars are environmental enemy number one.

(from an interview in Attitude, 2002)”
Andy Singer

“The virtuosity and visual humor of people like A.B. Frost, T.S. Sullivant, and [Thomas] Nast of course, have so much depth and innate humor that I couldn't really resist cross hatching. Later day cross-hatchers like Ron Cobb and Bill Plympton were also early influences.

(from an interview in Attitude, 2002)”
Matt Wuerker

“The self-righteously bitter cartoons that appear in sectarian magazines are fine if all you want to do is preach to the choir, but I believe you can reach a lot more people with humor.

(from an interview in Attitude, 2002)”
Matt Wuerker

“Q: Do you like mainstream political cartoons?

A: Besides Tom Toles and Kirk Anderson, no.”
Clay Butler

Howard Zinn
“Khalil Bendib, with a few ingenious strokes of his pen, gets to the heart of the issues of our time. His cartoons are in the greatest tradition of American political humor, with that combination of wit and intelligence so needed in the struggle for justice.”
Howard Zinn

Ralph Nader
“Khalil Bendib is an equal-opportunity skewer. The more a subject or victim is ignored by the mass media, the more he infuriates, informs, and intensifies the reader's attention. Cartoons need to jolt. Bendib obliges page after page.”
Ralph Nader

“If you go to my website you’ll see that my slogan is “The Pen is Funnier than the Sword”—which I really believe. I’m committed to non-violent change.

(Interview on ihsan-net from 2005)”
Khalil Bendib

“The common denominator between all my cartoons is rebellion against blind conformity.

(From 2004 in berkeleydailyplanet)”
Khalil Bendib

“I wasn't really interested in doing cartoons at that time, but I had one teacher, Miss McCoy, who used to call me and the other Black pupil in the school to the front of the room and present us to the class. She'd say. "These two, being Black, belong in a waste basket." Well, there was no way of defending oneself against that. So, I began to build up a kind of rage against her. There was no way that I could have gotten back at her because if I had, it would have been much more serious than it turned out. In the end, it turned out rather beneficial to me because I began doing cartoons of Miss McCoy in my notebooks.”
Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“I was right there in the middle of all of this action. I didn’t have to think up gags…The cartoons drew themselves…I was more surprised than anyone when Brother Bootsie became a Harlem household celebrity, not only among the colored proletariat be among the literati as well.”
Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“To really dig Brother Bootsie, his trials and tribulations, you’d have to see Harlem from the sidewalk. Everyone in Harlem had trials and tribulations because everyone was colored. Or almost everyone…But being colored, even in an enlightened northern burg like New York, could be a drag.”
Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“The art of what we might call, loosely, cartoons…[has been] as source of pleasure which has remained and sustained me.”
Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“I was in deadly earnest about developing my talent, and carousing had no lure for me. I applied myself assiduously to the work in hand, and as I proceeded I became more and more convinced that graphic art was my road to recognition. Painting interested me no less, but I thought of it as having no influence. If one painted a portrait, or a landscape, or whatever, for a rich man to own in his private gallery, what was the use? On the other hand, a cartoon could be reproduced by simple mechanical processes and easily made accessible to hundreds of thousands. I wanted a large audience. . . The prevailing art of that period embraced a thorough, almost photographic, lens-like observance of detail. Gerome, Messonier, Cabanel, Vibert, and Bougeaureau were in the forefront of the artworld then, because they were accurate, precise draftsmen.”
Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times

“In my youth I hoped for no higher status in life than to be among those who would follow in the wake of Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler, and Bernard Gillam, outstanding artists in the field of political caricature. And when in my early twenties I grew familiar with the political and social satires of the graphic artists of England and France across two centuries, these gave even greater stimulus to my ambition. Dreamily I anticipated that my destiny was to succeed as a caricaturist of some influence in public affairs.”
Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times

“You've done a lot of work on the revolution, obviously. And you tend to focus on women's rights and free speech. What other issues are you drawn to?

