Howdy folks. All the brewhaha about cartoons around here got me to thinking. I mean, I have virtually no drawing skills to speak of, but I am probably at least as left-of-center as Ted Rall and I have a snarky sense of humor. So I decided to see if I could create a cartoon that would fill a niche here. Rall's politics appeal to many here and in the few comments that i read, i noticed that people were saying that they had no problem with Rall's politics but only objected to the caricature.
Well, the drawing part didn't go so well, so I decided to go with a digital collage style. So over the fleur-de-kos is my first political cartoon. Given that I have no special artistic skills, maybe this will encourage others to take up cartooning. Turns out it's not all that hard to do. Let a thousand cartoons bloom!
I hope that you all enjoy it.
Shikspack To Go
King quote source
Obama quote source
Required attributions for components of collage 1 and 2.
Meta
For the record, since this is certain to come up, I was somewhat taken aback by Ted Rall's caricature of President Obama. I have no reason to believe that he intended to create an image with racist resonance or that he has a racist bone in his body. I do understand how such an image might make people uncomfortable.
I read an interview in The Progressive where Rall says that he is considering changing his caricature of Obama and I hope that he does:
[Rall:]
"Obviously if there's even one person who is legitimately troubled by something that I have drawn or written, it worries me and bothers me and I want to do something about it. So I may well end up changing the way that I draw Obama in the future. I have to think about it and work on it."
I also think that it is reasonable to assume from his statements that he was somewhat blindsided by the sudden attention that his caricature received here at Daily Kos and probably reacted badly to the criticism. Such a reaction also seems understandable since, while Kossacks can be some of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet, some of them can be as rude, hostile and insulting as any group of people on the internet.