Saturday, January 19, 2013

Drawing People of Color

In an interview about political cartoonists drawing President Obama, Politico's artist Matt Wuerker drops a great joke on my Congressman:
WUERKER: I think it's changed a little bit. I think that one of the changes that happened in the beginning I think the first years of the administration, a lot of cartoonists were very careful about dealing with the caricature of an African-American.
STANTIS: Absolutely.
WUERKER: And it was a minefield that people were tiptoeing across in a lot of ways. And a couple of people stepped on some mines and some - one of our boneheaded brethren drew him as a monkey for Rupert Murdoch or something. And people began to have to sort of, you know, you had to deal with the legacy of some really virulent racist imagery in American cartoons going back centuries. But we got over it. And the cartoon gods work in mysterious ways, just as we're having to grapple with drawing the first black president. The cartoon gods gave us the first orange house speaker so...
(LAUGHTER)
WUERKER: And so...
CORNISH: I'm sure John Boehner would quibble with that description.
(LAUGHTER)
WUERKER: Well - but it was suddenly, you know, it was like, OK, we're drawing people of color here, so this is fun and...
That made me laugh a good bit.

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