Eladl: All the issues that concern Egyptian citizen. I deal a lot with women's issues, gender rights, but I think I focus a lot of my work on Egyptian citizens and, because I think any reform should start with the Egyptian citizen, trying to get them to participate in this process.
The purpose of editorial cartooning is to awaken people. Some media outlets, whether in the United States or Egypt, distort the facts. And normally the media is controlled either by government, by investors, by the people who have the money. So cartoons, they should look into issues and make it clear whether it is black or white, or whether there is a grey area. People can look and distinguish between sincere and honest cartoonists and from other kinds that are not. Even an historian can be under pressure and to fake the writing of history. But cartoonists, we have the freedom to say what we want.

(2011 interview with Cartoon Movement)”
Doaa El-Adl

“Print media started collapsing in the mid-2000s. When I first started out, it seemed like alternative news weeklies were the future of newspapers. It was a booming industry. It was a product of the nineties and that nineties mentality. At the time, I had a day job at the University of Virginia and I was sending my strip out and picked up one paper here and another paper there very gradually. I was building up a client list and then that fateful day where Village Voice Media dropped comics across the entire chain. I was actually spared the worst of that. I think I was just in the Village Voice at the time, but that was a big loss. [laughs] Not that the pay was all that great, but it had been my goal to get into that paper.
At the time I really wasn’t sure whether I would be able to continue, but then dailykos came along and picked up a bunch of alt weekly cartoonists and breathed some life into our industry online. They did really well on dailykos they were shared a lot and got good traffic and I think it set a precedent. Not that it was the first home for political cartoons online, but something about dailykos at that moment turned the tide a bit. A few more websites started running political cartoons – and paying fairly for them. People started realizing that they were highly shareable and that they could do well online. I’ll add that print has stabilized. At least it had stabilized under the second Obama administration. I actually added papers during that time. I wouldn’t say this is a growth industry. I think it would be very hard to break into now, but I did get the sense that print media had stabilized and some papers were doing okay. For me it’s really a hybrid now between print and digital. Certainly the digital side of things has grown the most in the past few years.

(Interview with Comicsbeat)”
Jen Sorensen

“What pushed you to be political?

I’ve always been interested in politics, but when I first got out of college I just wanted to have fun and do non-political work. What happened was the Bush vs Gore election and the Supreme Court [decision]. That was the event that really shocked me into starting to do political cartoons. It was just so outrageous at the time. Then 9/11 and the Iraq War. I prefer doing a mix of straightforward political cartoons and more cultural cartoons about trends and facial hair and things like that. Now I feel silly doing a strip about beards. Maybe things will calm down and I can go back to doing cartoons about facial hair. As time went on and politics became more and more dire, that’s what really sent me down that path. Also I started picking up more and more clients that are explicitly political, like dailykos and The Progressive Magazine and once in a while The Nation will run a cartoon. That pushed me in a more political direction as well.

(Interview with Comicsbeat)”
Jen Sorensen

“Q: What do you think will be the future of your field?

There’s too much pessimism about the future for political cartooning. I think the future’s very bright. You see more and more sites like Politico that aggressively deploy cartoons on the homepage. I think the media is becoming increasingly visual… and increasingly made to match our shrinking attention spans. The business model for cartooning is going through a rough transition now, but in the long run the thing we cartoonists do—-deliver simple-minded political messages in short easily digestible bites—-is the direction the media in general is heading.
We’re living in a media landscape that seems to get more infantile and politically simple-minded all the time—-look at the huge popularity of Glenn Beck…and I saw someplace recently that Jon Stewart is now the most trusted man in America. The clowns seem to be taking over the circus. This may be bad for governance, but it can only be good news for cartoonists. The interesting part will be what the platforms are going to be, cell phones, iPads, the iChip in my forehead, whatever it is, I’m sure the combination of visual metaphor and incisive humor you find in good cartoons will adapt and evolve and really thrive in the future.

(Interview with Washington City Paper)”
Matt Wuerker