It's being a tough summer for political cartoon pages: We lost Slate.com's Cartoon Box back in the spring; Time.com's Cartoons of the Week went Tango Uniform early in the summer. Now, McClatchyDC.com's featured cartoon page seems to have a glitch, although perhaps not a fatal one: At the moment it has one toon up, and if you try to move to the next one the site crashes. Nice. And Oregon's Jesse Springer remains on hiatus.
Maybe its like that old Woody Allen joke: August is when doctors (and cartoonists) go on vacation, leaving behind a city full of crazy people.
This week's toons were found, catch as catch can, from the pages at McClatchyDC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, Politico's Cartoon Carousel, Comic Strip of the Day, and other fine sources.
p3 Picks of the Week:
Mike Luckovich, Jack Ohman, Joel Pett, Rick McKee, Chris Weyant, Joe Heller, Jeff Parker, Dave Granlund, David Fitzsimmons, Steve Sack, Jen Sorenson, Matt Wuerker, and Monte Wolverton.
p3 Best of Show: Larry Wright.
p3 Drawing the Right Conclusions Medal: Bill Schorr.
p3 World Toon Review Martin Sutovec (Slovakia). Paresh Nath (India). Terry Mosher (Canada). and Ingrid Rice (Canada).
Ann Telnaes points out that, if Bradley Manning really wanted to do harm to this country, he went about it all wrong.
Mark Fiore imagines: If only the people of Syria had the attention-getting device of the British "Royal Easel."
Taiwan's Next Media Animation tells an unfortunate story involving a disposable phone.
Tom Tomorrow pays tribute to the business of the commonwealth.
Keith Knight sends a message to someone special.
Tom the Dancing Bug illustrates one of p3's long-held principles: If you think a six-foot tall invisible rabbit cruises bars with you, you're a candidate for the booby-hatch, but if you think an invisible hand guides the economy to optimal outcomes, you're a University of Chicago economist.
Red Meat's Ted Johnson has a story will have you glued to your seat.
The Comics Curmudgeon considers one of the most depressing Crankshaft strips – maybe one of the most depressing strips, period – ever run.
Disney animation: Diplomacy by other means. Walt Disney Studios has a track record of producing government-sponsored good-will films about and directed toward third-world countries, especially in South America – such as Saludos Amigos (1942) and the better-known The Three Caballeros (1944). But today's offering, “Family Planning” (1967), directed by Les Clark, was an educational film produced not in collaboration with the US State Department, but with the Population Council, an affiliate of – are you sitting down? – Planned Parenthood International. Walt Disney himself had been dead a couple of years at this point, and despite its Disneyesque paternalism toward brown people the world around, “Family Planning” touched on an issue that probably had Walt spinning in his non-cryonic grave. It was only three years earlier, after all, that the Supreme Court had ruled that states had no business interfering with the “right to marital privacy” by outlawing contraception. But, fortunately for Walt's eternal slumber, “Family Planning” has nothing directly to do with contraception in the US, and certainly no connection with the misogynistic treatment of the topic by contemporary conservatives; the film's depiction of the typical “family of man” is located distinctly beyond American borders and almost laughably steeped in the White Man's Burden. According to the Big Cartoon Data Base, the cartoon “was withdrawn domestically pretty early and yanked internationally in about 1985.”
H/t to Planned Parenthood of Oregon for putting this rarity on my radar.
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The Not-Quite-So-Big Oregon Toon Block: Matt Bors says it's time to stop being so fastidious about profiling.
Test your toon captioning skills at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here).
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