The Bonds that Bind

This past April, after the Virginia Tech shootings, some friends and I were discussing the way the media handled the situation. One of those discussions turned to the editorial cartoonists’ response, which I have written about here before. Just from Daryl Cagle’s cartoon syndicate website, one could find several cartoons changing the “VT” logo into a pistol; several more depicting Uncle Sam mourning; two very similar cartoons with a parent hugging a child who thought his parent would be happy he got in to college; and a few with the Virginia Tech mascot mourning in Uncle Sam’s place.

Friends outside of cartooning were shocked when I assembled a handful of cartoons and exposed the similarities side by side. One told me that it was obvious to him that these cartoonists were copying each other, but I argued that couldn’t have been the case when so many of these came out on the same day.

So I opened my copy of the Omaha World-Herald this morning to see Jeff Koterba’s cartoon on Barry Bonds. It involved Bonds swinging and missing at a pitched asterisk instead of a baseball. I immediately recalled Daryl Cagle’s cartoon of two weeks ago, which depicted Bonds connecting with an asterisk instead of a baseball.

Now in my never-ending quest to be as critical as possible and burn every cartooning bridge before it’s assembled, I was tempted to go on one of my customary rants about cartoonist groupthink killing off the industry, blah blah blah, but I thought I’d try something different and turn to the humans behind the cartoons to get their side of the story.

Cagle, the cartoonist for MSNBC.com, wasn’t too upset. “It happens,” he told me. He often writes about these situations, which he calls a “Yahtzee,” on his blog at cagle.com. Cagle’s intent with the cartoon was to ask “…that we take notice of the ‘asterisk’ more than the achievement.” He thought the cartoon conveyed that concept well, and to him, it appeared Koterba was attempting to deliver the same message.

Koterba’s intended message was a little different – an observation that “…Bonds would always have that
asterisk to contend with.” He told me he hadn’t seen Cagle’s cartoon. “I try to stay away from looking at other cartoons for the very reason that I don’t want to be influenced by what other cartoonists are doing,” he said. “Coming up with an original idea is a point of pride with me…What’s the point of being a cartoonist if you don’t have original ideas?”

“When I see that someone else has drawn a cartoon similar to mine, either before or after the fact, I’m mostly disappointed in myself, that I hadn’t come up with something beyond the obvious idea that everyone else came up with,” Koterba added. “But what happens is that I push myself harder the next time, to try an out-think the other cartoonists.”

“On the other hand, it’s frustrating to not sometimes do those types of cartoons,” he added. “Sometimes it is the obvious idea that resonates with the reader.”

As evidence of that, a few days ago I wrote about some of the similarities in the recent Michael Vick cartoons. A quick glance at my site statistics shows that 26 of the past 45 visitors that came here from search engines were looking for Michael Vick cartoons, with several looking specifically for Gary Varvel’s cartoon from the Indianapolis Star-News. Cartoonists may judge themselves and each other, but that doesn’t change the fact that an audience wants to see these cartoons, even if the same essential idea has been drawn by several people.

Koterba doesn’t believe there is any thievery going on in editorial cartooning. “Most cartoonists are competitive and get into this career because they have lot of ideas to share,” he said.

But with fewer and fewer staff cartoonist positions, more newspapers are relying on syndicated cartoonists, and those syndicated cartoonists are competing for placement. Other publications, like weekly news magazines, have created their own expectations for what types of cartoons and what style of humor is likely to score reprints.

“There are only so many ideas floating around,” Koterba said. “Perhaps if cartoonists looked beyond the headlines more often, this sort of thing would happen less often.”

And even though cartoons are often similar, they’re rarely identical, and those subtle differences can lead conversations a different direction. When I saw Koterba’s cartoon, I immediately thought of Cagle’s. But friends I’ve talked to note the difference between Cagle’s hit and Koterba’s miss (I’m speaking of the literal depictions in the cartoon, here); the hit suggests the dishonesty of the accomplishment; the miss shows the shame that comes with achieving the milestone without the honor.

Cagle also pointed me to an article in the Penn State Daily Collegian which cited his inaccurate depiction of Bonds – swinging right-handed instead of left – as more evidence of a media tendency to judge Bonds without knowing much about him.

To close out this entry, I’ll leave you with a question posed by Koterba:

“How is it that Letterman, Conan, and Leno never come up with the same jokes? I mean you would think somewhere along the line, they would have run across this problem. I have a theory that they have a quiet agreement that they share their monologues with each other before show time. What do you think?”